Okay! So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in âThe Last Battleâ, 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 âlipstick and nylonsâ 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 canât 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 donât like Lewis, Narnia, Christianity or any combination of these, youâre free to do so and nobody can make you like them.
The problem I have with The Problem Of Susan is that itâs 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 âlipstick and nylonsâ and the part about âinvitationsâ gets left out. And thereâs latching on to âtoo keen on being grown-upâ.
So what is Lewis saying here, or trying to say? âGrowing up is icky, especially if you start liking boysâ? To take the reading that he is saying âloss of innocence (especially sexual innocence) is bad, adulthood is bad, children should stay children as long as possibleâ?
I donât think so. Polly is a grown-up herself, and yet a friend of Narnia. If Susan is now âgrown-upâ, then Peter - as her elder brother - is also a grown-up. But heâs 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 Iâm 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 ânylons and lipstickâ 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 Iâve 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 âfriends of Narniaâ then they must have avoided Susanâs 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. Letâs 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?
Hereâs 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 âun, so breaking off here for Part One before getting into Part Two
Iâve criticised the take that the Problem of Susan is reducible to the simple (and simplicistic) answer of âSexâ, and hereâs why I think that.
Letâs look at the full version of the much-quoted line about âlipstick and nylonsâ:
"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."
âand invitationsâ. To drag in another writer, âWhatâs invitations, precious? Whatâs invitations, eh?â
Well, theyâre exactly what they sound like. âOh, you mean boys asking her out on dates, maybe?â No. Being asked out, yes, but I mean âinvitations to parties and social occasions and grown-up eventsâ.
Iâm hobbled by the fact that Lewis doesnât 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 âThe Last Battleâ, Susan is old enough to have left school but isnât going on to college (that we know of, at least not yet).
So sheâs about eighteen or so at a minimum, and looking around online thereâs an estimation that sheâs twenty-one.
Letâs 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 âyou canât do that, youâre too youngâ when weâre in our teenage years, caught between no longer a child but not quite adult yet? And mostly weâve had a simple view of what being grown-up means: nobody imagines âIâll have to do my taxes and get a mortgageâ when theyâre 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. Thatâs not a bad thing! The bad thing is if thatâs 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, thatâs only natural. But if she spends her time only going to parties, looking for flattery of attention, and trying to be âmutton dressed as lambâ as she gets older, then sheâs wasting her potential. I donât 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 youâve stuck with me this far, congratulations! âJeez, will you ever get to the point?â I will, I promise!
So hereâs 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 Godâs 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.
âBut whatâs wrong with liking fun and parties and having a good time and meeting people and making new friends?â
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 âproperâ 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.'
Sheâs lying to herself as much as to the others. She knows Narnia and everything they say is real, but because it doesnât fit in with the type of person she wants to be now, sheâs doing her best to deny it and forget it. Sheâs convinced herself that it was all just a game and childish imagination, and sheâs not a child now. Popular, cool people donât 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.
âŚWhat 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 naĂŻvetĂŠ. And there was a real friendliness in him. He was moved partly by that to tell us all he knew or thought he knew.
Thereâs 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, thatâs my take on it, anyway. Take it or leave it as you like.
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Notes -
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.
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-schoolerâs 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, theyâd lived decades there and practically forgotten the England theyâd 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 Professorâs estate. From the final two pages of LWW:
Then said King Edmund,
âI 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.â
âSir,â answered they all, âit is even so with us also.â
âAnd more,â said Queen Lucy, âfor 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.â
âMadam,â said King Edmund, âthe like foreboding stirreth in my heart also.â
âAnd in mine, fair brother,â said King Peter.
âAnd in mine too,â said Queen Susan. âWherefore by my counsel we shall lightly return to our horses and follow this White Stag no further.â âMadam,â said King Peter, âtherein 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.â
âSister,â said Queen Lucy, âmy 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.â
âAnd so say I,â said King Edmund. âAnd 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.â
âThen in the name of Aslan,â said Queen Susan, âif ye will all have it so, let us go on and take the adventure that shall fall to us.â
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 werenât caught.
And that would have been the very end of the story if it hadnât 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, didnât 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!
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!
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 đ¤Ą, 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.
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