In The Narnian, a biography of Lewis, Alan Jacobs makes the customary (and not negligible) argument that Lewis wrote “in a time less sensitive to cultural differences.” Like Downing, he insists that Lewis merely drew upon the “readymade source of ‘Oriental’ imagery,” generated by Christian Europe’s long rivalry with the Ottoman Empire. Jacobs feels sure that the continued popularity of the Chronicles proves that “readers … can tell the difference between, on the one hand, an intentionally hostile depiction of some alien culture and, on the other, the use of cultural difference as a mere plot device.” Jacobs’s confidence that the average reader would instinctively reject stories with truly racist elements is sadly misplaced; such scruples, if they exist, have done nothing to inhibit the popularity of Gone With the Wind. But beyond this, he also seems to be suggesting that because Lewis didn’t really know — or even want to know — anything about Turks or Arabs, he can’t be accused of deliberately maligning them. At worst, he just didn’t care whether he was doing them an injustice as long as it served his needs.
The feebleness of this distinction — it’s better to insult someone out of ignorant expedience than out of straightforward antipathy — is pitiful. What is prejudice if not the presumption to judge people you know nothing about on the basis of “readymade” imagery? Perhaps if Lewis had lived in Istanbul or enjoyed a few close Turkish friends, he would not have made this mistake. He might have grown accustomed to the scent of garlic. His pronouncements on homosexuality were notably liberal-minded, for example, no doubt because Arthur Greeves, his best friend from boyhood, was homosexual. Lewis’s fault lies in never considering the possibility that he might be wrong about those dark-skinned strangers, the ones he never got to meet; he was ignorant of his own ignorance. His beloved imagination may have served him well on many other occasions, but when it came to people who looked or smelled different from himself, it stopped short.
Chapter Twelve
Girl Trouble
Everybody’s favorite characters from the Chronicles are reunited at the end of the final book, The Last Battle — all but one. King Tirian, Narnia’s staunch defender against the Calormene menace, until the moment Aslan brings his world to an end, suddenly and inexplicably finds himself in a beautiful countryside, where he meets seven of the eight children who have visited Narnia from our world. Among them are Peter, Edmund, and Lucy (now young adults), but when Tirian asks after Susan, Peter tersely replies that she’s “no longer a friend of Narnia.” Jill explains that, back in our world, Susan would rather not hang around with the rest of them reminiscing about their Narnian adventures. Instead, she’s “interested in nothing nowadays but nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Polly, also among the redeemed, adds, “Her whole idea is to race to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”
Susan’s fate — the rest of the visitants from our world have already died in a railway accident, although they don’t know it yet — has bothered many readers. It is one of the most debated aspects of the Chronicles. Presumably, Susan is the only Pevensie to escape the accident (the Pevensies’ parents are also killed), which prompted Neil Gaiman to write a short story imagining the rest of her life. In “The Problem of Susan,” she is presented as an elderly college professor, the author of a history of children’s literature, giving an interview to a young journalist. Susan recalls identifying the mangled bodies of her siblings at the railway station and barely scraping by financially after losing her whole family. She has lived a full life, illustrated by an obituary in the morning paper that reminds her of a man she kissed in a summer house long ago and another man who “took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach.”
Gaiman pointedly fills “The Problem of Susan” with everything Lewis left out of the Chronicles: adulthood, the uglier realities of violence and death, the brutal side of nature, and, especially, sexuality. Although none of these matters are natural topics for children’s books (especially in Lewis’s day), Gaiman feels that Lewis takes his aversion to maturity too far. He agrees with Philip Pullman that Susan’s “nylons and lipstick and invitations” are emblems of her sexuality, and he maintains that sexuality is really what keeps her out of Paradise. “It’s only reading it as an adult,” he told me, “that you start to wonder: Where are the nice women of childbearing age? …There was a level on which of course [Susan] doesn’t get to heaven because she’s just like the witches, and they wear dresses and they’re pretty.”
Gaiman’s friend, Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, thinks that both men interpret this passage too freely. “Lewis’s critics tend to reduce it all down to a question of sex,” she said when I had the chance to ask her about it during a visit to England. “I’ve seen convincing arguments that what Susan was guilty of in the end was not so much growing up as vanity. I think there are strong reasons to think that’s probably true.”
“I see what you mean,” I replied, “but even so, I believe Lewis did think that women are more prone to that sort of trivial vanity than men are.” I told Susanna about a story Lewis wrote, “The Shoddy Lands,” in which a man’s friend becomes engaged and somehow the narrator finds himself briefly transported into the fiancée’s mind. Everything in the world becomes blurry and flimsy, except for the clothes and merchandise in shops, which is clearly all this silly woman really cares about.
“I’m still not sure I agree with you,” she replied. “It really depends on whether you just look at the books themselves, or whether you look at his character and his other writings as well. I don’t see from the books, the Narnia books, that he thought trivial vanity was a female thing.”
“What other examples are you thinking of?”
“Well, you’ve got Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, who goes off and dresses himself up in his best clothes. And there’s also the horse Bree in The Horse and His Boy. [Lewis] makes it clear that Bree is vain and socially insecure and worried about what will happen to him in Narnia.”
Lewis himself wrote to a child fan that Susan had “turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end — in her own way.” Alan Jacobs, in The Narnian, defends Lewis against charges of sexism by arguing that Susan really misses out on paradise due to her “excessive regard for social acceptance.” Although Jacobs is willing to admit that Lewis “could say some extraordinarily silly things about women,” he believes that, for those who object to Susan’s fate, especially Philip Pullman, this is really a side issue. To atheists like Pullman, Jacobs claims, Lewis’s “greater crime” is his conviction that people can be eternally condemned at all; what they can’t stand is the fact that “God gives people the freedom to choose Hell rather than choose to dwell in Heaven.”