# 9 - Sexism in Narnia

From May 2007.  I might write it differently now, but I still like it, and very much like where the comments went across three essays.  The link in the comments to the essay and discussion at my son's site still works, even though he does not keep that site up anymore.  Those two discussions also led to another post here, Female Characters In Heroic Fantasy, which is part of the whole deal.

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J.K. Rowling has mentioned in an interview that she dislikes how Susan Pevensie is treated in the last of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle. Her reading of the final sections, in which it is revealed that Susan “is no longer a Friend of Narnia,” along with Lucy’s comment that she is “interested in nothing now-a-days except lipstick and nylons and invitations” discovers an unattractive sexism in Lewis’s dismissal of the girl.

“There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.”

When I first read of Susan’s exclusion from Narnia and the wilder lands further up and further in, I thought it harsh myself. I didn’t connect it to any ideas of budding sexuality and embracing of the pubertal experience, though. I attributed her separation to her silliness. Yes, it is certainly the type of silliness common to (some) girls becoming women, and such silliness is tied up in the social and hormonal changes which suffuse the atmosphere in those years. Yet it is clear from the immediate context that sex and womanhood are not her problem.

Lewis considers silliness a serious problem. Playfulness, humor, joy, and celebration he is much in favor of; silliness, in this sense of disparaging the important and embracing the frivolous, goes near the heart of what Lewis sees as mankind’s separation from God. Not until I read the further works of Lewis (especially God In The Dock, and The Great Divorce) did this come clear to me.

This has been part of a more general claim of sexism in the C of N. But for some reason this section about Susan gets mentioned most often. It seems to rankle. We'll see why in a bit.

This accusation of sexism is more than a little odd. Had these books been written in the last few years, a wise editor would have taken care to make the boys and girls equal in so many ways, and not breathe a whisper that a girl could be less able than a boy in anything. By those lights, there are a few – a very few – sections in the Chronicles which raise the eyebrow today: a male character’s claim that girls aren’t good with maps, for example. It is also true that girls are kept out of combat – as we still do today.

Lewis’s female characters stand out dramatically against the girls of previous children’s literature. There were books for girls and books for boys in that era, and the girls in the boy books didn’t have much in the way of adventures. We all remember how the courageous Becky Thatcher set off down the Mississippi on a raft… oh no wait, that was Huck. The King Arthur stories had Guenivere who slew, er, nothing actually; and Robin Hood had Maid Marian, who conquered…who conquered…

The Wind In The Willows, The Prince and The Pauper, and all those Kipling and EM Forster books were just chockablock full of…of boys having adventures. If you wanted to read about girls having adventures, you had to read girl books: Heidi, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew, The Secret Garden. And who could forget the many quests, exotic travels, physical dangers, and battles from those books?

Lewis’s females have few parallels in books meant to be read by both sexes. Notably, Lewis does this in a time when it was not considered necessary to make the boys and girls equal in all books. He just does it. Because he believes it. One of the grander adventures for a girl in a story before that time was Wendy's in Peter Pan. She spends her time being the mother and getting captured.

But Lucy, Susan, Jill, Polly, and Aravis all have real dangers which they have to get themselves out of. Their actions are central, not secondary, to plot development. They hunt, ride, sail, and endure hardship. Even Rowling’s series has only Hermione as representative of young girls having adventures – unless you count being a chaser at Quidditch. The others are involved in going to school and having crushes.

And here we come to the subtext of Rowling’s complaint. Female authors have scattered girl-coming-of-age books across the landscape for several decades. These are regarded as sacred, by the authors at least, and presumably some of their audience. Not only has Lewis not written that type of young-womanhood narrative, he has insulted it. He has profaned sacred ground with his muddy masculine boots. When his girls come of age they become competent adults. Joanne Rowling can read as well as I can, and note that it was not Susan’s lipstick but her betrayal that casts her into the outer darkness. Susan denies Narnia exists, denies what she knows to be true. Worse, she sneers at the others as if she is the older and wiser one. It is not lipstick, but her nothing but lipstick, and nylons, and invitations that do her in.

I think J.K. Rowling is telling us more than she wants about what she thinks is important in a young girl’s life. She has fastened on the issue of sex to celebrate it, and Lewis’s mostly ignoring the issue (in Narnia – sex shows up in his adult books) she regards as an active rejection of her value. I think most of the actual girls reading The Last Battle recognised exactly what Lewis meant about Susan, and several classmates came to mind.