Perhaps the most unconventional argument that Goldthwaite mounts in The Natural History of Make-Believe concerns Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which he regards not as a charming flight of fancy but as a risible “bout of rancor.” Lewis Carroll’s novel, he maintains, is the toxic product of its author’s thwarted artistic and social ambitions. I’m not sure I can entirely agree with that, any more than I would argue that children’s fiction ought to be devoid of anger, but he has a point; a friend of mine stopped reading the book to his four-year-old daughter because she found the characters upsettingly “mean.”
In Goldthwaite’s chapter on Middle-earth and Narnia, he raises some familiar objections to the Chronicles — Lewis’s evident fear of powerful, sexual women and the occasional sideswipes at such crackpot progressive notions as coed schooling. He also brings up a few others that I hadn’t considered before. Goldthwaite (who knows a thing or two about rancor) has a tendency to work up a full head of rhetorical steam and then let it run away with him for pages at a time. Still, he’s undeniably intelligent and he makes a troubling case against Lewis’s elitism.
Goldthwaite particularly detests a passage from Prince Caspian in which Aslan leads a jubilant procession through a Narnia that he has just liberated from another occupation, this time by humans, the Telmarines. The lion’s party comes upon a school. Under Aslan’s influence, magical ivy grows over and then crushes the school’s walls and desks, freeing a classroom of miserable girls dressed in tight collars and “thick tickly stockings.” Most of the girls scatter in fear, but one, Gwendolen, hesitates and is invited by Aslan to join his companions. Gwendolen’s school is one in a series of dreary, workaday scenarios Aslan’s entourage upends along their way. The procession, which includes Bacchus and his Maenads, releases a river god from a bridge, a boy from a man beating him with a stick, and a tired girl teaching arithmetic to “a number of boys who looked very like pigs,” (and who will, à la Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, eventually turn into pigs).
This scene, with its rambunctious celebrants, enchanted vines, frisking beasts, and general holiday air, has long been one of my favorites. Jonathan Franzen calls it “erotic,” and Lewis himself seemed a bit overwhelmed by the wantonness of all the dancing, drinking, and sticky-fingered grape eating. At one point, he has Susan whisper to Lucy, “I wouldn’t have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.” This is the only point in the Chronicles where we can sense any concern in the author that his readers might get swept up in all the pagan delirium. For myself, I remember thinking that, contra Susan, Bacchus’s “wild girls” sounded like one of the few clubs I’d really like to join.
Goldthwaite sees something else again in Aslan’s march. The narrator dismisses the rest of the students from Gwendolen’s demolished school, the ones who run away from Aslan, as “mostly dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs.” The line infuriates Goldthwaite to the degree that he calls it “the vilest passage ever to poison a children’s book.” Imagine, he suggests, a vulnerable child somewhere, reading this description and recognizing that her own chubby legs must forever relegate her to the ranks of the unchosen; such a slur, Goldthwaite maintains, constitutes nothing less than “sadism.” Fat-legged girls are “Lewis’s Jews”: “The word evil springs to mind,” he fulminates, “and, if not evil, then certainly the word shame.”
Goldthwaite’s outrage may be over the top, but it’s not unfounded. Classic fairy tales, like the ones collected in Andrew Lang’s nineteenth-century color books (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on), commonly make their virtuous characters beautiful and their wicked characters ugly. But Lewis, a twentieth-century author attempting to model Christian values, ought to have known better. He wasn’t writing a traditional fairy tale; those stories feature brutalities that he would never have dreamed of including in Narnia: torture, people thrown into ovens alive, dismemberment, cannibalism, and so on. Besides, Lewis condemned petty vanity and prided himself on not caring much about appearances; his clothes were notoriously shabby and even his house was run-down. To make the primitive error of linking someone’s unattractive looks with spiritual unworthiness (or vice versa) is exactly the sort of thing a “silly, conceited,” and superficial young woman like the grown-up Susan Pevensie would do.
Goldthwaite views the crack about fat legs as one among many instances of in-group snottiness in the Chronicles. Caspian rejects a potential bride because she “squints and has freckles.” Eustace Scrubb, at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is derided not just for reading the wrong kinds of books, but also for having parents who “were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underwear.” Such remarks, writes Goldthwaite, work like “keep-out signs on the clubhouse door.” (He also reads a great deal into the name Gwendolen, with its posh intimations of the most popular girl at boarding school.) And true enough, a whiff of clubbiness does waft through the Chronicles — an unthinking complacency about the superiority of “our kind” (that is, Lewis’s kind) of people which goes beyond even the knee-jerk attitudes about race. Nowhere does this seem more apparent to me than in The Horse and His Boy, my least favorite among the books (after The Last Battle, of course).
The Horse and His Boy has several villains, but in a way its least appealing character is Corin, a boy made more disagreeable by being offered to readers as one of the good guys. Corin is the twin brother of the book’s hero, Shasta; both are born princes of Archenland, Narnia’s close ally and neighbor. They were separated in infancy when Shasta was kidnapped, lost in a battle, and then raised by a Calormene fisherman as his son. Even a casual observer can tell Shasta doesn’t belong in his adoptive father’s smelly seaside cottage; a Calormene visitor describes the boy as “fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North.” (That the Calormenes invariably find the light-skinned Narnians beautiful is yet another of this book’s unsavory motifs.) Furthermore, Shasta harbors an instinctive fascination with the north, a yearning that Bree, the talking horse who escapes with him, believes comes from “the blood that’s in you. I’m sure you’re true northern stock.” Much later, when Shasta finds his way to Archenland, a northern lord remarks, “The boy has a true horseman’s seat, Sire. I’ll warrant there’s noble blood in him.”
Blood will out, and some blood is finer than others: these are persistent ideas in The Horse and His Boy. Shasta is modest, loyal, and likeable, and despite being raised amid Calormene “slaves and tyrants,” he behaves much like the Pevensies and the other children from our world who get to Narnia. He has been reared by the wily and avaricious Arsheesh, yet he has very Pevensian scruples, objecting to a plan that involves “a certain amount of what Shasta called stealing and Bree called ‘raiding.’” He even talks like a British schoolboy: “Oh bother breakfast,” he says after waking up saddle-sore on the first morning of his flight north. “Bother everything.” Shasta sometimes expects other people to act with a Calormene ruthlessness (“He had, you see, no idea how noble and free-born people behave”), but his own natural responses always resemble those of the fair-playing, unpretentious Narnian lords he first sees whistling through the streets of Tashbaan.