Okay! So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in “The Last Battle”, the final Narnia book. This has been quoted on Tumblr, I responded to that, and this is a development of my view of the reading.
A lot of people have done psycho-sexual readings of the line about “lipstick and nylons” and gone on about this being indicative of Susan maturing into a sexual being. Naturally, since C.S. Lewis is a famous Christian, this means that as a Christian he heartily disapproved of:
• Sex
• Women
• Women Being Sexual
• Children Growing Up
• Children Losing Innocence About The World
• Children Growing Up To Be Women Who Are Sexual
and probably a ton of other stuff too which I can’t be bothered to go search online for them to tell me he hated. Some people do not like Lewis, Narnia, or Christianity, and have a very dour view of The Problem Of Susan and like to tell us all how, why, and where Lewis is a horrid old Puritan sex-hater. Before we get into this, I want to say: if you don’t like Lewis, Narnia, Christianity or any combination of these, you’re free to do so and nobody can make you like them.
The problem I have with The Problem Of Susan is that it’s a very shallow reading.
First, there seems to be little to no reading of that part of the text as a whole:
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"
"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."
It gets quoted as “lipstick and nylons” and the part about “invitations” gets left out. And there’s latching on to “too keen on being grown-up”.
So what is Lewis saying here, or trying to say? “Growing up is icky, especially if you start liking boys”? To take the reading that he is saying ‘loss of innocence (especially sexual innocence) is bad, adulthood is bad, children should stay children as long as possible’?
I don’t think so. Polly is a grown-up herself, and yet a friend of Narnia. If Susan is now ‘grown-up’, then Peter - as her elder brother - is also a grown-up. But he’s here in Narnia. So if adulthood per se is not the problem, what is?
And here we get the view as expressed by someone in a response to my response:
Uuhh I’m PRETTY sure Susan got kicked out of the gang bc winklydinnkkkllllllllldl :/
Sex is the problem. But is this a plausible reading?
Well, sure. Sexual maturation, developing sexual interest and sexuality is all part of growing up. People have used “nylons and lipstick” as signifiers that Lewis means sex because, well, nylons: lingerie, fetish or at the very mildest sex fantasy fuel. And lipstick means reddening the lips, making them look like the labia, ready for sex.
(Look, if I’ve had to read these intepretations, so do you).
But is there a better reading? I think there is.
So here is the second part of what I think is going on.
Now, if the problem is that Susan is now sexually aware, what about Peter? (And Edmund, and Lucy?) On this reading, if they are still ‘friends of Narnia’ then they must have avoided Susan’s sexual awakening. Peter must be developmentally stunted and have remained a good, innocent, little boy mentally at least.
So for the proponents of The Problem Of Susan, the only mature adult is Susan, who is cast out of Narnia for that knowledge and that choice (Pullman wrote an entire trilogy of books in response about how sexual awakening is the means of becoming adults and independent).
However, I disagree. Let’s segue off for a moment about homosexuality (this was a joke comment in the original post to which I was replying). Lewis was writing in the 50s and was a Christian to boot, he must have had the same repressive social ideas as you imagine a 50s Christian would have, right?
Here’s where I recommend you read his memoir Surprised By Joy, particularly the parts about his early schooling.
Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.
("This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about..." Well, yes, it does, and more's the pity; but it's nothing to our purpose at the moment.)
Okay, looks like this is going to be a long ‘un, so breaking off here for Part One before getting into Part Two
I’ve criticised the take that the Problem of Susan is reducible to the simple (and simplicistic) answer of “Sex”, and here’s why I think that.
Let’s look at the full version of the much-quoted line about “lipstick and nylons”:
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
“and invitations”. To drag in another writer, “What’s invitations, precious? What’s invitations, eh?”
Well, they’re exactly what they sound like. “Oh, you mean boys asking her out on dates, maybe?” No. Being asked out, yes, but I mean “invitations to parties and social occasions and grown-up events”.
I’m hobbled by the fact that Lewis doesn’t give us any exact ages for his characters, particularly the Pevensie children (Tolkien would have told us the day and month, not alone year, they were born so we could have worked it out) but we can roughly take it that for “The Last Battle”, Susan is old enough to have left school but isn’t going on to college (that we know of, at least not yet).
So she’s about eighteen or so at a minimum, and looking around online there’s an estimation that she’s twenty-one.
Let’s go with twenty-one: legal age of adulthood, but still young and inexperienced. Polly is a little hard on Susan:
She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.
Which of us has not wanted to be treated as a grown-up and chafed under “you can’t do that, you’re too young” when we’re in our teenage years, caught between no longer a child but not quite adult yet? And mostly we’ve had a simple view of what being grown-up means: nobody imagines “I’ll have to do my taxes and get a mortgage” when they’re contemplating what it will be like to be free and independent and nobody can tell us what to do or eat or wear.
So Susan was eager to be old enough to wear adult clothes and makeup and go to parties and have fun. That’s not a bad thing! The bad thing is if that’s all she wants to do, ever; if her reasons are based on vanity and selfishness. We all like to be admired, so if Susan wants the boys/young men to find her attractive and be interested in her, that’s only natural. But if she spends her time only going to parties, looking for flattery of attention, and trying to be ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ as she gets older, then she’s wasting her potential. I don’t think anybody imagines that Susan as an airhead is a good future for her.
Let me jump back into the memoir to show that Lewis knew about, because he had experienced, adolescent desire. He attended a preparatory school between the ages of thirteen and fifteen:
It is quite true that at this time I underwent a violent, and wholly successful, assault of sexual temptation. But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense my deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. ...The mere facts of generation I had learned long ago, from another boy, when I was too young to feel much more than a scientific interest in them.
...Pogo's communications, however much they helped to vulgarise my mind, had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor as Bekker's Charicles, which was given me for a prize. I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G., but she was the first woman I ever "looked upon to lust after her"; assuredly through no fault of her own. A gesture, a tone of the voice, may in these matters have unpredictable results. When the schoolroom on the last night of the winter term was decorated for a dance, she paused, lifted a flag, and, remarking, "I love the smell of bunting," pressed it to her face -- and I was undone.
You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; the prose and not the poetry of the Flesh. I did not feel at all like a knight devoting himself to a lady; I was much more like a Turk looking at a Circassian whom he could not afford to buy. I knew quite well what I wanted. It is common, by the way, to assume that such an experience produces a feeling of guilt, but it did not do so in me. And I may as well say here that the feeling of guilt, save where a moral offence happened also to break the code of honour or had consequences which excited my pity, was a thing which at that time I hardly knew. It took me as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to get rid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
So Lewis is going to be the last person in the world to condemn Susan for natural part of growing up. What he does want to condemn her for - is going to be developed in Part Three.
Part Three, and if you’ve stuck with me this far, congratulations! “Jeez, will you ever get to the point?” I will, I promise!
So here’s where we have to get into theology (sorry, but it is relevant, I promise) and here is a handy definition:
In Christian theology, the world, the flesh, and the devil have been singled out "by sources from St Thomas Aquinas" to the Council of Trent, as "implacable enemies of the soul".
The three sources of temptation have been described as:
world -- "indifference and opposition to God’s design", "empty, passing values"
flesh -- "gluttony and sexual immorality, ... our corrupt inclinations, disordered passions"
the Devil -- "a real, personal enemy, a fallen angel, Father of Lies, who ... labours in relentless malice to twist us away from salvation".
What proponents of The Problem Of Susan think Lewis is preaching against is the second, the Flesh (lipstick and nylons = sexual maturity and awakening).
I maintain that what he is warning against, in the person of Susan as she has abandoned her family and Narnia, is The World.
“But what’s wrong with liking fun and parties and having a good time and meeting people and making new friends?”
Nothing! And everything, if it turns you into a liar, a traitor, a snob, a sell-out.
And that is what Susan is doing, in her quest to be a ‘proper’ grown-up:
(W)henever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
She’s lying to herself as much as to the others. She knows Narnia and everything they say is real, but because it doesn’t fit in with the type of person she wants to be now, she’s doing her best to deny it and forget it. She’s convinced herself that it was all just a game and childish imagination, and she’s not a child now. Popular, cool people don’t believe in fairy stories, and she so desperately wants to be popular and cool and to fit in with the right sort of people, the people who throw those parties everyone wants to go to, the invitations she is so eager to receive.
And Lewis knew about that from the inside, too:
He was succeeded by a young gentleman just down from the University whom we may call Pogo. Pogo was a very minor edition of a Saki, perhaps even a Wodehouse, hero. Pogo was a wit, Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town, Pogo was even a lad. After a week or so of hesitation (for his temper was uncertain) we fell at his feet and adored. Here was sophistication, glossy all over, and (dared one believe it?) ready to impart sophistication to us.
We became -- at least I became -- dressy. It was the age of the "knut": of "spread" ties with pins in them, of very low cut coats and trousers worn very high to show startling socks, and brogue shoes with immensely wide laces. Something of all this had already trickled to me from the College through my brother, who was now becoming sufficiently senior to aspire to knuttery. Pogo completed the process. A more pitiful ambition for a lout of an overgrown fourteen-year-old with a shilling a week pocket money could hardly be imagined; the more so since I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop. I cannot even now remember without embarrassment the concern that I then felt about pressing my trousers and (filthy habit) plastering my hair with oil. A new element had entered my life: Vulgarity. Up till now I had committed nearly every other sin and folly within my power, but I had not yet been flashy.
These hobble-de-hoy fineries were, however, only a small part of our new sophistication. Pogo was a great theatrical authority. We soon knew all the latest songs. We soon knew all about the famous actresses of that age -- Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Zena Dare. Pogo was a fund of information about their private lives. We learned from him all the latest jokes; where we did not understand he was ready to give us help. He explained many things. After a term of Pogo's society one had the feeling of being not twelve weeks but twelve years older.
…What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know. He gave little help, if any, in destroying my chastity, but he made sad work of certain humble and childlike and self-forgetful qualities which (I think) had remained with me till that moment. I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.
I would be sorry if the reader passed too harsh a judgement on Pogo. As I now see it, he was not too old to have charge of boys but too young. He was only an adolescent himself, still immature enough to be delightedly "grown up" and naif enough to enjoy our greater naïveté. And there was a real friendliness in him. He was moved partly by that to tell us all he knew or thought he knew.
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back. Unless she lets herself harden into a caricature of a silly, vain attention-seeker who follows and drops every social fad as it comes into and goes out of fashion, who is always taking the cue as to what to say and think from others instead of her own views and opinions, and who continues to deny reality.
Nobody locked her out or kicked her out. She walked out herself, or rather ran out, rushing to go to that party or function or event or gathering of the real adults.
Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. Take it or leave it as you like.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I do agree with this interpretation.
Allegedly, Lewis said in response to a letter asking about Susan's further story: “I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?” (The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy; I did not check the reference myself to see if it was real)
Lewis, in contrast to his critics but in keeping with much of Christianity, does seem to believe that it's something of a tragedy for a woman to grow up, be in sexual relationships, and intentionally prevent herself from bearing children. That not preparing for children aspect seems part of what Polly is getting at about staying in that lipstick and nylons stage as long as possible and not continuing to grow up, and her condemnation thereof. I remember Merlin chastising Jane in That Hideous Strength for being on birth control, saying that she could have conceived a great Arthurian hero, but the time is past, and now he will never exist.
Now that I think of it, there does seem to be a dearth of good novels that I, at least, have read, with fully adult women as protagonists, compared with fully adult men. Middle aged, they either did or didn't end up married with children after at least one sexual relationship, but the story isn't entirely about the children. It seems like middle aged woman stories tend to be sad, and perhaps the one Lewis didn't want to write would have been. The best job of it I can remember off the top of my head is Tolstoy.
More options
Context Copy link
Precisely, my beef with the popular framing of the "the problem of Susan" has always been that Lewis makes it pretty clear that Susan chose to leave Narnia, and as such I've never found the arguments that she was somehow being unfairly excluded (or cruelly denied salvation) all that compelling.
She's metaphorically choosing to leave God, not Narnia. And people in real life don't "choose to leave" God in the same way that one might choose to leave a place. They certainly don't "choose to leave" God in any way resembling denying the existence of a place.
Narnia is something that's all around you that you can't deny without being arrogant or insane. And if you leave it, you are doing so knowingly. Believers wish that God was like this and make metaphors that imply it, but he isn't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I do think it's worth pointing out that while we don't see very much of Susan-as-queen-of-Narnia, what we do see is a portrayal of a (nondescriptly)very beautiful woman who is aware of that fact and is described as regularly being courted by foreign princes. This is not condemned in the work itself, and there's no indication that Susan is inherently opposed to the idea(although we do see her rejecting one suitor, the Calormen prince, that's explicitly because she doesn't like his character- it's implied that she would like to marry, and even enjoyed the attention before his cruelty and selfcenteredness was revealed).
In that context, "lipstick and nylons and invitations" refers to shallowness. Positively portrayed in Narnia Susan is not intended as a desexed character, but while she may appreciate her suitors' attentions, she is ultimately more concerned with the deeper aspects, and her profound responsibility as a monarch. The description in The Last Battle can't help but be a contrast.
Yes! That's what Lewis is trying to get at, as well as warning that you can lose your salvation 😁 Well, more that even formerly devout can fall away due to the pressure and tempation of life and all that is in it, and to be aware of this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The problem of Susan is completely contrived, because Christianity is already the coda for interpreting Peter, Edmund, and Lucy's, euphemistic vagueness for the in-world sake of discretion.
Had Lewis, said something explicitly at odds with Christianity, there'd be something there to criticize. Alternatively, if one is simply looking to criticize Christianity, we need not strangle a passing line about a fictional character, written out of a story for the sake of showing "stakes" to do so.
Because Lewis left it vague and intended it to be Christian allegory, we need only to read Christian beliefs into an understanding of it.
Q: Was Susan left out of heaven because she was sexually mature, or generally a grown up?
Decoder: Does Christianity exclude adults or the sexually mature from heaven?
A: No.
Q: Was Susan left out of heaven because she lost her faith?
Decoder: Does Christianity exclude people without faith from heaven?
A: Quite possibly so.
Q: Is it really that binary, she goes to hell because she misremembered fantastical journey?
Decoder: What does Christianity have to say about morally upright people who get the details wrong?
A: Here Lewis does have something to say in the contrast with the pious Caloremene, Emeth. Here one can actually earnest debate Lewis' message about nonChristian salvation or inclusion into heaven. For those who don't remember, he was a pious and morally upright believer in Tash (a false diety), but found himself in heaven, and is told essentially that his proper moral conscious was unknowingly done in honor of Aslan himself.
Now, one might fall on either side of Christian inclusivity, but let's put that a theological debate aside and return to Susan, because even in a world of inclusivity, Susan doesn't make it, which means that within TLB, Susan is clearly both not a believer in Aslan, and relatedly living impiously / immorally.
So whether or not a lack of faith in Jesus is enough to keep one out of heaven, we know that Susan had both a lack of faith and a lack of moral uprightness within the context of Lewis's narrative. This isn't an interpretation, it's deductively so.
Q: Was Susan's immorality a simple appreciation for lipstick, nylon, and/or invitation?
Decoder: Does Christianity condemn lipstick, nylon, or invitations?
A: Here Lewis used the characters' discretion to leave it vague, in order to be inclusive of a wide range of Christianity. And the reader is best served reading into as a placeholder for un-Christian lifestyle. If you are a Puritan, maybe it does render correctly to read it straightforwardly as immodesty.
But it's weird and dishonest to interpret a vague euphemistic line in a particular way for the sake of disagreeing with that reading. But how can we interpret it?
Q: Can we draw anything from Susan's behaviors?
Decoder: What does Christianity have to say about sexual immorality or worldliness?
A: Quite a bit. If you want to render Susan's behavior as a sexual awakening at odds with Christian sexual ethics, what's the problem with Susan that isn't just a problem with Christian belief? You don't have a "problem of Susan", but a "problem with orthodoxy".
If you want to render Susan's behavior as a sexual awakening not at odds with Christian sexual ethics, then clearly that isn't what kept her out of heaven. It makes no sense.
She's not going to Hell! Or at least, we don't know that yet. If she continues on in denial and selfishness, then yes -ultimately she will be separated forever. But there is always the possibility of repentance, and since Susan is still alive, she has time (but not forever) to turn back. Maybe the death of her siblings will be the shock that jolts her out of denial. We don't know.
And in one of the Narnia books, Lewis has Aslan say that other people's stories are not for you to know (out of idle curiosity). What happens to them you won't know until the end, and you should be more concerned with how you are writing your own story.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it would also be perfectly fair to criticise the book for implying something without deciding whether it is “at odds with Christianity.” In particular, a non-Christian might not care about what “true Christianity” has to say about nylons and lipstick. A criticism like “This description of Susan draws on a type of disdain for specifically female sexuality that is common amongst Christians” can be valid whether or not it is actually Christian, in some idealistic or doctrinal sense, to disapprove of lipstick. It doesn’t make sense to claim that Lewis can only be interpreted as a Christian in a doctrinal sense, and not in a broader cultural sense.
I’m not so sure that disdain for specifically female sexuality is actually all that common among Christians as opposed to tumblr’s straw man of them- and in particular, opposition to makeup and jewelry and pretty dresses is fairly confined to non-mainstream sects. Comparatively, condemnations of pornography(male-coded) are extremely mainstream and even the default within Christianity, even when you broaden policing of female sexuality to concern with modest dress and the like.
Christians holding the view that young people should be less worried about sex than they are is true, but that’s also probably true for most randomly selected groups of non-youths.
In particular, Lewis was the violet triber of his day and probably held nuanced views about sexuality. He wasn’t some Bible thumper who in todays context might oppose women in pants or condemn instagram or something. To the extent that he held puritanical views about sex(and most Christians view sex very positively in its proper context) they were likely to be applied fairly evenhandedly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Christianity doesn't have a rule whose text explicitly reads "adults and the sexually mature don't go to heaven".
But Christianity does think things are bad that are thought by nonbelievers to be harmless and which are associated with being adult (such as loss of childhood faith) or being sexually mature (such as immodest dress and behavior). Claiming that this doesn't count because Susan's only being penalized for non-Christian sexuality, instead of for sexuality, is a nitpick that makes no real difference to the criticism.
By this reasoning, no religion has ever been against adult sexuality except the Shakers.
Saying that she was penalized for a harmless thing because you don't want to be explicit about how bad a thing she actually did describes the thing euphemistically, but the punishment dysphemistically--punishing someone for a less severe thing is a more severe punishment.
"Atheists can go to heaven, but pretty much all atheists happen to be evil people who don't go to heaven" is, in practice, "atheists don't go to heaven". Believing in a negative stereotype about X amounts, at some point, to believing bad things about X, even if you don't literally think that every single X is like that. And as I said before, Lewis isn't stupid. He knows very well that this is a common Christian stereotype of atheists. If he puts it in anyway, he knows what he's doing.
Yes, he said that Calormenes can go to heaven, but Calormenes are not atheists. They are misguided believers, but they are believers and don't fall into the stereotype. "You may think you are worshipping someone else, but you're actually worshipping Aslan" still requires worship.
It depends what the criticism is though. As I stress, if you are using the "Problem of Susan" as a way to criticize Christianity at large, its a stupid starting point because you are reading into an intentionally vague line whatever you happen to want to criticize instead of criticizing it directly.
Due to the Penseveerseres's discretion, there's not much to work with, but that not much to work with is intentionally and incorrectly spun into excluded from heaven without much reason. My entire point is that it's insincere and distracting to translate, Lucy et al's explanation is thin into the reason is thin.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One more part of the problematic misreading is that all of Susan’s nuclear family and the rest of their little Narnian adventurers club died in a train wreck, which is why they went to Heaven, and she wasn’t there (yet) because she’d stayed home / college / wherever she was.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some follow-ups, now that I've had the chance to read some of the books. Much of "The Problem of Susan" seems to collapse if its author had read more of the series, instead of considering that final scene in isolation. This locks your counter-analysis into working from scraps, when there's stuff about Susan's attitude in the other books. Even in Prince Caspian, Susan starts to turn away from Aslan and deny what she sees:
At the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there's something which looks like the first signs of the invitation-chasing Susan you've been discussing:
At the end of your post, you write:
But at the end of Prince Caspian, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that it's probably his last time in Narnia: "At least, from what he said, I'm pretty sure he means you to get back some day. But not Su and me. He says we're getting too old." I'm still working through the books so I don't know if that's the last word on the matter, or whether "too old" means something other than chronological age.
As adults, the original Pevensies can't get back into Narnia that way - they have to live in our world now, and get to Aslan's kingdom in the conventional way that people who haven't travelled to Narnia get there.
There's two things going on: (1) getting to Narnia, and that's as children (mostly) because it's magical portals (2) learning about Aslan and deciding to turn your back on him, or not. The second one, if you choose to turn your back on him, is what blocks you forever. Susan hasn't yet done that; she's in the process of doing that, but hasn't committed the final irrevocable step.
More options
Context Copy link
Note that Peter never really gets back to the shadow of Narnia. He gets back to the True Narnia. Peter learned what he needed to learn in Narnia and was supposed to take those lessons into our world (and indeed he appeared to do so).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for the analysis, I think you're correct.
The piece of media that really illustrated everything you're describing, for me, was the Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I could write an entire essay on it as well but it really strikes at the same situation you're pointing at. Kaguya-hime's father becomes obsessed with material and societal wealth, pulls his daughter and wife away from nature and raises a girl who is so empty that by the time she ascends to heaven she has nothing to live for. This is basically the same as Susan's pursuit of material/societal wealth that drags her away from the world of Narnia (which, while a fantasy world, actually represents the world of truth/nature/God in the same way that Kaguya-hime's birth village represented truth/nature/God.)
Kaguya-hime is completely heartbreaking, by the way, and the older I get the more upsetting it is. It kind of shook me out of the path of material status chasing, it was so profound.
More options
Context Copy link
"invitations" is key IMO -- not because Susan was going on dates or wild parties, but because it's code for "social climbing" in the England of the era.
Put your focus on the material world to the exclusion of the spiritual one, and you are no longer welcome in the Kingdom, is what Lewis is saying here.
More options
Context Copy link
I can't speak to the church experiences of others- but for an American protestant growing up in the 90s and 2000s, when talking about sin and temptation and all that during services, the focus was definitely:
The Flesh >>>> The Devil >> The World
I wonder to what extent people jumping to thinking Lewis was talking about the flesh was due to a "horses, not zebras" assumption based on the sermons they heard growing up?
Edit: I do think your assessment that Lewis is in fact talking about Susan being lured away by the temptations of the world rather than the flesh is correct.
Of course now I want it, I can't find it, but Lewis does talk somewhere about how worldliness and the dangers of the World is hardly talked about, in comparison to the Flesh (and in second place the Devil) and yet it is vitally important to remind people that the 'harmless' pursuits they engage in are every bit as deadly, if mishandled.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, now I've got to go read the Narnia books. I have read many of his books, but never any of his fiction.
I recommend reading them in in-universe chronological order, except read The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe first. The big omnibus volume has them in chronological order, if I remember correctly.
I teach a Chronicles of Narnia class for middle school, and I recommend & assign students to read the books in publication order:
There’s something to be said about both orders. The world-building happens (literally) in Magician’s Nephew, so I dislike seeing it so far back. Plus, getting Jill and Polly mixed up, since the latter half of the series introduced multiple new kids in consecutive books (Eustace, Jill, Shasta, Aravis, Diggory, Polly, and then Jill and Eustace are back for The Last Battle).
I’ve also tried reading The Horse And His Boy before the final page of LWW, the hunt for the white stag, which only fails because that final page is hanging over me the whole time. If I had a DRM-free editable audiobook of the series, I’d order it fully chronological for my listening, with THAHB cut in as above.
Then again, I do recommend kids start Star Wars with Episode 1 because it has all the action and silliness kids expect from movies nowadays, and handles worldbuilding in the Galaxy Far Far Away in unsubtle, kid-friendly ways. (My preference: 1, R1, 4, 5, 2, 3, 6, Solo, 7, 8, and skip 9.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Make sure you read the Screwtape letters too, they are excellent!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think your reading is correct because it matches a theme that Lewis revisits in other forms. The Inner Ring is a short essay about it:
And one of his novels, That Hideous Strength, is in large part about a man almost completely unmaking himself by trying to get into the inner rings:
Mark is the grown-up Susan (not so grown-up). So very desperate to be 'one of the gang' that he becomes a double-crossing backstabber and hardly notices as he crosses subtle line after subtle line. But in the end there is one line he won't cross, and that is what saves him eventually:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's clear that when Lewis wrote this particular scene, he had these words in mind, which he had written on another occasion:
Susan is the critic who treats "adult" as a term of approval.
More options
Context Copy link
Not really? You cannot get there at demand.
No, you can't enter into Narnia by the wardrobe again, or push your way in. But she can go back and be a friend of Narnia once more, by acknowledging her lies and self-deception and the reality of Aslan.
Christianity believes in repentance and forgiveness.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IIRC, it was Neil Gaiman who first wrote "the problem of Susan." It's been repeated endlessly, of course.
I liked the Narnia books as a kid, but they are much too earnestly Sunday School for me now. However, I always assumed that the line about "lipstick and nylons and invitations" was not about Susan becoming "sexual," but about her becoming too worldly. The whole Narnia series is of course a Christian metaphor, so Susan is a metaphor for the person who has left the church to become "of the world." (IIRC there is even a line about how it's possible she'll eventually get her head out of her ass and return to Narnia, i.e., repent and come back to the church.)
Like @self_made_human says, the part that bugged me was that it completely fails to pass the suspension of disbelief. Very young children might believe in magical kingdoms and talking animals and then grow out of it, but when you're a teenager who's literally ruled a magical kingdom and been there long enough to know it's not just a big game of make believe, I don't buy that she "grew up" and convinced herself it was all pretend. If Lewis had been writing for an older audience, maybe he'd have explored her psychological state in more detail and it would have emerged that yes, she knew Narnia was real but she turned her back on it for more complicated reasons, not just because she wanted to go to parties.
He published a short story under that name in 2004 that seems to have been one of the main rallying flags for The Problem of Susan as a philosophical point. It's worth pointing out that Gaiman's The Problem Of Susan (cw: nsfw) is fictional, not just in being a short-story rather than an essay, but that even in-story much of it is metaphor and dreams and supposition. There are a number of interpretations and, and while the "C S Lewis Thinks Girls Have Cooties" analysis is the most shallow and most heavily repeated, it's not the only one and maybe not even the most plausible. There's a lot of the story that's about broader theodicy, and about what happens to children's stories that grow up, and about what the brave adventures actually require happen in the background. The character-who-might-be-Susan ends the story dead, but dead in a way that's reconciled with her life, if by setting herself or her goals outside of God.
((To be a bit less charitable, the story's also... very far from Gaiman's best work; the emphasis on dream-logic interplays of violence and sexuality are nearly Garth Ennis-level shock jock-isms, and if anything have only become more dated since. I don't think Gaiman himself really ever had a good idea of what he was trying to say with Greta's dream: he describes the story as "I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature."))
I think there's something that could be done here, in an interesting way, but on the other hand, there something awkward when the closest attempts I'm aware of are an XKCD four-panel, and maybe some mediocre web fiction. I don't know whether anything that could be done would be a good story.
I do like Gaiman's work in general, but that story misfired for me. He doesn't get it. His background is Jewish and he's an atheist or agnostic or however he'd describe himself, and a conventional Christianity like Lewis' isn't something familiar to him or that fits with what he knows and feels.
I think he picked up the wrong interpretation of that line (if Lewis knew how many times and in what contexts it would be repeated, I think he would never have written it), or maybe somebody influenced him that direction, and went with it.
And of course, ever since then, we've had the Internet chain of "X said that Y said that Z said it meant such-and-such". People pick up with perfect assurance "Lewis was anti-sex which is why he punished Susan for growing up" without ever having read a word of the original text, just articles at second - and third-hand about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Except Narnia isn't just a children's tale. It's about faith all right--it's a metaphor about religion and God. "People have actually been to Narnia, but they reject it anyway" is a close match to a common Christian strawman of atheists: that atheists have enough evidence to believe and they just refuse out of sinful arrogance.
And Lewis is too smart a person to not recognize that "people have been to Narnia but they still don't believe" matches this Christian strawman. If it's there, Lewis put it there on purpose.
I definitely have some similar reactions to you. The idea that Susan is pretending not to believe in exchange for social approval may well have some basis in real temptations that Lewis as a believer sometimes experienced. Nevertheless, it’s quite common for believers to suggest that nonbelievers are falling prey to these sorts of failings and I can feel my hackles rising as a result.
I think Lewis often takes this kind of tactic of “Are you sure you don’t just feel [uncharitable suggestion]?” as part of his approach to apologetics. Often, as the OP notes, he believes that these accusations are true of his own former self. Lewis often seems to think that self-criticism is surely safe. But when you are using your former self as a guide to understanding others, charity toward your former self becomes as important as charity to others.
I think the idea is more that she's convinced herself than that she's pretending. Framing it as a pretense does make Lewis come across as much more uncharitable.
I dunno, in some ways "you know this deep down but you've convinced yourself otherwise" is even more infuriating than a simple "you're lying for social approval." At least the latter can be easily dismissed. The former always feels like the person talking to me is trying to undermine my best judgment by making me doubt myself.
That's fair. I can't claim to know what Lewis was thinking, but to me "you've convinced yourself otherwise" doesn't mean "you know this deep down," it just means "you once knew this deep down."
In general it's just annoying to talk to people who are very self-assured and confident that you're wrong about your own experiences. Susan isn't a particularly charitable example, since she had more than enough proof of Christianity. Much more than most people get in their lives. Still, she doesn't seem to me to know deep down that she's living a lie.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Regardless of that strawman - their are Christians who have been to “Narnia” and reject it anyway. He’s writing to the Christians not the atheists.
You're claiming there are Christians who have good evidence for God and have then become atheists afterwards? I doubt that.
You shouldn't. From a purely atheist standpoint, there should exist Christians who have nearly indisputable evidence. ~30 billion people have lived, maybe 3-5 billion of which have grown up in Christianity. Setting aside status quo bias, our seemingly innate bias to want to believe in our parents' beliefs, and the genuinely powerful weight of evidence which is tradition, culture, and the encouragement of one's society, hallucinations, etc., multiple people out there have experienced billion-to-one coincidences which "prove" God's existence.
What is your standard for good evidence? I don't think you've thought your own position through here--I think you're just trying to make a rather stale and tired point with minimal effort.
The things that Christians are referring to when they claim that.
It's true that with millions of people, some have had million-to-one coincidences that seem to point to God and that those are, in a sense, good (although wrong) evidence. But that's a motte and bailey on "good evidence". When Christians claim that atheists refuse to believe despite having good evidence for God, that's never what they're talking about. At best, they're talking about the usual Christian apologetics; at worst, they just think that the world itself makes God obvious.
Then you shouldn't have claimed what you said, because the thing that Christians are referring to has definitely happened to people, as I was saying. Spiritual sensations and "miracles" (i.e. very large coincidences) have certainly happened to thousands if not millions of people.
Or is your claim that the typical Christian "good evidence" refers to very powerful evidence such as regrowing an arm or raising someone from the dead? I don't think this is correct--I don't think most Christians would call that kind of evidence typical. Even if that is your definition though, I still think from an atheist perspective there are plenty out there who have witnessed that kind of thing, if only from charlatans.
It looks like a motte and bailey specifically because I don't want to get into Christian apologetics. This is why I claimed you were "just trying to make a rather stale and tired point with minimal effort." Your point doesn't actually say anything at all except express (mostly unrelated) doubt about Christianity in general, but it's phrased as if it's an actual rebuttal to the point of the commenter above you. The only ways to respond are to 1. engage in a lengthy theological debate, or 2. claim that even outside of a Christian standpoint your doubts are misplaced.
There certainly exist people who, by any reasonable standard within or outside of Christianity, have good evidence of Christianity's truth and then left the church anyways. That is the statement that you expressed doubt towards and so that is the one that I responded to.
If you were responding directly to that claim, I am telling you here that you are wrong by any reasonable standard. If you were lazily expressing doubt towards Christianity in general (as I think is the case) then just do so directly rather than hiding it in a mostly unrelated remark.
The typical Christian accusation about atheists refusing to believe despite evidence refers to normal Christian apologetics at best, not to the atheists experiencing one-in-a-million miracles. Christians do separately think that one in a million miracles are evidence for God and that atheists reject them, but that's not the substance of the main accusation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t know what you mean by good evidence. There are those of us who have felt the spirit - “known Narnia” and for status or personal vanity choose not to walk in the path. Chosen to forget Narnia.
There are many Christian’s who choose not to live as Christians. I think that is his target.
Living in Narnia for decades is good evidence that Narnia exists. In the metaphor, Christians don't have such good evidence that God exists.
Allegories are just exaggerated metaphors. If the point is that atheists have evidence and turn away anyways, then the allegory's atheists will have lots of evidence and turn away anyways. The point was never that atheists have exactly that much evidence, no more, no less.
I'm not saying that's not what the metaphor is. That's exactly what the metaphor is. But the metaphor doesn't fit reality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Stories don't exist in a vacuum. The meaning of the story limits the plot elements--"they forgot Narnia magically" cannot be what happened in the story, because it would contradict the metaphor.
Would it? The metaphor is much more centered around Aslan than around Narnia. What exactly do you think Narnia is in this metaphor that forgetting it would contradict the metaphor?
Narnia is good evidence for the existence of God.
I have personally seen myself inexplicably forget very substantial evidence for the existence of God. Susan pretty clearly talked herself out of Narnia--the magic only helped and made it possible--so, so far this seems perfectly compatible with the metaphor.
I don't believe that you actually had very substantial evidence for God, though you may have thought you did.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, that's part of what is not understood. He's writing for children, so he's consciously trying to put it in terms that children will understand. But I think that as adults, we forget how malleable our memory is when we very much want not to remember things the way they really happened.
Susan and the others have not gone back to Narnia, it's the younger children Jill and Eustace who get to do that. When you're immersing yourself in the world, it's easy to rewrite your own personal memories as "way back when I was a kid, I believed this game so hard I thought it was real, can you imagine?"
When everyone and everything around you is telling you "only kids believe in magical kingdoms and talking animals, but in the Real World we know such things can't be, and if you are an adult who claims they are real, then you're lying or crazy", and you want to be taken as a proper responsible sensible grown-up who knows the individual Kardashians by name and all their background/can spout off whatever the current progressive euphemism is for something and not the one that was used last week, then you can make a very hard effort to comply with that and stuff the inconvenient memories (which now seem more like a dream than anything) into a box.
I have a family member who is in therapy and insistent that back when we were all kids, certain things happened a certain way. I was around for some of them and my memories don't line up with that at all. But they are very highly motivated to fit those memories into a victim narrative, so they deny any evidence to the contrary and firmly believe in the rewritten version.
That's one thing, and another is living literal decades in an alternate world, with consistent events that are corroborated by your family.
You can't erase that without being actually mentally ill.
You can if, like in dream experiences, the magic in play means you can lead an entirely different life and yet return in an instant to the body and brain you left. Her middle-schooler’s brain was literally not developed enough to retain all that it had absorbed and adapted to in the other realm. The forgetting would have started nearly immediately as the nerves unbranched.
In addition, they’d lived decades there and practically forgotten the England they’d come from! They were fully assimilated into Narnian life. But in the text, they dropped it all in an instant, remembering about the houseguests touring the Professor’s estate. From the final two pages of LWW:
Then said King Edmund,
“I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream.”
“Sir,” answered they all, “it is even so with us also.”
“And more,” said Queen Lucy, “for it will not go out of my mind that if we pass this post and lantern either we shall find strange adventures or else some great change of our fortunes.”
“Madam,” said King Edmund, “the like foreboding stirreth in my heart also.”
“And in mine, fair brother,” said King Peter.
“And in mine too,” said Queen Susan. “Wherefore by my counsel we shall lightly return to our horses and follow this White Stag no further.” “Madam,” said King Peter, “therein I pray thee to have me excused. For never since we four were Kings and Queens in Narnia have we set our hands to any high matter, as battles, quests, feats of arms, acts of justice, and the like, and then given over; but always what we have
taken in hand, the same we have achieved.”
“Sister,” said Queen Lucy, “my royal brother speaks rightly. And it
seems to me we should be shamed if for any fearing or foreboding we turned back from following so noble a beast as now we have in chase.”
“And so say I,” said King Edmund. “And I have such desire to find the signification of this thing that I would not by my good will turn back for the richest jewel in all Narnia and all the islands.”
“Then in the name of Aslan,” said Queen Susan, “if ye will all have it so, let us go on and take the adventure that shall fall to us.”
So these Kings and Queens entered the thicket, and before they had gone a score of paces they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamppost, and before they had gone twenty more they noticed that they were. making their way not through branches but through coats. And next moment they all came tumbling out of a wardrobe door into the empty room, and They were no longer Kings and Queens in their hunting array but just Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in their old clothes. It was the same day and the same hour of the day on which they had all gone into the wardrobe to hide. Mrs Macready and the visitors were still talking in the passage; but luckily they never came into the empty room and so the children weren’t caught.
And that would have been the very end of the story if it hadn’t been that they felt they really must explain to the Professor why four of the coats out of his wardrobe were missing. And the Professor, who was a very remarkable man, didn’t tell them not to be silly or not to tell lies, but believed the whole story.
I have always found those claims dubious at best, and the most famous one, namely the lampshade story on reddit, is likely a creative writing exercise. I do not believe that any dream can compare to the richness of experience that living several decades would actually have.
Honestly, is it even productive to argue about the physical implementation of the "return" to normal reality? I can assure you that Lewis wasn't thinking about neuroplasticity in the brain when he wrote that excerpt, just making a ham-fisted metaphor. (All of Narnia is a ham-fisted metaphor)
If you posit that it went as far as neurons unbranching, then I can say that a literal reversion might have taken place too, such that all the children ever experienced was the act of getting in and out of the cupboard.
A middle schooler is not a toddler, their cognitive faculties are far more developed even if incomplete. I wouldn't expect one to forget several decades of life in any scenario short of brain damage.
I find it far more believable that they simply lost their cognitive maturity in terms of improved executive function and all the other things that come with age, in other words a reversion to an younger brain but keeping memories intact.
The others certainly kept theirs!
Not really. In the passage above they even forget their normal childhoods before they return to the real world. IIRC in other books they vaguely remember Narnia and have to make a conscious effort to not forget it, and then if and when they return the details come back to them.
More options
Context Copy link
This thread debating the realism of children becoming kings and queens in a magical portal fantasy was funny until you had to get antagonistic. Does it seem to you that when you feel a need to personally insult someone in a debate about Narnia, ffs, that you might need to walk away and take a few deep breaths?
You have quite a track record now of going off on someone in a petty, unprovoked manner. I'm not going to ban you this time to avoid bringing down the thread, but you are definitely looking at a ban next time.
More options
Context Copy link
My, how funny is it that I was quoting @DuplexFields, who has never claimed to be anything but a layman in that regard.
Not that my medical degree taught me much about synaptic pruning, that's something I read up on myself and only vaguely understand. It doesn't really come up in our day jobs, unless you're a neurologist, which I'm not (nor have I claimed to be).
But sure, cast as many aspersions as you like, because an idle chat at like 5 am for me is where I want to go into nitpicky details about memory formation and it's implications for plot holes in the Chronicles of Narnia (any further than I already have).
But go off king, I'm a believer in free speech!
Children, play nicely, or I'll take the toys away (well, the mods will).
No name-calling. It's not polite.
More options
Context Copy link
I'll dunk on whoever I like, thanks. But if you wish to dunk on me, someone who's clearly alive circa Today AD, you really ought to get your facts in order my g.
My investment in untangling the physical implementation of something the author never thought about, because no matter how galaxy brained you think he was, neuronal plasticity wasn't even an idea at the time, is rather limited, and so is my interest in delving further into it.
You absolute 🤡, I didn't even being up the notion that it had anything to do with it, Duplex made a comment that is a perfectly acceptable first approximation for a layman that was mildly interesting to consider and I didn't feel like debooonking it like you're suddenly so interested in doing.
It's akin to claiming a physicist is a fraud when they don't go around correcting someone referencing Newton's First Law because aCksHually, the uncertainty principle forbids something from having precisely zero changes in its momentum or energy with absolutely certainty.
I'm so sorry I hurt your feelings by having less than positive opinions of Lewis, PBUH.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Except there is zero evidence aside from the memories. She's not decades older than she should be, she came back to Earth exactly the same age and exactly the same time that she left, wearing the same clothes that she entered Narnia wearing.
Basically the only evidence she might possibly have is her skill with a bow, I think? With a situation like that, I can see her accepting and internalizing the idea that Narnia is a made-up game she played with her siblings to help them cope with the war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, I never liked Narnia. The whole franchise was too fucking twee and preachy to appeal to even childhood me.
To me, the "problem with Susan" seems to be that she's literally retarded. You spent half of your life in Narnia, and then claim it's some kind of funny game? When you can confirm for yourself by just opening that wardrobe?
Hell, even if you want to fit in with your peers, that is not the behavior of a sane person.
It seems to me that it's an instance of the metaphorical/allegorical intruding on the literal. The line between the two domains becoming blurred.
You can imagine spending half your life dedicated to a certain religion, or career, or a political ideology; but then at some point something changes. You can no longer believe in what you once did; it no longer has any meaning for you, you can't take it seriously anymore, you just want to turn your back on it. Susan turning her back on Narnia is supposed to represent that sort of major life development. She's not literally denying the validity of her memories of Narnia and saying that it was all a game - or at least, that's not what you're supposed to be getting out of it.
More options
Context Copy link
They spent half their life in Narnia and then were able to be more or less regular kids again to grow up and not look like isekai protagonists. Maybe the return did make it easy to dismiss the whole thing as a dream.
I consider that itself to be nonsensical, so it's not doing Lewis any favors.
But is arguing about shitty worldbuilding in the Chronicles of Narnia really what any of us want to do haha?
It's nonsensical, but it's nonsense that screens off the other nonsense. You're basically double-counting criticism. If you grant that the kids return to being regular kids at the age they left, that already gives you all the nonsensicality required for the hazy memories as well.
I'm struggling to understand this. Even if they became "regular kids", Susan should be old enough already to retain her memories. If she didn't, then as I've argued elsewhere, it takes God/Aslan thumbing the scales to force her to forget, if not totally.
That breaks the Aesop. But of course, we're arguing about the metaphysics of the reversion to being "regular kids" as well.
I mean, I guess if you're putting a person who has aged a year back into a younger body, you're already applying god-tier/superintelligence-tier modification. At that point, "how" you go about it, if you do it parsimoniously by applying some general effect to the brain, or if you literally just rewrite every atom, you're not so much putting your thumb on the scale as grabbing the scale and tilting it whichever way you like. Of course Aslan could have made them remember clear as day and without any doubts if he wanted to do that. So yeah, I guess I agree that "well, they're remembering hazily because they were de-aged" doesn't do anything, because it's not like de-aging is a primitive process that would have to be further enhanced for clear memories. - Then again, Aslan has never seemed as all-powerful or unconstrained as capital-G God to me. Maybe it is a primitive process.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, part of it is that she can't do that anymore. Even when they first found it as children, it didn't work all the time - Lucy tries to persuade the others that she did get into a strange land out the back of the wardrobe, but when they all try, it's only an ordinary wardrobe so they don't believe her.
So particular portals don't work all the time, and not for everyone. Now that the original four are older, old enough to be adults or nearly so, they can't get back into Narnia like that. So Susan isn't being retarded; there is no objective outside proof to overcome her "wow, still playing that game?" version.
Remember, they came back to our world as children the same age as when they left, and they've lived for years in the ordinary world. Memories fade, and if you really want to convince yourself that some thing from the past wasn't that way (when it would contradict something you really want right now), then you can do so.
It's a more complicated problem than the simple one it looks like on the surface, and saying "oh Susan grew up and discovered sex" is too simple a way to write it off.
I don't know about you, but if I lived a life of at least several decades in Narnia, then the fact that I returned as a child is hardly sufficient to make me suppress or deny the memory. There's willful ignorance, and there's that.
Not to mention that she has her family to corroborate her claims.
My money is still on mental retardation.
But it's not her family she has to convince, or face up to: it's adults in the outside world who think all those kinds of stories are just that - stories. If you insist they're real, you're crazy.
Picture one of her parents' friends at a dinner party: "So, you claim to have travelled to another world? Have you brought anything back? You lived there for years? If so, why are you only twenty now? Do you have any independent witness not your siblings? If you grew up in Narnia, how were you a child of twelve when you went back home after being evacuated to the countryside? If I go to this magical wardrobe, can I get to Narnia? No?"
How do you prove that what you are saying is real?
That's perfectly fine, but the issue isn't just her declaiming it to the wider world, but to her family, presumably her siblings. They claim to have had the same experiences!
If I for some reason had a similar experience, I would certainly suspect I was going crazy, but less so if I had people to validate my claims. At the very least, I might keep shut about it in public, but I don't see myself going into such willful denial.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There seems to be some magic in place to make them forget most of their time there. It's pretty annoying to be arguing about plot holes if you're not taking the time to actually remember the whole plot.
I really don't care enough to litigate this further or look up the primary source that is-
checks notes
An almost century old children's novel.
That being said, if there's "magic that makes forget most of their time there", then that entirely undermines the whole "problem" since it's possible the poor girl isn't in willful denial, but genuinely believes that she hallucinated the whole thing.
Bro come on. You're mocking me for missing a word and I didn't even miss that word.
There's a middle ground between those two extremes which the book was obviously aiming for. She's (somewhat willfully) convinced herself that she hallucinated the whole thing, but doing so was pretty easy due to the magic involved.
EDIT: also I could do without your sneering about looking up primary sources. You don't have to. The commenter above you did it for you and you're ignoring that passage.
My apologies, that was unnecessarily rude of me.
My point is that any degree of magic undermines the allegory, analogous to the question of how god can condemn sinners when he's omnipotent and omniscient and intentionally set up the world such that they were inevitable going to sin, and then get punished for it.
I think that it takes a lot of magic to erase decades of memories, therefore that degree of intervention breaks the Aesop.
I think it would break the Aesop if those memories were actually erased, rather than given a dreamlike quality. As is, it seems to fit the allegory perfectly. A Narnia where the memories are unchanged would be impossible to deny. A Narnia where the memories are erased would be impossible to remember at all. If Susan were to actually deny decades of firsthand experience, her repentance and return to Narnia would be quite doubtful. Her denial of a somewhat dreamlike experience is much more realistic--she has to reject reality, but only to a fairly reasonable extent--and much more closely mirrors the standard Christian attitude where those who renounce the faith are forgetting spiritual experiences but are not necessarily directly denying reality.
It's much easier to misremember an event from your childhood than to point at a rock and call it a river. The former is the standard Christian interpretation of falling away from your faith. Most people who leave Christianity aren't witnessing miracles and then immediately denying that they saw them; they are reinterpreting and maybe misremembering events from (possibly) years ago which previously formed the bedrock of their faith. Thus, using magic to obfuscate what happened in Narnia enhances the allegory, it doesn't ruin it.
It's still an active intervention for no good reason, god/Aslan tilting the scales against someone. And once again, I reiterate that it takes a great deal of tilting to turn decades of life into a murky haze that's even possible to deny without mental illness.
I don't really see that being true. It seems to that most people raised a particular religion who become atheists do so because the aching weight of reality accumulates so much evidence that they can no longer reconcile the cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their observations. That's for outright atheists, the kind who become "cultural catholics" and the like simply start paying lip service to the doctrine while engaging in an ability to hold two mutually conflicting means of parsing the world at the same time, which is highly puzzling to me as someone who deeply values the integrity of my epistemic.
I'm sure you, presumably a Christian yourself, prefer your interpretation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know, man. That's exactly the kind of behavior I've learned to expect from people. I'm only surprised she didn't call them domestic extremists, or something.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link