To me, the best children’s books gave their child characters (and by extension, myself) the chance to be taken seriously. In Narnia, the boundary between childhood and adulthood — a vast tundra of tedious years — could be elided. The Pevensies not only get to topple the White Witch, fight in battles, participate in an earthshaking mystical event, and be crowned kings and queens; they do it all without having to grow up. Yet they become more than children, too. Above all, their decisions have moral gravity. In contrast to how most children experience their role in an adult world, what the child characters in these stories do, for better or worse, really matters, and nowhere more so than in Edmund’s betrayal. His envy and vanity bring about a cataclysm, the death of God.
I remember feeling that the Chronicles were full of perilous decisions in which it was all too apparent how easily you could drift onto the wrong path. The White Witch entices Edmund with delicious hot drinks and enchanted Turkish delight, but primarily by flattering his laziness, his conceit, and his rivalrous sentiments toward his older brother, Peter — all very human weaknesses I recognized in myself. I wasn’t alone. One of the people who wrote to me after reading my essay about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a musician, writer, and artist I knew slightly named Tiffany Lee Brown. When we met to talk about the books, she described how different Narnia felt from other children’s fantasies.
“The first novel I ever read was The Magic of Oz in the school library,” she told me. “I loved it, and believed every word of it. So I read all the Oz books. I moved on to the Narnia books after that, when I was about seven or eight.”
“And how did you think they compared to Oz?”
“Well, I didn’t spend too much time in Oz. It was kind of wacky and had a lot of things going on, but there was a certain weightiness to Narnia which really appealed to me.”
“What do you mean by ‘weightiness’?”
“The fact that people were really being tested. It wasn’t just ‘Are we coming to the end of the adventure? Will we get back to Kansas?’ but, ‘Will we get back to Kansas with our souls intact?’”
To the adult skeptic, the evident Christianity of the Chronicles makes their morality seem pat, the all-too-familiar stuff of tiresome, didactic tales like Elsie Dinsmore. “The world of Narnia is simple and eternal,” Alison Lurie writes, a place where good and evil are too “clearly distinguishable” compared to the “complex and ambiguous and fluid” world inhabited by Harry Potter. But that’s an illusion, fostered by an adult’s resistance to what appears to be religious proselytizing. True, Lewis does populate Narnia with semiallegorical figures who represent eternal aspects of human nature in addition to more realistic characters like the Pevensies. The White Witch is bad through and through, almost as uncomplicated as a fairy-tale villain. But she’s not the ground on which the story’s moral battle is fought. Edmund is.
For the novelist Jonathan Franzen, the plausibility of Edmund’s corruption is an example of the ethical gravity that gives the Chronicles much of their power. “What I so admire about them as an adult and I think may very well have been a big part of their appeal to me as a child,” he told me, “was how well Lewis understands how real evil is to children. How real a sense of guilt and having done something very, very bad is. And how vital to having a story with real meaning that possibility is. All of the books I liked best, that really made an impression on me from childhood, had main characters who were not all good, who were not victims of bad things but were actually agents in creating bad things.”
Victims, it’s true, have an appeal of their own. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, like Elsie Dinsmore, was one of those stories in which a child is bullied and deprived by nasty authority figures and her peers, only to achieve a satisfying triumph at the book’s end. Even with a heroine like Elsie, who bore little resemblance to an actual human being, this kind of narrative can be weirdly enthralling. Vindication, however diluted, is intoxicating to the powerless, and all children feel powerless much of the time. There’s something a little unwholesome about even a good children’s novel in this particular vein — A Little Princess being a fine example. Young as I was, I recognized that my fascination with the injustices suffered by Burnett’s heroine, a former rich girl reduced to working as a servant at her boarding school when her father dies, and my hot anticipation of the comeuppance I knew lay in store for her enemies, had an ugly side.
There is even some of this self-pitying thirst for revenge in the Harry Potter books. The long-suffering Harry, forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs by his dreadful foster family, the Dursleys, and often unfairly suspected of mischief at school, is always proven to be a blameless hero by the conclusion of each installment. Only at the very end of the series, in the seventh book, do we get a hint (and then only a hint) that Harry’s cousin, Dudley Dursley, might not be awful to the core, although in the first few installments he is not much worse than Eustace Scrubb at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and Eustace is permitted to reform. More important, although neither the little princess Sara Crewe nor Harry Potter behaves as badly as Edmund does in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they are in fact what Edmund only believes himself to be: wronged, aggrieved, undervalued, and due a little payback.
Much of the evil done in the world is committed by people who regard themselves in exactly this light. It’s a worthy thing, as Lurie observes, to encourage children to stand up for what they believe is right, even when that means defying authority. Still, this doesn’t impress me as a lesson of tremendous complexity or ambiguity. By comparison, I see great moral wisdom in suggesting that children ought to examine their own motives at the times they feel most injured and self-righteous. (Many grown-ups would benefit from the same exercise.)
You can, incidentally, absorb this aspect of Lewis’s morality without also subscribing to the Christianity that inspired it (just as professing Christianity is certainly no protection against the excesses of self-righteousness). Lewis himself believed in something he called “the Tao,” a term he appropriated from the Chinese to refer to what others have called natural law, a set of core values common to “the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan and the Jew.” Some of those values include the keeping of promises, loyalty to clan or country, and the defense of justice. It is the role of an educator to cultivate these principles in his students.
Lewis didn’t, however, think that literature was particularly well suited to this job. It did not escape his notice that people who read a lot of good books aren’t necessarily the more virtuous for it. In An Experiment in Criticism, he wrote that as far as he could tell, the ranks of nonreaders included many individuals who were superior “in psychological health, in moral virtue, practical prudence, good manners, and general adaptability. And we all know very well that we, the literary, include no small percentage of the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped, and the truculent.” What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: “it admits us to experiences other than our own.”