This early encounter with the cruelties of Britain’s class system helped make Orwell a leftist. Lewis, whose sentimental conservativism was really a flight from serious political thought, clung instinctively to the old ways in spite of all he had endured and resented under their dominion. Although he hated Malvern, in later years he would fret about excessive taxation, worrying that it might prevent middle-class Britons from sending their boys to similar schools. In the Chronicles, this makes for a contradictory attitude toward “school,” which Lewis usually depicts as a character-warping oppression. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter and Lucy attribute Edmund’s nastiness to “that horrid school, which was where he had begun to go wrong,” and one of the many good works the Pevensies perform after they become kings and queens of Narnia is to make sure “young dwarfs and young satyrs” aren’t sent to school. Human beings aren’t so lucky; the downside to the discovery of Shasta’s true identity as a prince of Archenland, he explains to Aravis, is that now “education and all sort of horrible things are going to happen to me.”
This is a strange attitude in a man so devoted to books and learning. Lewis, it seems, had ruled out the possibility that school could ever be enjoyable, or even agreeable. His mistrust of anything labeled “progress” set him against the notion that schools could be improved or reformed; do-gooders would only make them worse. In The Silver Chair, Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole attend a coeducational academy called Experiment House, derided by the narrator as “what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.” (Nowhere does Lewis sound more like the crusty, reactionary old colonel in an Agatha Christie country-house whodunit than he does in that aside.) At Experiment House, the smaller children are tormented by a gang of fellow students known only as “Them.”
We are informed that “horrid things” in the line of cliques and bullying are allowed to flourish at Experiment House, abuses that “at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped in half a term.” It’s hard to imagine what could be worse than the goings-on permitted at an “ordinary” school like Malvern — de facto slavery in the form of the fag system, catamites, sanctioned beatings. But whatever the horrid things perpetrated at Experiment House, the school’s authorities merely indulge the culprits, drawing them out in long chats and treating them as “interesting psychological cases.” Further signs of the school’s deficiency include the fact that Bibles are “not encouraged” and the “Head” (headmaster, or principal) is a woman.
The swamp of misguided progressivism that is Experiment House can only be drained with the help of Aslan, who at the end of The Silver Chair sends Jill, Eustace, and (briefly) Caspian back into our world with orders to thrash some of the worst bullies. Jill beats them with a switch, and Caspian and Eustace with the sides of their swords, raising a ruckus and driving the Head to hysterics. (Later, we’re informed with uncharacteristically leaden wit that this individual will rise to a station more commensurate with her incompetence: a seat in Parliament.) The scene appalls Goldthwaite. All Christians, he maintains, are bound to honor the ideal of pacifism, even if they can’t always strictly abide by it. “I cannot imagine,” he writes, “a betrayal of one’s faith more complete than this last picture of Christ at the playground, putting weapons into the hands of children.”
Any child who has ever been bullied relishes scenarios in which schoolyard tyrants get their comeuppance; revenge is an ancient and satisfying narrative theme. It’s not, however, a particularly Christian one, and the beating delivered in the coda of The Silver Chair does seem gratuitous. It traffics in the sort of self-righteousness that Lewis usually makes a point of condemning elsewhere. Couldn’t Aslan have simply appeared before the bullies and terrified them into virtue with a single glance — he is God, after all — without asking our heroes to wallop a bunch of unarmed kids? Is hitting people really the best way to reform them? I suspect Lewis himself sensed how dicey the scene is; he becomes euphemistic when describing the thrashing itself, using the word “ply” instead of “beat” or “whip.” The whole episode has an air of bad faith and self-indulgence. Lewis gets the satisfaction of imagining his old enemies, the bloods, being scourged, but he excuses the tradition that gave them the power to persecute him in the first place. In this looking-glass world, progress and reform, not the hallowed institution of “bloodery,” have enabled sadists to run amok.
Throughout the Chronicles, Lewis will often play an imaginative sorting game, hoarding everything good and admirable on the side of what’s familiar while pushing all vices toward what’s not. The Calormenes, the foreigners to the south, are given all the shameful excesses of civilization, and the Narnians in the north get to keep all the justice and virtue. Both nations have hereditary monarchies, but Calormen is ruled by tyrants while Narnia’s kings are born noble and true. The hierarchy of Calormen is manifestly unfair, permitting spoiled aristocrats to push everyone else around, while the social ladder of Narnia consists of everybody knowing his place and feeling perfectly comfortable in it.
As the German psychologist Bruno Bettelheim pointed out in his most celebrated book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, such dichotomies are typical of traditional fairy tales. Bettelheim argued that the wicked stepmother figures in stories like Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella serve as stand-ins for troubling aspects of a child’s real mother. “Although Mother is most often the all-giving protector,” Bettelheim writes, “she can change into the cruel stepmother if she is so evil as to deny the child something he wants. Far from being a device used only in fairy tales, such a splitting up of one person into two to keep the good image uncontaminated occurs to many children as a solution to a relationship too difficult to manage or comprehend.”
When Lewis wrote “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” in 1956, he surely didn’t have this particular use of enchantment in mind. He would have hated Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis of the tales he loved so much. Nevertheless, in light of The Uses of Enchantment, it’s hard to ignore how well Calormen serves, unconsciously at least, as a way to “manage” all sorts of difficult relationships and situations. The evils of the British class system could be displaced onto a nation of swarthy foreigners while the romance and poetry of its chivalric past could be kept by the Narnians.
Narnia is an idealized reimagining of a society toward which Lewis felt a deep aesthetic and spiritual affinity, the world of medieval Britain. But Narnia’s government is feudalism without serfs (Narnia has no discernible agriculture), a place where the epitome of civic virtue is to mind your own business unless Narnia itself is being threatened. By making the hereditary kings of Narnia human beings who rule over animals and semihuman creatures, Lewis could preserve a hierarchy that seems perfectly natural. A mole or a dwarf doesn’t mind being relegated at birth to a life of digging the way a human being would, because, of course, they “don’t look on it as work. They like digging.” When the citizens are different species, it’s easier to see caste as merely a matter of “each kind of creature joyfully living out their natural attitudes.” This left Lewis free to savor the romance of Arthurian-style aristocracy without countenancing the kind of underclass (the human kind) that makes any aristocracy viable. No wonder, then, that the half-bred dwarf Doctor Cornelius admonishes Caspian that Narnia “is not the land of men.”