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.
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Notes -
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.
All peoples' experiences are their own, but in my experience, I decided for a number of personal reasons that I didn't want to believe any more, and had the unique experience of the lean of the evidence realigning in my mind. Some years later, I had the experience of deciding that I did, in fact, want to resume believing, and likewise observed the accumulated mass of evidence tipping back the other way again. In both cases, I believed what I chose to believe.
People talk about evidence as though it were dispositive. it is not. If you don't want to believe something, there are an infinite number of arguments you can raise. If you want to believe in something, there's a likewise infinite number of arguments supporting it. It seems to me that people gather arguments until they feel their prefered decision is well-supported, and then they stop. That's choosing a decision, not being forced into one.
Where are you now?
The way I see it, motivated reasoning can outweigh a great deal of evidence, especially when everyone else is in on it, but it can't outweigh literally all the evidence on longer timescales, as evident from the fact that the functionally atheist fraction of the global population continues to rise.
Of course, as time passes, the remaining religious will be akin to MRSA, having developed memetic immune responses that shield them even if you tape their eyes open with a gun to their head. Call me optimistic, but I don't think the majority are quite that badly compromised yet.
I chose not to believe, now I choose to believe. I find the latter choice more rewarding.
What reason of consequence is not motivated? I've spent a lot of my life debating with people; it's a hobby of mine. I've learned in that time that convincing people is more about making an idea seem palatable to them than it is bludgeoning down their material objections. People cannot be reasoned out of a position they did not reason themselves into, and many positions are, one way or another, axiomatic. This is not to say that debate is pointless; what it doe is help people clarify their understanding of the choice they're making, of the axioms they choose.
What evidence needs to be outweighed, for that matter? The fundamental facts underlying the issue appear to have been well-understood at least since roughly the invention of writing, and to my knowledge no new, relevant information has been added since. It's certainly true that Atheism is currently dominant, but it seems to me that such dominance is the result not of a sudden outbreak of clear-headed reason, but rather a confluence of historical factors accelerating the usual social dynamics, and this leads me to conclude that its dominance is likely temporary. Its previous attempts at securing hegemony were hideous failures, and while our current society is certainly gentler, it is not without its own carnival of horrors. It seems to me that Atheism has never once delivered on its promises, and the more clearly people understand that, the less they will see the appeal.
Time will tell, of course.
Man, I can't even imagine doing so myself, anymore than I can willfully convince myself that the chair I'm sitting on is in nonexistent.
If it was some rando claiming this, I simply wouldn't believe it, but in your case I'm going to retreat in utter confusion haha
That's not how it works. You don't just pick a random statement and assert a position in defiance of all evidence. Rather, there's a branching chain of supporting conclusions that go back and back and back until their endpoints become lost in obscurity for most practical purposes. You can with great effort find the edge of the network, but all you can do there is either extend it further indefinitely, or anchor it to an axiom. Either is a choice, freely made, and that is how beliefs are chosen by each of us. Either you choose to terminate the endless loop of supposition through axiomatic thinking, or you choose to ignore that it is an endless loop; either way, you choose to stop questioning further. The Turing tape halts, as it inevitably must if anything useful is to be accomplished.
OK, so if I understand it correctly, you can change your underlying axioms at will and then endorse the new conclusion that arises based on their interactions with observed evidence? And not simply ignoring evidence outright?
More or less. Something being a choice doesn't mean making it is trivial, of course, and some choices make subsequent choices easier or harder, sometimes to a dispositive degree. Not all choices are easily revocable, and some may not be revocable at all. Witness serious addiction, for an example, or consider someone who weaves a particular axiom into their identity, their character, their being, shapes their life around it, until changing it would be tantamount to complete self-destruction; they could do so; I could at this moment ditch my family and friends and go try to make a new career as a Chris Farley-esque male stripper. I'm not going to do that, because why would I? And neither are people who've gone to similar effort to commit to their choices.
That doesn't make the initial step less of a choice, though.
There is an effectively infinite amount of evidence. In order to reason, we have to select, evaluate and weight evidence for relevance, and that process cannot itself rely on evidence without infinite recursion. Axioms are the only practical foundation on which reasoning from evidence can proceed, but at that point the game has already been decided. Evidence cannot force axioms; the idea that it can, that Reason rather than Will is the monarch of the human mind, has been pernicious since its inception. It emerged in an environment of relatively homogeneous axioms between participants, which gave a common grounding for reasoning from evidence. That is mostly gone now, though, and unlikely to return in the near future, and in its absence we see that evidence simply cannot force conclusions on an opponent. There's always another argument, another line of evidence, disagreement over the evidence selected, disagreement over its interpretation, etc, etc. Ignoring evidence is unnecessary when weighting, evaluating, and interpreting it can achieve the same effect with far less cognitive dissonance.
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