Women certainly weren’t included in Lewis’s annual “English binges,” at which his male pupils were invited (or, when reluctant, pressured) to get drunk on beer and bellow out “bawdy” — off-color jokes and songs culled from hoary ballads and Old English sources. (Lewis specified that the bawdy be “outrageous and extravagant,” although one younger friend characterized the typical example Lewis offered as “very mild.”) Lewis Carroll was a meek, socially maladroit don who told stories about a little girl because he found little girls more appealing (and less terrifying) than adults, but C. S. Lewis was the epitome of hearty British masculinity at the time he wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. His manner, according to Wilson, got “bluffer and beerier and louder” as the years went on, but this, the biographer insists, was really a “persona,” a kind of act Lewis slipped into during middle age. Lewis’s bluffness was a mask perfectly adapted to the compartmentalization he had practiced since boyhood, a wall erected against those aspects of life and himself that he preferred to conceal.
Such a man, when writing a children’s book, would naturally begin with a boy hero, and that’s just what Lewis did. But the boy characters in the Edwardian children’s fiction Lewis grew up with didn’t have much emotional range. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter — fair, brave, ethical, judicious, and decisive but not domineering — is an ideal eldest brother in every way, but as a human being he’s badly constrained by his role. Writing about Narnia released something free, lyrical, and tender in Lewis, and none of those qualities fit within the limitations of what he would have viewed as an acceptable boy character.
Practically the first thing we learn about Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that she is “a little afraid” of the strange-looking professor and easily creeped out by the huge old house with its empty rooms and corridors. This is perfectly understandable in a small girl, but Peter, unless he were very little indeed, would seem a coward if he expressed the same apprehension. Edmund can be afraid — of the White Witch, to give one example — but only when he is playing the quisling. After his reconciliation with Aslan and his siblings, he has to reclaim our admiration; accordingly, he becomes the most valiant warrior at the Battle of Beruna. Lucy, by comparison, can be vulnerable, can even waver at times, without ever coming across as weak; if anything, her courage, when she exhibits it, is all the more commendable because no one expects it of her. She can plead with Mr. Tumnus not to betray her to the witch and comfort him when he bursts into tears at the thought of his own perfidy — all without appearing “soft.”
Lewis is not the only storyteller to find that his own investment in conventional masculinity makes a female protagonist the most appealing choice. In her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol J. Clover, a professor of Scandinavian and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, considers the curious case of the low-budget slasher films of the late twentieth century. These movies, despite their reputation for catering to the misogyny of their predominantly young male audience, almost always featured a particular kind of young woman as the hero. Clover came up with a name for this recurring figure, usually the only member of a group of teenagers to survive the film’s ordeals and defeat a supernaturally monstrous antagonist: she is the “Final Girl.” Clover writes, “The Final Girl is … a congenial double for the adolescent male.” Providing an “identificatory buffer,” the Final Girl allows the men in the audience to experience vicariously “taboo” sensations like fear and vulnerability without shame.
Lucy has many of the traits of Clover’s Final Girclass="underline" innocence, kindness, modesty, unsuspected reserves of strength. Of course, the Chronicles move through a much broader emotional spectrum than a horror film, and at the positive end as well as the negative Lucy can do and feel much more than a traditional boy character. After Edmund has also been through the wardrobe, and Lucy asks him to confirm Narnia’s existence to the other two, he spitefully refuses. Lucy runs off in tears. Her brothers and sister pretend not to notice she’s been crying (all of Lewis’s child characters aspire to a stiff upper lip), but there’s no serious humiliation in this, as there would be for a boy who wept, however hurt or angry. It’s impossible, too, to imagine Peter or Edmund in the place of Lucy or Susan on the eve of Aslan’s death or the morning after, calling him “dear Aslan” and covering him with kisses. Lucy, then, became the vehicle of Lewis’s inner life.
The first person Lucy meets once she arrives in Narnia is, despite his goat’s legs and horns, essentially a learned bachelor. Mr. Tumnus has always been my favorite Narnian, partly because he was the first Narnian I met, but mostly because of his hospitality. He may be part animal and live in a cave, but his is the coziest home imaginable, with two comfortable chairs (“one for me and one for a friend”), a roaring fire, and a bountifully stocked tea table. Lewis once met a man who suggested that meals in the Chronicles play the same role that sex does in adult fiction — as a kind of titillation cannily used to beguile the child reader. Affronted, Lewis replied that he put a lot of food in the books not to pander to the kiddies but because he liked it. He didn’t bother to add that at the time he wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, postwar rationing and shortages made good meals a rare occurrence in Britain. The Lewis brothers’ letters from those years include countless notes sent to Jack’s American admirers, fervently thanking them for gifts of ham and sugar.
As soon as they’ve eaten, Mr. Tumnus begins to tell Lucy stories:
He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest. He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.
People from our world visit Narnia only when something’s gone wrong and needs to be fixed: the White Witch has to be overthrown, the Telmarines ejected, the lost prince retrieved from the northern wastes. Rereading the Chronicles as an adult, I realized that my notion of everyday Narnian life as a merry round of festivals and games comes almost entirely from fireside tales like Tumnus’s. Even when you’re in Narnia, the place can be elusive, constructed out of stories about times that are not quite this one. The titles of Tumnus’s books — The Life and Letters of Silenus, Nymphs and Their Ways, and especially Men, Monks and Gamekeepers: A Study in Popular Legend — peg him as a scholar of sorts, but it is his storytelling that makes him the most likely avatar for Lewis in all of the Chronicles.
Hospitality codes, as anyone as conversant with ancient literature as Lewis would have known, are among humanity’s oldest and most sacrosanct taboos. There’s no possibility that Mr. Tumnus, having invited Lucy into his home and buttered toast with her, could ever have carried out his initial plan to hand her over to the White Witch. But above and beyond that consideration, he does not do it because they have become friends — that theme again. Lewis considered it lamentable that friendship, in the contemporary view, had been almost entirely overshadowed by filial and romantic love: “Very few modern people,” he wrote in The Four Loves, “think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.”