Narnia: Gender Essentialism and Female War Veterans

Narnia Recap: Edmund has slipped out of the Beavers house and has reported to the Witch's home. The other children and the Beavers have realized that they are in grave danger.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Chapter 10: The Spell Begins to Break

Earlier this year, I read a wonderful book called "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" which is sort of a half-personal, half-serious account of one woman's struggles with gendered toys while trying to raise her daughter to be strong, independent, and happy. I enjoyed the book immensely, and I recommend it highly. Today's post is also about gender essentialism and gendered toys and gender assumptions and a lot of other gendery things in the Chronicles of Narnia. And so I want to make some disclaimers first.

I know from internet experience that it is sometimes hard to parse the difference between "this passage is gender essentialist and gender essentialism is bad" and "this passage is gender essentialist and therefore the author is bad". I'm also aware that any time any piece of literature written before [insert current year] is criticized for having gender essentialist passages, someone pops up to helpfully point out that the author can't possibly be at fault because the author was born before [insert current year] and therefore was a product of a sexist society and unable to form alternate opinions. I'm sympathetic to this view, to a point, although I realize my hilarious tongue-in-cheek description sounds like I'm not. So I want to completely, 100% clarify going in that this is not meant to be a "C.S. Lewis sucks!" post, so much as a "gosh, gender essentialism sure is invasive and damaging and we're all highly susceptible to it" post.

So, with that in mind, let's talk about the Beavers.

   NOW WE MUST GO BACK TO MR. AND Mrs. Beaver and the three other children. As soon as Mr. Beaver said, "There's no time to lose," everyone began bundling themselves into coats, except Mrs. Beaver, who started picking up sacks and laying them on the table and said: "Now, Mr. Beaver, just reach down that ham. And here's a packet of tea, and there's sugar, and some matches. And if someone will get two or three loaves out of the crock over there in the corner."
   "What are you doing, Mrs. Beaver?" exclaimed Susan.
   "Packing a load for each of us, dearie," said Mrs. Beaver very coolly. "You didn't think we'd set out on a journey with nothing to eat, did you?" [...] "Get along with you all," said his wife. "Think it over, Mr. Beaver. She can't be here for quarter of an hour at least."

Now, I like sensible fantasy characters. One of the reasons I fell head-over-heels for the "His Dark Materials" trilogy was the fact that the adults were sensible, logical, and actually involved the children in key discussions with the belief that, yeah, it's a shame to ruin childhood innocence with ugly facts but when there's a very good chance their lives will depend on this information, it's up to an adult to get over the "innocent child" fantasy and start educating them. How refreshingly novel in a YA book!

So I want to like Mrs. Beaver. She's packing food and not just helping everyone run around like a chicken with their head cut off. How can I not like that? The problem is that I still somewhat feel like Mr. Beaver and Mrs. Beaver are not thoroughly characterized characters, and I additionally feel that a lot of their characterization is either heavily gendered or just a little too whimsical.

Part of the problem, of course, is Mrs. Beaver's insistence that she knows the future. Mrs. Beaver's precise predictions rub me up the wrong way entirely, from her "not if I know her" predictions of the behavior of a woman she most definitely does not know, apparently has never met, and knows precious little about, to her now perfect timing of how long it will take the Witch and the Secret Police to get to their house, considering that no one even knows precisely when Edmund left the house. But no, it'll take at least another 15 minutes for the Witch to get there, because Mrs. Beaver says so. Never mind that packing up five bundles of food, drink, and clothing would likely take more than 15 minutes plus the fact that you're shaving things pretty close even with a full 15 minute lead. 

Beyond the issue of Mrs. Beaver's self-insisted clairvoyance is the feeling that this reinforces the Sensible Working Class vibe that I get from the Beavers. Mrs. Beaver's sense strikes me as almost sense for the sake of sense, rather than being meaningful in itself. By which I mean that it might well make sense to take stock of things prior to rushing off into the snow with the Secret Police after you, but... the Stone Table isn't exactly miles and miles away. The whole party will make it there in less than 24-hours time, and that's at a leisurely stroll (and Susan gets a blister). In which case, maybe they don't need five full bundles of food, drink, and extra socks. "Sense" should serve a meaningful end, otherwise it's just a compulsion.

   "Well, I'm nearly ready now," answered Mrs. Beaver at last, allowing her husband to help her into her snow-boots. "I suppose the sewing machine's too heavy to bring?"
   "Yes. It is," said Mr. Beaver. "A great deal too heavy. And you don't think you'll be able to use it while we're on the run, I suppose?"
   "I can't abide the thought of that Witch fiddling with it," said Mrs. Beaver, "and breaking it or stealing it, as likely as not."

Then there's the gender and characterization issues packed into Mrs. Beaver Against The World. I do not consider it a coincidence that it's the woman of the group that "sensibly" insists on both the bare necessities for travel and the little luxuries in the same breath. And this is the crux: Mrs. Beaver isn't sensible at all. She's emotionally attached to her sewing machine, to the point where she wants to drag it all over the countryside with her rather than let the Witch "fiddle" with it. (This also, of course, illustrates that Mrs. Beaver doesn't know what Jadis is going to do; Jadis will bypass the Beavers' house entirely and head straight to the Stone Tablet -- the sewing machine is safe from witchly fiddling, albeit probably not from wolfy destruction.)

She is so attached to her possessions, that she will actually risk everything -- their lives, the lives of the children, and the future of Narnia -- on her material possessions. She's a silly-sensible woman, a character locked into a very strict pattern of "sensible" behavior, a person who would not be out of place in a satirical etiquette novel a la Jane Austen.

Now maybe this is realistic. There are lots of people in the Real World who allow their love of their possessions to muddle their priorities and put them in prolonged danger. Maybe there's nothing going on here at all except a quick little piece of characterization. Maybe I'm being Too Sensitive to see this as a gendered problem, or this silly-sensible characterization as something that afflicts female characters more often than males.

And yet... why is the sewing machine even here? To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first and last mention of anything so technologically advanced in Narnia. The sewing machine adds nothing whatsoever to the overall plot, does not well-characterize the characters, and creates far more confusion than it alleviates: where is it from, what is it for, how is it maintained and serviced, how can the Beavers afford it, and why will we never see its like again? I truly believe that the only reason the sewing machine exists, the only reason it was allowed to be in the story in spite of all the world-building problems it causes, is as a quick short-hand for Mrs. Beaver's personality.

Mrs. Beaver owns a sewing machine: she is hard-working and industrious. Mrs. Beaver prioritizes her sewing machine over her own safety: she is silly and cannot see the bigger picture. Mrs. Beaver will receive a new sewing machine from Father Christmas: she is a simple woman with simple needs.

And this brings up a point: while I do see Mrs. Beaver's characterization to be a gendered problem, I also fully concede that Mr. Beaver doesn't get much better treatment. He is defined with broad brush-strokes as being a working male proud of his hand-built home, he will receive his home back from Father Christmas as his present, and he too will exhibit a rather silly reluctance to see the bigger picture:

   And so at last they all got outside and Mr. Beaver locked the door ("It'll delay her a bit," he said) and they set off, all carrying their loads over their shoulders.

No, I really don't think it will, Mr. Beaver. Jadis doesn't strike me as the type that uses doorknobs.

I do think that much of Mr. Beaver's characterization is limited to male stereotypes (he works hard outside the home, he brings home the food, he builds the exterior of the living area) where Mrs. Beaver's characterization is limited to female stereotypes (she works hard inside the home, she cooks the food, she cozifies the interior of the living area). These aren't, perhaps, bad ways to characterize characters, but it's something to think about as we tackle gender assumptions within the series.

   "It's an old hiding-place for beavers in bad times," said Mr. Beaver, "and a great secret. It's not much of a place but we must get a few hours' sleep."
   "If you hadn't all been in such a plaguey fuss when we were starting, I'd have brought some pillows," said Mrs. Beaver.
   It wasn't nearly such a nice cave as Mr. Tumnus's, Lucy thought -- just a hole in the ground but dry and earthy. It was very small so that when they all lay down they were all a bundle of clothes together, and what with that and being warmed up by their long walk they were really rather snug. If only the floor of the cave had been a little smoother! Then Mrs. Beaver handed round in the dark a little flask out of which everyone drank something -- it made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat, but it also made you feel deliciously warm after you'd swallowed it -- and everyone went straight to sleep.

It's a shame Mrs. Beaver couldn't bring the pillows, but at least she brought the booze!

   It seemed to Lucy only the next minute (though really it was hours and hours later) when she woke up feeling a little cold and dreadfully stiff and thinking how she would like a hot bath. [...] But immediately after that she was very wide awake indeed, and so was everyone else. In fact they were all sitting up with their mouths and eyes wide open listening to a sound which was the very sound they'd all been thinking of (and sometimes imagining they heard) during their walk last night. It was a sound of jingling bells.
   Mr. Beaver was out of the cave like a flash the moment he heard it. Perhaps you think, as Lucy thought for a moment, that this was a very silly thing to do? But it was really a very sensible one. He knew he could scramble to the top of the bank among bushes and brambles without being seen; and he wanted above all things to see which way the Witch's sledge went. [...] Great was their surprise when a little later, they heard Mr. Beaver's voice calling to them from just outside the cave.
   "It's all right," he was shouting. "Come out, Mrs. Beaver. Come out, Sons and Daughters of Adam. It's all right! It isn't Her!" This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia -- in our world they usually don't talk at all.

Despite having an English degree, I'm not much for grammar propriety; I tend to think that the only thing that really matters is the effectiveness of communication. So I had to really chew my lip over this one before I conceded that, yes, "It isn't she" probably would have been more correct, but it seems tortured somehow.  I would feel a bit sorry for Mr. Beaver being called out publicly by the narrator, but instead I'm distracted by the statement that all beavers use bad grammar when they're excited.

   It was a sledge, and it was reindeer with bells on their harness. But they were far bigger than the Witch's reindeer, and they were not white but brown. And on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world -- the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it is rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn't find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

And here is the scene we've all been waiting for. After pages and pages of world-building, Jolly Old Saint Nick has been plunked down into our Eternal Winter Fairy Tale and we get to find out that "always winter, but never Christmas" is actually meant to be read literally and not figuratively. Jadis the White Which has been expending huge stores of magical power in order to keep out a Catholic saint that rides a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer and distributes toys down chimneys as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ who isn't, technically, affiliated with Narnia in any way. At least not under that name.

   "I've come at last," said he. "She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch's magic is weakening."
   And Lucy felt running through her that deep shiver of gladness which you only get if you are being solemn and still.

This is the second time that the narrator has told us about special shivery feelings, and I find it interesting because this one most definitely seems meant to apply to everyone, regardless of their position in or out of Narnia. Instead of a name, the trigger condition here is that of being very solemn and still, and while I have many times in my life been "solemn and still", I can honestly say that a "deep shiver of gladness" has rarely, if ever, accompanied that feeling. Perhaps I'm not doing it right.

I really cannot decide if these Special Feelings are meant to be descriptive of something the author has and does experience or prescriptive as something the child reader should try very hard to experience. 

   "And now," said Father Christmas, "for your presents. There is a new and better sewing machine for you, Mrs. Beaver. I will drop it in your house as I pass." [...] "And as for you, Mr. Beaver, when you get home you will find your dam finished and mended and all the leaks stopped and a new sluice-gate fitted."

And here are some gendered presents for you along with a big dose of disappointment. Mrs. Beaver, you will have a sewing machine to replace the one that has recently (presumably) been wrecked by the Secret Police; Mr. Beaver, your house is now finished, which is good because the Secret Police probably torched it to ashes a few hours ago. Merry Christmas! Now be off with you, there's a good lad and lass.

Mr. and Mrs. Beaver must surely be hoping at this point that the children will remember who got them on the throne when all this is over, or at least they would if they weren't good, honest, grateful working folks. But me, if I was told that my "present" after 100 years of winter was the replacement of what I'd already lost materially in the last 24 hours, I might feel like Saint Nick was stiffing me a bit, given that I'm still in the process of risking my life to get the kids to the Stone Table and clearly Nicky isn't in the mood to offer us a ride there.

   "Peter, Adam's Son," said Father Christmas. [...] "These are your presents," was the answer, "and they are tools not toys. The time to use them is perhaps near at hand. Bear them well." With these words he handed to Peter a shield and a sword. The shield was the color of silver and across it there ramped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it. The hilt of the sword was of gold and it had a sheath and a sword belt and everything it needed, and it was just the right size and weight for Peter to use. Peter was silent and solemn as he received these gifts, for he felt they were a very serious kind of present.
   "Susan, Eve's Daughter," said Father Christmas. "These are for you," and he handed her a bow and a quiver full of arrows and a little ivory horn. "You must use the bow only in great need," he said, "for I do not mean you to fight in the battle. It does not easily miss. And when you put this horn to your lips and blow it, then, wherever you are, I think help of some kind will come to you."

Here's a couple of fun facts: Peter's sword and shield will have a whole scene in a couple of chapters. Susan's bow will never be mentioned again in this book. The horn will be mentioned -- it will, in fact, be used to summon Peter with his sword and shield in tow so he can be a Big Dang Hero and rescue Susan, but the bow? The bow won't see any action in any of the upcoming fight scenes.

Susan will, actually, learn how to use the bow sometime between the final chapters of this book and the starting chapters of Prince Caspian: she'll use her leet archery skills to Prove Her Worth when the kids are dumped back into Narnia. But never is it implied, to the best of my knowledge, that her skills are anything more than the archery a pampered lady might be inclined to learn: target practice and possibly animal hunts, never war. Susan, it should be remembered, followed the rules given to her. She was told not to fight because she was a girl, and as such she was implicitly told to be feminine.

Let's keep going.

   Last of all he said, "Lucy, Eve's Daughter," and Lucy came forward. He gave her a little bottle of what looked like glass (but people said afterward that it was made of diamond) and a small dagger. "In this bottle," he said, "there is a cordial made of the juice of one of the fire-flowers that grow in the mountains of the sun. If you or any of your friends is hurt, a few drops of this will restore them. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle."
   "Why, sir?" said Lucy. "I think -- I don't know -- but I think I could be brave enough."
   "That is not the point," he said. "But battles are ugly when women fight. And now" -- here he suddenly looked less grave -- "here is something for the moment for you all!"

Lucy is the one who rebels. She asks why. She argues politely. She's young enough or plucky enough or perhaps just not beat down enough that she can say This rule? This rule you've just given me? It does not make sense to me. Justify it. Explain it. Prove it.

Why is this scene here, and why are these gifts given? Lucy's dagger won't be used in this book any more than Susan's bow will be -- not even when they have a lion conveniently tied up and needing untying. The girls will pick uselessly at the knots and give up before mice have to come along and do the job for them. Neither of them have a sharp edge on them, it would seem -- apparently they were so afraid of disobeying Saint Nick's injunction that they tossed the sharp Christmas presents (but not the horn or the healing vial, because those are in hand as needed) into a corner of one of the tents and never looked at them again. I think -- I think -- Lucy's dagger will show up briefly in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Maybe.

Mark Twain wrote in 1895 that: "The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it. " Famous Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote in 1911: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Kurt Vonnegut later simplified these philosophies into a single rule: "Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action."

This scene, this giving of Susan the bow and Lucy the dagger, does nothing to advance the plot. The two items will not be used again in this book, and a good case could be made that their use in later books is as sequel hooks only. Removing the items from the book entirely would have caused no damage whatsoever to the tale; the important items -- the horn that might call help (no guarantees from Santa, I note) and the healing liquid -- would still be dispensed. So why are these items here at all?

It is my theory that these items are here entirely to advance the narrator's belief that "battles are ugly when women fight" and that the girls -- Lucy and Susan -- are not to be involved in the battle. This belief is expressed doubly-forcefully; once with the giving of the bow and once with the giving of the dagger. Two chances to express the same opinion, both taken.

Why is this here? C.S. Lewis, it should be noted, fought in World War I. The Narnia books were written and published after World War II and take their time setting from that period. In both wars, both World War I and World War II, women were taking on very visible roles in the war effort, on the front lines as fighters and medics and on the home front in industrial support roles. The world was clearly no longer a patriarchal fantasy where men do all the manly fighting and women stay home and make sammiches. Lewis, as a former soldier, must have known this -- and he must have known that women in the army didn't make the world wars any uglier or worse than any other war in history that might be fantasized as being a "men only" war. And yet, here we have a scene inserted into the book apparently for the sole purpose of sending a message about womens' place in war. Here are some weapons; don't use them.

Battles may have been "ugly" to the narrator when women fought them, but there's a point here that is almost completely missed: battles are particularly "ugly" when children fight them. Edmund, hero of the war and mortally wounded to boot, is nine years old. Peter, who fights and slays Maugrim alone on Aslan's order because Aslan wants Peter to prove how tough he is, is thirteen years old. There's something "ugly" in this picture, but I'm far from convinced that the problem lies in the genitals of the participants.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is, ultimately, a children's fantasy. It's not a treatise on war, and battles will not be taken seriously in any sense of the word. Peter is a child who is forced to fight alone, with a weapon he's never used before, against an experienced and deadly opponent, and he wins handily because fighting is easy like that. Edmund is a smaller child who is mortally wounded and then when his younger sister begs a moment to be sure he recovers, she is berated for not having a stiff upper lip and tending to the other battle wounded... by herself. Because being an eight-year-old battle medic is a perfectly reasonable, non-scarring situation for a child. And two girl-children will be given weapons and then specifically told not to use them -- not because they're too young, but because they were born the wrong gender.

It's an aspect that didn't need to be in the story. It didn't advance the plot or deepen the characters. It wasn't even in-step with the world that the books were set within, a world where women were fighting and dying that very moment to keep the Pevensie children safe while they explored the inside of a magical wardrobe. Saint Nick -- by saying what he says and doing what he does -- disrespects these women, disrespects these heroes, all so he can deliver his sermon on How The World Ought To Be before chucking some food at the children and driving off. He can't be bothered to help fight the war or give the children a ride to Aslan, after all -- he's got presents to deliver. Priorities, people!

   Peter had just drawn his sword out of its sheath and was showing it to Mr. Beaver, when Mrs. Beaver said:
   "Now then, now then! Don't stand talking there till the tea's got cold. Just like men. Come and help to carry the tray down and we'll have breakfast. What a mercy I thought of bringing the bread-knife."

And, of course, Mrs. Beaver brought the bread-knife. That's alright. It's good. It's proper. It's sensible.

But she never, ever would have considered bringing a sword, or even a steak knife. That would have been quite ugly indeed.

316 comments:

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Barry_D said...

"Doesn't do anything about Peter's violent initiation or Lucy's Combat Medic Fun Times, of course, but war in Narnia follows basic movie rules in which wounds are very neat and everyone is remarkably clean - no partially detached limbs or people leaking organs."

Or the healing potion having limited power, so Lucy was given the dagger to give a merciful death to people who've suffered horrible yet slow-killing wounds :(

Barry_D said...

"In the Iliad Paris' weapon was a bow. He was looked down on for it. Of all the reasons to look down on Paris (and there were many) that one never made sense. A bow is a pretty damned important weapon. It's not something to laugh at."

There'd be two reasons - first, bows weren't that good, and the major battle force would be warriors with helmets and large shields. Archers and slingers would be skirmishers, along with unarmored javelin throwers. They'd be second class fighters. Also, those are cheaper weapons, and would mark one as lower class (e.g., general freeman, rather than upper class).

chris the cynic said...

But then you've got things like the story of Philoctetes where to win the war they needed to get the bow of Hercules and the the guy Hercules gave the bow to. Which means Hercules had a bow. Though he probably didn't use it as his primary weapon (which brings up the question of what he did use it for.)

malpollyon said...

My point is that sometimes it seems like authors really REALLY want their characters to do something that the readers will consider morally wrong, so the author writes a setup where everything in the in-text universe is bending over backwards to justify it. This rarely ends well, I think.

It probably ends with John Ringo's "Paladin of Shadows" series (If it goes further I almost certainly don't want to know). They could probably be used to calibrate the maximum reading on your misogyny meter.

Ana Mardoll said...

Didn't Odysseus have a bow so strong that only he could bend it enough to string it properly? And which he used to kill his wife's suitors? And which he...apparently left at home when going off to war? Odd, that.

chris the cynic said...

Yes he did, and somehow it never occurred to me to ask why he didn't bring it to war with him.

Thomas Keyton said...

Is that how you read it? I got from Snape's actions that he didn't trust Voldemort at all to provide any protection but was begging for it from the only two people who could reasonably do so - Voldemort's mercy was essentially his backup plan if Dumbledore failed. (After all, it's not like Albus actually let Snape explain his reasons, choosing instead to, in my opinion, project his disgust at his own behaviour in a similar situation onto Severus). But then, I've been a Snape fan since PoA at least, so my interpretation's hardly unbiased.

chris the cynic said...

Concerning Shindig, my favorite line was "Aye aye, Captain Tightpants." Their entry into the gala possibly the only moment in Firefly that Kaylee got to be more comfortable and in control of a situation than Mal.

It's been a while since I've been around groups of Firefly fans, so this could be wrong, but I believe he is know in the fandom as Captain Tightpants to this day. Kaylee said it and forevermore shall be be known as it.

Redwood Rhiadra said...

Though he probably didn't use it as his primary weapon (which brings up the question of what he did use it for.)

Probably mostly for hunting animals.

depizan said...

Is that the Oh, John Ringo, No! series? The one even the author admits is completely bonkers on multiple levels (including the misogyny, if I remember correctly).

Lurker said...

Just a few thoughts... I have to run off to work in five minutes.
1) "Battles are ugly when women fight" = "Because the enemy soldiers will rape you. Kill yourself before that happens." I've seen that trope in fantasy before and for someone Lucy's age especially, it might make sense.
2) Sewing machines are inconsistently technologically advanced because they only come from Santa, and it's been centuries; Mrs B's was handed down all that time. He left an instruction book on how to maintain it, but no one knows how to make spare parts.

Ana Mardoll said...

Oh, and I should add: The "Susan isn't dead yet" argument hinges on the fact that she may die and get admittance into Heaven and everything will be good again. But one of the Problems of Susan -- for me -- is that, were I her, I wouldn't necessarily want to share Heaven with Aslan.

A Problem of Susan is that she has a legitimate beef with God/Jesus/Aslan/Whatever. The options being presented to her is that she can eschew Heaven entirely and go to Hell, or she can live in a place where everyone praises God/Jesus/Aslan/Whatever all the time for being so awesome. Neither of these options are attractive to me, nor do I think they are fair to Susan.

Kit Whitfield said...

I merely quoted that segment because it was the first response.

i have no objection to you addressing ana - after all, it's her blog - so if you'd done it out of respect to the host i wouldn't object. but if you want to argue that who happened to be online first is a more significant factor than whose entire life has been turned upside down, then i don't think that's a very nice apology.

--

At the end of Last Battle, it's stated by Eustace that Susan's biggest objection to the group is to sitting around and talking about Narnia. Well no freaking wonder!

agreed. you ever sit through one of those christian unions where everyone seems to be playing a game of 'whoever can get the conversation back to the sentence "and that's why we should follow Jesus" in the fewest moves wins'? there's a difference between living by your beliefs and endlessly rehashing them. and in in my experience, in fact, the rehashers tend to be the most judgemental and insular believers; talking about them can become a substitute for living by them.

so why shouldn't susan want to go out and live? if she were living a genuinely wrong life that'd be one thing, but there's really nothing so terrible about wanting to look nice, and nothing at all terrible about going to parties and meeting other human beings. i was under the impression lewis was pretty clubbable himself.

the damnation seems to focus on preferring to live than to rehash. it carries the implication that, outside of Narnia, living cannot be done faithfully. that is a bad, bad implication.

--

"Because the enemy soldiers will rape you. Kill yourself before that happens." I've seen that trope in fantasy before and for someone Lucy's age especially, it might make sense.

in lewis's world?! *sceptical face*

Izzy said...

If there is ANY theme that is emphasized in Every Single One of the Narnia books, it is not that Women Are Scary and Bad, but that the stories, games, and fantasies of children are just as important and worthy of respect as the "grown-up" concerns of adults -- and in some cases, more so.

Right, but then why the "silliest part of her life" comment?

I like these books--okay, the "everyone's dead and the world ends and somehow that's a good thing" bit in TLB never fails to sketch me out in and of itself--so if there is a reading for that which doesn't imply wrongness/stuntedness in enjoying single adulthood (and the associated flirting, dressing up, clubbing, etc) as something other than a phase to get through on the way to Proper Settled Life, I would love to find one. Because so far I haven't; I'm 29 recently, and have no desire to "settle down"; and that passage never fails to grate in a possibly-taking-it-too-personally way.

Ana Mardoll said...

Another problem I have with the Friends of Narnia concept is that it's inherently isolationist. At no point in the "oh, yay, we're dead!" revelation does Peter say "oh, crap, my wife!" nor does Edmund say, "oh, crap, my boyfriend!" Nor do we get to met Howard, Lucy's fiance and Honorary Friend of Narnia. And how could we? Can you imagine this conversation:

Lucy: "Howard, before we get married, I have to tell you something important."

Howard: "Okay!"

Lucy: "When I was eight years old, during the war, I and my siblings visited a magical land where a Lion named Aslan -- did you feel a shiver just now?"

Howard: "Um. No?"

Lucy: "Well, maybe it doesn't work for everyone. Anyway, a Lion named Aslan crowned us kings and queens of a country of talking animals and we grew old and wise until it was our time to return to England as children again."

Howard: "O-- okay."

Lucy: "Only it was real."

Howard: "..."

Lucy: "And the Lion was Jesus."

Howard: "..."

Lucy: "Anyway, the group of us -- my siblings and also a few friends and also an old couple who were there at the creation of the world -- get together regularly, usually once a week, and go over our old adventures. I'd like you to come, only you have to be very clear that everything that happened to us is fact, and you shouldn't discuss it like it was fantasy."

Howard: "..."

Lucy: "Also, until you get to know Peter better, you should probably call him 'High King Peter'."

I mean, I'm exaggerating, but how else can this conversation go? Lucy is asserting things that do not fit with the physical world as Howard knows it. She's asserting things that he may well consider to be blasphemous. And he has to accept this as fact or not be included in a major part of her life.

Susan has to have had this conversation in her mind. She has a choice. (A) Associate with the Friends of Narnia and live in a past that no one will ever understand or accept. (B) Associate with her friends in England and leave Narnia behind her as a part of her childhood. (C) Try to walk a line between the two, where she visits with the Friends of Narnia on the weekends, but keeps these visits a secret to her nearest friends and lovers because otherwise their relationships with her would be damaged.

This isn't a fair or easy choice. Susan shouldn't be ridiculed by the FoN just because she chose a different path.

Alex said...

Maybe someone's already mentioned it in a comment to an earlier post in this series, but I don't see it here, so let me recommend Jo Walton's short story "Relentlessly Mundane." Walton set out to imagine what life back in the real world might be like for three young adults who, as children, lived an epic fantasy adventure in another world, similar to Narnia and its various imitators. They haven't adjusted all that well.

Ana Mardoll said...

I've bookmarked that now, thank you. I definitely think it would be a near-impossible adjustment. It would be easier for me to just cognitively dissonance it all as a dream.

Alex said...

didn't mean they were. i just mean that a woman conditioned to be passive is likely to come out either self-destructive or manipulative an passive-aggressive. s seems to be neither.

That's true in A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, where Sansa is so beaten down by her circumstances that she essentially retreats into a psychological shell and interacts with her surroundings as little as possible. However, in A Feast for Crows, she does show signs of coming into her own as a manipulator -- she sees through a gambit of Littlefinger's that completely fooled several of the great lords of the Vale, including the fairly canny Bronze Yohn Royce. I suspect, in the end, she may be Littlefinger's undoing -- she's the one person with reason to hate him (once she figures out how he betrayed her father, and I think she will figure that out) whom he doesn't see as a threat, and may thus be the one person who can get close enough to slip a knife into his back or poison in his wine. I haven't read A Dance with Dragons yet, so I don't know if Sansa reappears in it, but I expect we'll see her develop into less of a pawn and more a player in the game of thrones in The Winds of Winter.

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

Another point is the fact that the Pevensie parents are killed, too. Logically, they would be much more needed by Susan (who now has nobody of her relatives) than by the others (who have each other, along with their Narnia friends). They< also have no connection to Narnia, but the "Good" Pevesies are happier with parents, so they are with them.
Neil Gaiman, in his "The Problem of Susan", DID explore how it is, to be suddenly left alone in the world, with no backup and no standing. Susan's life is not going to be easy by any standards. And all this just because she believed that Narnia was a closed chapter and moved on. Once again, Lewis shows very little compassion to Susan.

Alex said...

Yep, and about that: if there were a huge selection of female action heroes of all varieties, everybody could pick whichever they liked best. And by female action hero, I do not necessarily mean someone who glams around in skin-tight black leather 'ninjing' all over the place. I really wish there were a range of women who were (a) not scantily-clad, (b) not characterized by their area of expertise, and (c) not the only woman to appear in the whole damn movie!

If the Honor Harrington movie manages to proceed from an option on the books to one or more actual films, and if they're at all faithful to the novels, you should at least get (a) and (c) from them. As to (b), the fact that most of the major characters are officers and crew on a warship means that all of them, of either sex, are characterized to a large degree by his or her area of expertise -- the characters' roles in the plot are things like "Captain," "Chief Engineer," "Tactical Officer," "Astrogator," etc.

The first book alone gives us Commander Honor Harrington, CO of H.M.S. Fearless, of course; along with Dame Estelle Matsuko, the smart, capable political administrator of the colony planet Basilisk; Chief Petty Officer Sally McBride, Fearless' senior non-com; Lieutenant Mercedes Brigham, her Sailing Master (navigator); Surgeon Lieutenant Lois Suchon, a barely competent coward (after all, making all female characters heroic, and only letting the male ones vary in their personalities and roles in the story, isn't much less sexist than any other form of stereotyping); and Lieutenant Commander Dominica Santos, the chief engineer who comes up with innovative technological solutions to several of the difficulties inherent in trying to garrison an entire star system with a single ship, and dies saving that ship from destruction in the book's climactic battle. Any adaptation that shares more than its title with any of the HH novels will easily ace the Bechdel Test.

Pthalo said...

(the tilting of the poles is separate from the tidal locking -- didn't mean to imply that tidal locking implies that degree of tilt. What I meant was "those two factors working together produce the effect of")

Pthalo said...

(and the black pole is dark, but it's not dark like night on earth. it's a twilight sort of dark. but no sparkly vampires.)

Rowen said...

Ana,

I've NEVER thought about Susan that way. And I have to say that totally ROCKED my world. I think it's an incredible way to look at the "problem" of Susan. I'm going to have to go ponder things now.

Gelliebean said...

Alex - thanks for the head's up! I think some of the Honor Harrington books are ones I pulled from Baen's free ebook library last week, so now I'm definitely looking forward to reading them.

Alex said...

I find the whole discussion of Tyrion fascinating. Apparently he's a fan favorite because while he *did* technically brutalize a woman (his wife?!) in a 50+ rape pile-on, it's not his *fault* because his father "made" him do it. ("Made" in scare quotes because I don't fully understand the nature of the making.)

The threats his father could have made toward Tyrion himself to force him to obey the command to rape Tysha would have been fairly intimidating (severe beating, at a minimum), but I think the clincher would have been that, had Tyrion refused, Tywin would have had Tysha killed in front him, probably in some slow, excruciating, hideous fashion such as drawing and quartering. This isn't explicit in the text, but it is implicit in the character of Tywin Lannister and his relationship with Tyrion. In that scenario, Tyrion was a victim as well. That's not that he suffered as much as Tysha did, but he had no more choice than she did; Tywin himself was the true rapist, even though he never touched her.

Note that I'm only answering the question inherent in your scare quotes and explanation thereof, not defending Martin for setting up the situation in the first place; that's a separate discussion, with which I'm disinclined to engage at the moment.

chris the cynic said...

Pthalo, thank you so much for sharing as much as you do. I'm not sure if I'll ever really understand but I want to and you've certainly brought me closer than I'd ever be without you. So, again, thank you.

Alex said...

Yes, all the HH books can be read online or downloaded at http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ (go to the Mission of Honor CD content). The series includes twelve novels (so far) in the main sequence, four anthologies of short stories set in the same universe by Weber and several other authors, and the first two books in each of two new side-series, “Honor Harrington Universe” and “Saganami Island,” which are interwoven with the primary narrative. The best order in which to read them is as follows (I wrote this down a while ago when recommending the series to other friends):

HH1. On Basilisk Station
HH2. The Honor of the Queen
HH3. The Short Victorious War
HH4. Field of Dishonor
HH5. Flag in Exile
HH6. Honor Among Enemies
HHA1. More Than Honor (specifically, the story “A Whiff of Grapeshot,” which sets up certain changes in the People’s Republic of Haven in In Enemy Hands)
HHA2. Worlds of Honor (most of the stories actually take place years, decades, or centuries before the primary story-line, but establish background about the treecats which becomes important in In Enemy Hands)
HH7. In Enemy Hands
HH8. Echoes of Honor
HH9. Ashes of Victory
HHA3. Changer of Worlds (title story contains spoilers for In Enemy Hands, “Nightfall” contains spoilers for Ashes of Victory, and “From the Highlands” and “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington” establish characters who then appear, with minimal explanation, in War of Honor)
HH10. War of Honor
HHA4. The Service of the Sword (“Promised Land,” “Fanatic,” and the title story together set up the plot and characters of Crown of Slaves)
HHU1. Crown of Slaves (takes place parallel to War of Honor)
SI1: The Shadow of Saganami (parallel to At All Costs, but in a narrower time-frame — At All Costs contains spoilers for The Shadow of Saganami, not vice versa)
HH11. At All Costs
SI2. Storm from the Shadows
HHU2. Torch of Freedom
HH12. Mission of Honor

Izzy said...

Well, everybody *will* die and the world *will* end. It is neither good nor bad.

I don't know about the not-badness of the world ending. I like the world.

As far as people dying...well, I'm not thrilled about that either, but I can incorporate it okay most of the time depending on how close to "their time" it is. I was okay with Caspian's death in Silver Chair, and I think I'd have been okay with Diggory and Polly showing up as actually-dead-now people, but...the kids? All of them? Eeesh. They've still got lives ahead of them, and all that.

However, if you’re writing books for children in the immediate aftermath of many of them experiencing the sudden death of many family members, and the end of their world, I don’t have any particular problem with the message that “death is not the end, it is the doorway to someplace better, we will be reunited with those we love, no good thing is ever really destroyed”.

That's a good point: I was coming at it from a very different perspective, there, than either Lewis or most of his early readers.

Well, if you are serious about saying that you’d like to find another interpretation, try this:

Say that an acquaintance invites me to go to a party, or go out drinking, or whatever on Saturday night. And say that I respond, “Sorry, but I have to get up early if I’m going to get to church on Sunday morning.” And that person responds, “Oh REALLY? You still believe in that Invisible Sky Daddy nonsense? Why don’t you just grow up already?” (Why yes, this has happened to me, more than once, in just about those words.)

Now let’s say this rude person is *young enough to be my granddaughter*. I imagine I might be even more snippy than Miss Polly about that person’s understanding of maturity – or the lack of it – myself.


So "silliest part of life" is less parties and drinking than hostile skepticism and mistaking rudeness for honesty? I could get behind that, as a reading: certainly corresponds to some of the people I remember, or know myself. (Oh, Holden Caufield. You have so much to answer for. ) And it certainly makes me prickle less. Thank you!

Ana Mardoll said...

Re: Susan, as you say, we have no evidence for her behavior or attitude since she's not given a voice in the book. She's barely given a voice in her debut book! But we do know she loved Narnia enough to embrace lovers, so from that I do infer trauma over leaving.

In which case, even if she has been rude, I expect more understanding from the group than she receives. Some will see that as the FoN being realistically flawed; I see it as them being jerks. *shrug* My family can be more polite than that (and we're far from saints).

Re: Heaven/Hell, I understand the text to mean there is only one heaven for all words, so there is no alternative to heaven (no Charn afterlife) than hell. I'm using the term hell to refer to the absence of god, which I believe is one of its fundamental meanings.

If Susan must choose between being in god's presence with her family and being away from god without her family, this strikes me as unfair to Susan.

Re: Aslan, I see no reason for Susan to make up with Aslan, given that he does not apologize or even feel he is wrong for what he's done to her.

I do see Aslan as abusive within the text. This does not mean I see Jesus as abusive so much as I think cramming Jesus into an analogy didn't work here. But my reasons for thinking Aslan is abusive will largely come out later in later books.

Izzy said...

In which case, even if she has been rude, I expect more understanding from the group than she receives. Some will see that as the FoN being realistically flawed; I see it as them being jerks.

Well, in all honesty, I might not be more understanding at that point either: I'm frequently the harsh girl pointing out that Your Trauma is Not My Problem and that your angsty backstory does not give you license to be a pain in my ass. Someone who was making snippy comments about something that meant a great deal to me probably *would* get the "....annnnd you can fuck right off and die, Skippy," treatment, regardless of their problems, because they're an adult and I am not their therapist. (Even if it was my sister making those comments; at times in my life, *particularly* if it was my sister making those comments. Heh.)

So in that particular respect, yeah, I I'd sympathize with the FoN.

Kit Whitfield said...

i guess it's indicative that lewis feels a lot kinder if you're a christian yourself. that's really part of my problem with him: he feels like someone who can be very nice to people he considers to be the Right Sort, but who's callous with others because he doesn't trouble to understand them or be fair to them.

there are christians who don't seem that way. fred clark comes to mind, for instance, or walter wink, or lots of the people who tip up in daniel radosh's rapture ready - or you yourself, hapax. but i find lewis careless, at the very least, about those he sees as outsiders, and that's a fault that weighs heavily with me. you know the saying that if a man is nice to you but mean to the waiter he's not a nice person? that's kind of how lewis comes across to me: full of warmth within a limited circle but ice without.

put it this way: damning a major character in a story like this is a big deal. if you're compassionate and respectful, you should take a lot more care than lewis took in how you present it. at best, it's very open to misinterpretation, and there are some things you should say carefully to minimise the chances of that happening. carelessness about dismissing the soul of a character, especially for these reasons, suggests carelessness in areas where care is a major duty.

Ana Mardoll said...

regardless of their problems, because they're an adult and I am not their therapist.

An interesting choice of words, because if Susan does actually deny that Narnia occurred and if she does avoid people who insist otherwise, that advice may well have COME from a therapist.

Then again, my probably-not-textual impression of the FoN is that there is no middle ground, no filters, and no trigger warnings. I somehow don't see Susan as being offered a safe ground with her family -- I imagine that if High King Peter feels the need to say "wow, this Thanksgiving turkey is as good as the one we had at Cair Paravel during the eight year of our reign!", then he says so and doesn't give a toss about whether his words hurt his sister (or if those words make Howard-the-Fiance uncomfortable). I do imagine Peter as something of a "don't you censor me, sis" kind of guy, just because he seems to be that way in the books as a child and I've no reason to believe that being a High King would work that out of him. Most kings aren't into self-censorship, from my own readings.

As for people dealing with this all the time, well... I'm skeptical. It's one thing to say "Howard, I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and I want you to respect my beliefs" and another thing to say "Howard, I have literally touched the leonine version of Jesus Christ and I want you to behave as though that is true." The former is a case where Lucy is asserting a belief; the latter is a case where Lucy is asserting a fact. But perhaps that is just my perspective from a household that isn't religiously homogeneous.

Izzy said...

Quite possibly, yeah--although I'm not sure what the quality of therapy was like in the 1950s.

Part of the problem is that we don't really get a neutral description of adult!Pvensies or Susan, or see them interacting with anyone outside Narnia. Going from text--from what I remember of TLB--it's possible that either of them could be the reasonable party: there's no way of knowing whether Peter's attitude is the equivalent of "I'd like to be able to mention going to church without getting three pages of Marx on religion, gaaaah" or Susan's is "okay, I hadn't accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior three days ago, NOW STOP ASKING". Either could be true.

The Lucy/Howard thing doesn't seem as weird to me, because...well, I don't see why she couldn't just not tell him, or say "hey, this is a meeting about something that happened when we were kids" and leave out the details or whatever. I don't tell most of the people close to me about my mystical experiences, and it doesn't feel like a giant barrier: the way I grew up, there were just some things you didn't talk about much, even with your loved ones, and religion was one of them.

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't date an atheist again--while sharing a particular experience isn't important to me, sharing the possibility is, if that makes any sense--so maybe it would be an issue. Still, my first reaction to the Howard scenario was "Just tell him it's a spiritual thing and don't explain more unless he asks".

Ana Mardoll said...

For me, the Lucy/Howard thing sticks out at me not because of the hypotheticals, but rather the realities. Wait, that sounded weird, let me back up. The LWW and LB endings mirror each other in some ways. The Pevensies leave their world (Narnia, then England) and are effectively "dead" in the world they left behind.

Lewis seems not to have considered what that means, but the fact is that either the adult Pevensies had NO serious friends or relationships OR they did, but they coped with the loss of their best friends, war buddies, and sexual partners with remarkable aplomb.

So, as point of fact in the text, Howard does not seem to exist. In both the Narnia world AND the England world, Susan seems to be the Pevensie with the most active life outside of their group -- she nearly marries in Narnia, and she has parties and clubs in England. Lucy and Peter and Edmund never mention a single person they've left behind in the sense of "how will Howard get on without me" or "how will Anna manage with the kids".

So it's not interesting to me that Howard could/couldn't exist so much as that he DOESN'T exist. Lucy doesn't get engaged. Peter doesn't settle down with a nice woman and 2.5 children. Edmund doesn't find a meaningful relationship with someone in England. Why?

My thoughts are that either:

a) Narnia is so much a part of their selves that they can't marry someone who didn't experience it. You can have a Professor/Polly ship and a Eustace/Jill ship, but the Pevensies can't find Narnian mates outside their family.

b) Narnia has so damaged them that they can't form a relationship with someone who won't be let into it. In other words, Peter knows/hopes he might be yanked back at any time and can't bring himself to put down roots in the meantime. Indeed, he DOES manage to drop everything to go ride off with the rings on the ill-fated train, so he apparently didn't have any pressing ball games to attend that week.

c) Narnia has nothing to do with their single status and Lucy/Peter/Edmund are simply asexual and/or unlucky in love, or whatever.

I actually have no problem with dating atheists, as long as their non-belief isn't presented as *fact*. In the same way, I'd have no problem dating religionists, as long as their belief isn't presented as *fact*. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, it's just not my thing. I've been turned off of relationships with other Wiccans and Pagans for being very forceful about their beliefs, as well.*

* Boy howdy, have I ever. I distinctly remember a conversation with a pagan who had seen a different deity appear at a wedding than the one the couple had invoked and was VERY smug and irksome about the fact that "no one else noticed".

Ana Mardoll said...

I think it boils back into the GRRM discussion and what Kit said about the author's choices mattering.

Susan isn't a real person whose behavior is being neutrally reported on. She's a character. The author chose to write a character who (a) spent a significant portion of her life (10-20 years? We honestly don't know.) in a fantasy world and then -- according to another character -- (b) turned around and denied that happened.

Why was this written? Is it to make a point about lipsticks and nylons being anathema to a godly life? Is it to make a point about "growing up" being important (a muddy point indeed, considering that Susan can be seen as trying to put childish things away and move on with her life)?

Is Susan a Liar/Lunatic/Lord situation? We know she's not telling the truth regarding the reality of Narnia, so *why does she say it*? Does she believe it wasn't real? That seems like quite a leap, to believe that 10-20 years of your life weren't real, but I can imagine why she might think that since what she experienced was impossible. Does she want it to not be real? That implies -- to me -- a serious level of hurt and psychological pain that is being shoved aside.

We don't know why Susan doesn't want to acknowledge the reality of Narnia. We don't know why Lewis put this scene in here at all. We don't know why Susan gets 19% of the Pevensie dialog to Silent Edmund's 21% in LWW. But we do know that the author isn't a neutral party reporting the facts -- the author is the creator who shapes these facts.

So I think the Problem of Susan ultimately boils down to something perhaps a little more meta: Why was she written to not be a FoN? Why is she written to deny the very existence of Narnia as a childhood game? Why is she written to deny what she must know to be true to people who also know it to be true? These are, I think, valid questions. :)

Of course, given that the author is dead, we can't know the answers -- we can only speculate. I think there's not one "right" answer. :)

chris the cynic said...

Prince Caspian is on TV now, never seen it before, might not watch much of it now. (I've got other stuff that needs doing.) Definitely played up that Susan was traumatized by making a life in Narnia, losing it, finally getting used to England again, and being yanked back into Narnia in one of the few scenes I've seen so far. (Right before Lucy goes to sleep and has a vision of Aslan.)

-

Anyway, I've never read the book in question, so I have very, very little to contribute.

I don't particularly like Peter in what we've gone through of LWW, what I remember of it, or even what little I've seen of PC today. Which is why I was surprised, so very very surprised, when I read what Pthalo contributed and found myself really liking Peter.

I don't know a way read his dialog there that doesn't translate to, "Stop insulting Susan! Can we talk about the damned fruit instead?" It's not what a hero would do. A hero would defend Susan, but after dealing with Buck Williams and Edward Cullen and the Beavers who refuse to tell you when your brother is possessed, Peter's insistence that they stop putting Susan down was a refreshing change.

Of course the fact that I don't have context might mean that I'm missing something and Peter really is being a jerk but he just thinks that insulting Susan should be reserved for the designated Susan insulting time. I don't know, but from the quoted text it really reads to me like Peter is down about Susan not being there and not willing to listen to people badmouth any more. Of course, a better friend would have said something before the others made it to, "the silliest time of one's life."

Ana Mardoll said...

"Peter Pevensie! Not nearly as bad as Edward Cullen! Remember: Vote Peter, this Tuesday."

Paid for by the committee to re-elect High King Peter.

In other news, supposedly this thread is at 258 comments which SHOULD mean another Disqus thread, but... I'm just getting the "Load More" box again. So...yay?

Ana Mardoll said...

And to riff on that -- because I'm all about the double post -- no one is sure how much significance to attach to the fact that Lucy & Edmund don't contribute to this conversation.

Do they have a different opinion of Susan? Are they uncomfortable with the Eustace / Jill / Polly pile-on?

Is there a more meta reason? Polly was last seen in Book 6 and Jill is an actor in Book 7. They are the most recently used female characters, and the ones whose voices the author may have felt most recently comfortable with.

Then there's the fact that Lucy was openly jealous of Susan in Book 3, and Edmund -- for all his redemption -- had issues with "mother Susan" telling him what to do in Book 1 (and, I think, Book 2 but I can't recall a specific incident off my head). Would criticism from these two be less valid than criticism from objective strangers Jill and Polly?

Or is this a "we don't talk bad about family" thing where Peter / Edmund / Lucy are upset with Susan but it wouldn't be classy to vocalize it?

Truly, it's a very confusing scene that can be interpreted a number of ways. If Lewis was trying to make a specific point, he seems to have failed badly, since the scene comes across as very ambiguous and it rather famously bothers a lot of people, myself included.

hapax said...

I'll be honest, I'm kind of depressed that my long Susan rant ended up at the 250 "load more" point.

It's not that I disavow anything I said there -- I have my opinions about why Lewis felt it important to include a character who was essentially an apostate, but they are highly speculative, possibly unfair, and the poor man's dead, so it will never be satisfactorily resolved -- but it isn't something I feel THAT strongly about. (Well, except when I'm in a very cranky "Someone on the Internet is Wrong!" type mood).

I'm just now haunted by the image of "hapax, Susan-hater" being the first thing that pops up on a Google search (for *years*, the first result under my Real Name was a tirade about Miles Vorkosigan's unconscious sexism. Honestly, that isn't the most important thing I think about when I wake up in the morning...)

Ana Mardoll said...

Hahaha, I feel your pain. It's just a matter of time before I'm "that Twilight girl who yells a lot about Edward Cullen". Probably not the legacy I would have chosen for myself going in. :P

But seriously, please don't be depressed. I think -- I actually wrote this today in a post that I hope will someday grow up to be a Slacktiverse special -- that Author Advocacy and all-around dissent with the OP is possibly the most crucial part of the deconstruction process, and is where a lot of information and communication is exchanged. These deconstructions wouldn't be what they are if it weren't for posts saying, "I see it another way..." and I'm THRILLED that people speak up to say so. There's nothing wrong with that, and everything right with it. :)

(I actually worry about posting my POV in the comments, because I had my say in the OP and I don't want to quash anyone ever. Seriously, that would be a huge major serious 100% problem for me. If I ever cross a line in that respect, I hope someone will feel able to call me on it, because that's the best thing I could ask for there.)

As for Susan in particular, she's a character, so it's not like any of this is going to hurt her feelings. ;) I think it's valuable for people to be able to discuss her and see the wide variety of perspectives on her. Thank you so much -- you, hapax, and everyone else in this thread -- for speaking up as you do. This is really so rewarding for me, and I hope it is enjoyable for everyone else. :)

Ana Mardoll said...

Cross-dressing in mythology! Always interesting. Although it does seem to have a high incidence of rape associated with it, mores the pity. :(

There are cross-dressing tales in the Norse myths, too. Thor dresses as Freyja, iirc, and poses as a bride in order to retrieve something stolen. (His hammer? I'm too busying NaNoing to look it up. :P) The bridegroom keeps asking, a la Little Red Riding Hood why the bride's face is so ruddy, etc. and Loki has to keep making up excuses like "she's blushing with joy". Thor isn't thrilled.

Loki also at one point becomes *pregnant*. Which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, seeing that he's a male. 'Course, Zeus had babies too, but that was a bit different.

This is the best thread ever, I swear. :D

Ana Mardoll said...

I'd be interested in reading that post, Chris.

Baachus... as a concept... kind of scares me a little. I understand what he embodies -- freedom from restrictive roles. But it's the frenzy of the freedom and the mob mentality that deeply distresses me. I do not like mobs, and am usually very uncomfortable in crowds or in situations where I don't feel safe and in control of myself and my safety. I understand why he was needed, and I think I understand what Euripides meant as you explain it here, but he's not a god that I can imagine engaging with. :/

Rikalous said...

Another example of manly mythical (insert synonym for crossdressing that begins with "m") was Hercules himself. He spent a few years or so dressed as a woman and doing woman's work while the queen who ordered it wore his magic lion skin. He must have been convincing, because when Jason showed up recruiting for the Argonauts, they had to flush him out by seeing which "woman" went straight for the weapons.

Kit Whitfield said...

pthalo - just wanted to second chris. thanks for sharing. :-)

Alex said...

Let's try this from Shae's perspective. She meets Tyrion, who has wealth and power and offers her stability and protection in exchange for affection. Selling affection is her job. She goes for it. Later, Tyrion is thrown on trial, losing all ability to protect her, and she is in the hands of a man who is known to consider prostitutes completely expendable. Shae acts to protect herself and does what the more powerful guy demands.

Basically, as soon as Tyrion was captured, Shae was dead. Either Tywin would kill her for refusing to lie, or Tyrion would kill her for lying. Tyrion's position is "I am going to kill you for not dying for me, former employee! I hired you and loved you and you didn't love me back!"

I don't think the fact that Tyrion killed her is proof that the author hates women. I think the fact that Tyrion killed her and the author thinks we should all be okay with that is worth contemplating.


Sorry to contradict, and to come back to this six days later (I hadn't yet found this thread at the time it was posted), but I'm afraid that's not at all an accurate summation of the situation Shae was in at the point of Tyrion's arrest and trial. Her cover had not been blown; as far as Lord Tywin, Queen Cersei, or anyone else in the Red Keep knew, she was an innocent lady-in-waiting. The fact that she was a former camp follower and Tyrion's mistress was known only to her, Tyrion, and Varys (who wasn't talking), and she could easily have left it that way. She was in no danger whatsoever; she betrayed Tyrion for the wealth and social advancement Cersei promised her in return for testifying against him, not out of fear.

Her perjury wasn't just about his character, either, nor was it simply icing on the cake; it was the clincher, the ultimate "proof" of his guilt. All the other evidence against Tyrion was circumstantial (all it could be, since he was innocent), but Shae testified that she'd actually heard him plot to murder King Joffrey, and later his sister, his father, and Prince Tommen, so that he could take the throne for himself.

On the other hand, Tyrion, having found Shae in his father's quarters, had only two choices: kill her, or die himself. He'd taken a detour from his escape in order to confront his father and avenge Tysha; had he left either his father or Shae alive behind him, the alarm would have been raised before he got out of the Red Keep, and he would certainly have been recaptured and executed. Before she perjured herself against him, Tyrion might have been willing to trust Shae to keep silent long enough for him to escape, or to come along with him without betraying him at the first opportunity. Given the stark choice of killing her or dying himself, he might even have chosen to die for her, but that would be a bit much to expect after her lies condemned him to be beheaded.

Kit Whitfield said...

@alex - i don't think that anyone disputes it's justified in the text. it's the fact that it is justified, along with so many other violent crimes against women, that people are discomfited by.

Alex said...

what if martin wrote a boy who loved epics and had romantic ideas about knighthood based on his favourite books, an was consequently raped and beaten 7 ways from sunday for being such a sap?

He did, actually: Bran Stark. No, he wasn't raped, but then neither was Sansa. Sansa was beaten up and psychologically abused by Joffrey and his guards; Bran was rendered paraplegic, then became a hunted fugitive after seeing his home burned and all the people he'd grown up with slaughtered. I don't think you can really say that one of them had it worse than the other; Sansa did eventually escape to a relatively safe and comfortable refuge, while Bran's paralysis is permanent, and his circumstances as of the last time the reader saw him before book 5 far more unpleasant and precarious.

readers would probably have clubbed together n hired an assassin

There might be a few readers so inclined for the nasty things he's done to various characters, but more of us would be inclined to chain the man to his computer until he danged will finishes the series.

Kit Whitfield said...

Sansa was beaten up and psychologically abused by Joffrey and his guards

based on what i remember, she's under constant sexual threat. she gets forcibly married to someone, for instance. the violence operates within an intensely sexual context.

and did you just say that the effects of abuse end as soon as you get out of the situation? cos in reality, that kind of thing can leave effects just as permanent as anything else.

Ana Mardoll said...

It's interesting to me that in the GRRM world the only way to silence someone is to murder

It's so sad that no one in that world has discovered knots yet. :(

Will Wildman said...

I actually worry about posting my POV in the comments, because I had my say in the OP and I don't want to quash anyone ever.

But by posting in the comments, you avoid any derailed discussions about 'what Ana really meant', which would tie knots in the 'what Lewis really meant' discussion that's already going on. It happened all the time at TypePad!Slacktivist (and might still happen at Patheos!Slacktivist, but I read fewer comments there) when Fred would post something based on scripture and the thread would then involve arguments along the lines of "But what Fred is saying that Matthew wasn't saying about was Jesus was saying was really this" and then the italics would break.

Also it's more fun with you here.

Ana Mardoll said...

But by posting in the comments, you avoid any derailed discussions about 'what Ana really meant', which would tie knots in the 'what Lewis really meant' discussion that's already going on.

Thank you, I hadn't thought of that! Mostly because I can't imagine anyone caring what I actually meant about anything. :)

Ana Mardoll said...

Hmm. Wiki says Peter is 22 in The Last Battle, and that Susan is 21. I sit corrected -- I thought they were somewhat older. Ed and Lu would be in their late teens, then.

Wiki quotes Lewis on the Problem of Susan:

The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then 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.

Make of that what you will. I think I've already made my own bias pretty self-evident. :D
Someone named Paul Ford also wrote in a "Companion to Narnia" that:

This is not to say, as some critics have maintained, that she is lost forever ... It is a mistake to think that Susan was killed in the railway accident at the end of The Last Battle and that she has forever fallen from grace. It is to be assumed, rather, that as a woman of twenty-one who has just lost her entire family in a terrible crash, she will have much to work through; in the process, she might change to become truly the gentle person she has the potential for being.

Again, I'll refrain from comment. :)

Amaryllis said...

It wasn't that Shae humiliated Tyrion, it's that she played a crucial role in his sister's conspiracy to have him judicially murdered, and did so voluntarily, out of greed and ambition, not under duress.
We have no idea why she did it, because I don't remember GRRM granting her the dignity of explaining in her own words (although I may not be remembering correctly; it's been a long time since I read the scene).

But any relationship between "low-born camp follower" and "Lord Tywin Lannister" or "Queen Cersei" is inherently one of duress.

Emmy said...

Iirc, Eustace tells Tirian he and Jill are the only two left in school.

hapax said...

For as long as there has been a Slacktiverse blog I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on the parallels between the Bacchae by Euripides and Left Behind and see if that's something that might be posted there

please please please please...


that would push so many of my personal geek buttons.

On the topic of transgender literature, I want to put in a plug for WANDERING SON, a manga by Shimura Takako. Considering the way that crossdressing and transgenderism is played for laughs and titillation in so much manga, I was delighted to find this gentle, sensitive, and above all *sweet* story.

I ordered it for my library's Adult Comics collection because of the topic, but after reading it I pushed hard for it to be added to the Children's collection. As far as I can tell from my cis-privileged position, I think that it would be reassuring and inspiring for any young person who felt that they didn't fit right in their bodies.

Steve Morrison said...

I have Ford’s Companion to Narnia, and was just about to quote the characters’ ages from it (Appendix Two has a table). At the time of the railway accident, Peter was 22, Susan was 21, Edmund was 19, Lucy was 17, Eustace was 16, and Jill was 16. Also, Digory was 61 and Polly was 60.

Alex said...

@alex - i don't think that anyone disputes it's justified in the text. it's the fact that it is justified, along with so many other violent crimes against women, that people are discomfited by.

I think Will and Ana did dispute that it was justified in the text, in the parts of their posts I quoted; they asserted, incorrectly, that the "justification" given was revenge for infidelity and humiliation, which would be no justification at all in the mind of anyone but a misogynist. I'm pointing out that the justification given is actually survival, not revenge, and that the danger to Tyrion was created in large part by Shae, voluntarily and maliciously, out of greed. I see a vast difference between writing a story in which a sympathetic male character murders his unfaithful female partner to punish her for her infidelity, and writing a story in which a sympathetic male character kills his female partner in self defense, because it's the only way he can keep her attempt to murder him from succeeding. The former would be strong grounds for suspecting the author, and anyone who remained sympathetic to the male character in question, of misogyny; the latter, not so much.

Also, what other instance of violent crime against a woman in the books was justified? As far as I can recall, committing violence against women is generally what puts characters in Martin's world beyond the moral event horizon. He'll work hard at getting the reader to sympathize with Jaime Lannister, who tried to murder Bran in the first book, and Sandor Clegane, who actually did murder Mycah the butcher's boy, but rapists like Gregor Clegane and the Bloody Mummers are painted as pure a black as any dark lord in a less nuanced kind of fantasy novel.

based on what i remember, she's under constant sexual threat. she gets forcibly married to someone, for instance. the violence operates within an intensely sexual context.

That slightly exaggerated. She's under threat in the second book of being forced to marry Joffrey, but there's no immediate threat of sexual violence except in one scene where Joff has his guards strip her to the waist before beating her (and, in that scene, Tyrion stops them, then puts an end to the physical abuse). The forcible marriage in the third book is to Tyrion, who refuses to rape her on their wedding night even though law, custom, familial duty and self-interest all require that he consummate the marriage, swears to her that he'll never touch her unless and until she asks him to, and keeps that promise.

and did you just say that the effects of abuse end as soon as you get out of the situation? cos in reality, that kind of thing can leave effects just as permanent as anything else.

Nope. I didn't say anything of the sort. I said that when we last saw her before book five (which I haven't read yet) Sansa was in a better position to heal from her post-traumatic stress than Bran, whose traumas, while different in form, are no less severe, and whose physical injury no amount of time in a safe place (should he ever find such a thing again) can ever begin to heal. More generally, I'm saying that your assertion that Martin consistently treats female characters worse than male ones doesn't hold up to close scrutiny -- everyone in these books suffers a lot.

Kit Whitfield said...

there's no immediate threat of sexual violence except in one scene where Joff has his guards strip her to the waist before beating her

if you think that's a dismissible incident of sexual violence, i can't take your opinions on misogyny seriously.

Ana Mardoll said...

TW: Rape.

So this is going to be one of those "Ana says what Ana meant without trying to stifle people posts" that Will referred to earlier.

I'm pointing out that the justification given is actually survival, not revenge, and that the danger to Tyrion was created in large part by Shae, voluntarily and maliciously, out of greed.

OK. Let's break down what I know of the situation. There's two "dangers" that Shae poses to Tyrion.

1. Shae can call for the guards now that Tyrion is in the same room as her. This is not self-defense murder. This is not self-defense murder because it's my understanding that the only reason Tyrion is in this room is because he stopped by to kill his dad. Murdering someone because they are an obstacle to your murdering someone else is not self-defense. This is also not self-defense because there are a number of ways to silence Shae besides killing her. I'm not going to list them for TW reasons.

2. Shae stood as a character witness against Tyrion. This is not self-defense murder because unless GRRM's REALISTOGRAM world is VERY different from our own, the damage has already been done. The trial is over, killing the witness afterward isn't going to make things better for Tyrion. Does GRRM's world revolve around a "oops, witness died, now a pardon is issued to the accused"? If not, then this is not self-defense. It's revenge.

Also, what other instance of violent crime against a woman in the books was justified? As far as I can recall, committing violence against women is generally what puts characters in Martin's world beyond the moral event horizon.

There is a nice list in the post that everyone is talking about. I think there were at least two "rape but it got better!" situations, including 14-year-old blond dragon girl and Ashe an-orgasm-at-knifepoint-means-its-not-rape.

Will Wildman said...

I can't be sure - possibly someone who finished Dance With Dragons can confirm for me - but other readers have certainly indicated that Cersei's sexual abuse/humiliation near the end of that book is 'justified' punishment for her crimes. (The specific argument was that she was evil, but now that she's been made to suffer, she can be redeemed in the eyes of the reader.)

there's no immediate threat of sexual violence except in one scene where Joff has his guards strip her to the waist before beating her

I take it that your definition of 'immediate threat' is literally 'seconds from actively being raped', rather than 'forcibly married to and captively living with an incredibly powerful person who has stated his intention to rape her as soon as she is fertile'.

I reject this definition.

Rikalous said...

Tyrion didn't kill Shae in self-defense. He killed her because he was in a horrible place mentally and when Shae tried to calm him down she inadvertently reminded him of the humiliation he went through earlier. He was surprised and conflicted, but he didn't seem keen on killing her until after she called him her giant of Lannister.

Ana Mardoll said...

I recall a comment somewhere that defined four categories of homicide: criminal, excusable, justifiable, and laudable. Tyrion's murder of his father fell squarely in the fourth category...The fact that Tyrion was pursuing the laudable goal of eliminating such a monster from the world does not, to me, obviate his right to protect himself.

This is where I think, you and I at least, cannot have a meaningful conversation over this anymore. I just simply disagree completely.

Kit Whitfield said...

ana - no, you're right.

alex, i simply cannot agree with any of your values. i merely hope that they reflect your idea of values in fiction and don't apply to the real world, or if they do, that you never sit on a jury trying a man who assaulted a woman.

chris the cynic said...

I have not read any of the books being discussed. On the subject of the Narnia books I have not read, is it correct to say that there are at least two problems of Susan?

One revolves around the question of whether or not she is damned. If she is damned first off that's not good, second the reasons for which she is damned may or may not (depending entirely on what those reasons are) be extremely problematic beyond the fact she's damned in the first place.

The answer one would want to this problem is that no, she's not damned. Heaven is not closed to her, she is not forever barred from seeing her family again, this is not saying that if you tell people their religion is a childish fantasy god will hit them with a big stick and certainly not saying that using lipstick will send you straight to hell.

If the problem is that she might not be able to get into Heaven, then it turning out she can get into Heaven is the solution one would hope for. If that weren't seen as a good thing then her not going there wouldn't be a bad thing.

The only reason that her not going to Heaven would be problematic is if not going to Heaven is bad. So the ideal solution is for it to turn out that she can go there.

I said that twice because it contrasts with the other problem of Susan I see brought up here which seems to be more along the lines of, "Why the hell would she want to go to Heaven in the first place?" Narnia has good memories for her, but those good memories are bounded on all sides by trauma. She has plenty of reason to hate Aslan, she has plenty of reason not to want to go back to Narnia.

The problem isn't that she might not be allowed into Heaven, the problem is that even if we assume she is allowed she has plenty of reason not to want to take that invitation. It doesn't seem like it would be a reward. It seems like we should be quoting Milton. "The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make [...] a Hell of Heav'n."

The problem is that there are a bunch of people she loves there, and the theology doesn't seem to offer much else in the way of rewarding afterlife. It's hard to see what the ideal solution would be, but it would emphatically not be the ideal solution to the first problem (she gets to go to Heaven.) Someone trying to deal exclusively with the first problem is going to sound like a heartless jerk to someone looking at the second.

A solution might be something like finding a place distinct from Heaven, Aslan free, which is a nice place to spend eternity in it's own right and being able to visit loved ones on some sort of not-Heaven neutral ground. People from not-Heaven space would be able to visit Heaven, people from Heaven would be able to visit not-Heaven space, but if they weren't comfortable in doing so they could still see each other by visiting intermediate neutral territory. Of course it's entirely possible that the other Pevensies would mess that up by gushing about how awesome Heaven is and spending the entire time trying to convince Susan to come back there instead of, you know, enjoying some time with Susan.

Not really sure what the best way to handle things would be.

-

So, is that at all accurate?

Amaryllis said...

Well, Narnia isn't Heaven, to begin with, not even the ideal-Narnia that still exists after material-Narnia is destroyed. Susan can get to Heaven without ever seeing anything Narnian ever again. She will, I suppose, have to come to to terms with the One who is Heaven; I don't know about Lewis, but I will not be so exclusionary as to say that she has to meet that One wearing either Its Aslan-face. Earth or Narnia, all we mortals get are "hints and guesses," and we don't all get, or respond to, the same ones.

There's nothing in the text, one way or the other, to say what her eventual choices will be. it's one of those stories that we are not told.


----
they didn't know she was a low-born camp follower, and she knew they didn't know -- in her testimony, she was still posing as a well-born lady-in-waiting who'd been a virgin until Tyrion supposedly murdered her (imaginary) fiancé and made her his sex slave. (The act was good enough for Tywin to take her as his own mistress after the trial -- no way would he have done that if he'd suspected her real origins.)
Okay, I haven't read the book in years, and I'd forgotten the details. But I don't believe, and I'm sure I didn't question at the time, that Tywin Lannister would let anyone get so close to him, and that Cersei would have made her such a major part of her conspiracy, if they didn't know everything there was to know about her. Surely, what she said in her testimony is what they told her to say.


Lord Tywin desperately needed killing by that point in the books
As I said, I haven't read that chapter recently. But I was not under the impression that Tyrion was acting under any abstract pursuit of justice for anyone else. To cross fandoms for a moment, I always pictured him as in a similar state of mind to Mark Vorkosigan's when he turned the gun on his foster-father Ser Galen: years of abuse culminating in a moment of recognition of who his true enemy is. And leaving him in a thoroughly messed-up condition afterwards.

I agree that Martin tends to use "rapist" as shorthand for "deeply evil person," and I know that I said that I didn't find the idea of powerful men getting away with abusing women to be too improbable for fiction. The cumulative effect is a little much, what with the sadistic Cleganes and the revoltingly psychopathic Boltons and the cruelty-is-our-business Greyjoys and that little shit Joffrey, but yes, you're right that those are meant to be unsympathetic characters. So then, what are we to make of Tyrion, who participated in a gang-rape of one lover and murdered another? Yes, I know the in-universe justifications, we don't need to rehash them yet again (this is the thread that never died...). The fact that he's a rapist and a murderer, and we can't help but like him anyway, is surely worth considering.

Since I've reminded myself of the Vorkosigans, consider Sergeant Bothari. He's a rapist, a torturer, a murderer. Bujold succeeds in making him a somewhat sympathetic, or at least understandable, character; she allows her "good" people to come to an accommodation that lets them go on living with him. But she does it without minimizing his crimes, and in a shattering scene in The Warrior's Apprentice, forcing us to realize their effect on his victim(s) and finally bringing him to sort sort of retribution. Where is there anything comparable anywhere in GRRM?

chris the cynic said...

This is probably one of those things where I just need to read the books, but that's not going to happen in the course of this thread.

Susan has lost the only people in the world who know she's not crazy.

From what people have said in this thread I got the impression that the opposite is true. The impression I had was that Susan has lost the only people who know that the thing she dismisses as a fantasy is anything other than a fantasy. She's lost the only people telling her she is crazy.

Everything brought up so far made me think that the only people on earth who thought Susan couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality have been removed from her life. Everyone left on earth is of the opinion that she's quite sane.

You're saying that the opposite is true. Could you explain how you come to that conclusion? I'll certainly understand if you can't explain and it's one of those things where one needs to read the book to see it.

Ana Mardoll said...

I say that because no matter how much Susan may say to the others that Narnia didn't exist, she still seems to have her actual memories from that time. (I.e., she's operating on direct denial, not suppression-and-confusion.) Her way of coping with the cognitive dissonance of physically-impossible memories may be denial right now, but there's still a small subset of the population that shares those memories for better or worse, and that has to be a source of cold comfort.

Whether she believes she's mentally ill for having impossible memories or whether she believes she experienced something genuinely impossible doesn't matter so much as the fact that she's not alone in her mental illness / impossible experience. And if Susan ever decides to confide in anyone about her experiences and they dismiss her as mentally ill (or decide to lock her up as mentally ill), she could always have fallen back on her siblings for protection and affirmation of her experiences.

Now, more than ever, she has to live a lie in order to be safe. She can't dabble as normal knowing that she could always come back to the FoN group if she can't keep up the pretense. She has to lock away her past forever, whether she wants to or not. The only people who can understand her are gone, and I can't imagine that Susan won't spiral further into the belief that (a) her memories are false and (b) any inability to truly accept that is a sign of her own mental illness.

Kit Whitfield said...

if you want to exist at all, you're existence is purely by Aslan's (and the Emperor's) gift.

and there we have an ethical difference. to my mind, if you give a gift, you give it. It doesn't mean people have to do exactly what you say with it. Giving with strings attached, giving as a power-play, giving to indenture: these are considered morally wrong when they're done by human beings. I find it hard to accept that God should be held to lower moral standards.

Ana Mardoll said...

I always try to think about god in terms of my cats.

I love my cats. I'm kind of "god" to them in that all good things come from me, in a certain way. I give the food, the water, the warm shelter, and so forth. And there are things I do for their own good that they don't like -- I take them to the vet and don't let them go outside because they are Special and would get hit by a car immediately. (I swear this is true. Primary Cat is ESPECIALLY dense. He once tried to stare down a motorized wheelchair rather than move.)

Some cats are very traumatized. One of my ex-boyfriends had a cat that literally could not bear to be touched by humans. He took care of the cat, gave it food and shelter, but he respected that it could not bear to be touched by him. Ever. He didn't touch her unless it was absolutely necessary. This was hard. She was a really soft, lovely cat. I wanted to touch her. But she wasn't an object -- she was a creature worthy of respecting her needs and limitations.

If she'd been frightened of even the sight of us, I feel strongly that Ex-Boyfriend would have found a way to create a "safe space" for her in the house where she could feel safe and sheltered from the humans.

Now, I have family members who won't truck with that. One of my family members traumatized their cat because he felt like he was "the boss" of the house and if he was going to pay money to keep and house a cat, that cat was going to let him pet it as much as he wanted. I feel like this is wrong, and I strongly disapprove of this attitude, but I recognize that it's not an uncommon one. I don't know who is right here, I can only follow my convictions.

I can't remember where I was going with that.

chris the cynic said...

Giving with strings attached, giving as a power-play, giving to indenture: these are considered morally wrong when they're done by human beings.

I don't know what you mean by this. I wrote a lengthy response before I realized that I don't actually know what you mean by this.

It reads to me as a general statement (i.e. not specific to Narnia related concerns) about objective fact (not, "I consider these," but instead "these are considered") but I'm not confident enough in that interpretation to conclude that that's what you mean.

For myself, I do not consider giving with strings attached to be morally wrong in itself. I think it depends on the strings and depends on the context.

An example that I consider over the top, but others might not, would be if you give something to someone because they lied to you about who they are. If I've got a gift for Edmund and then mistakenly give it to Peter because Peter told me he was Edmund, I don't consider it morally wrong to demand that the gift be given to Edmund or returned to me so I can give it to Edmund. That's a string. It's a conditional. "I am giving this to you on the grounds that you are not misrepresenting they nature of your being and if it should turn out that you are I reserve the right to take it back and/or tell you what you may and may not do with it." (You may give it to Edmund, you may not keep it for yourself.) It's a string that probably isn't stated beforehand, but I think it's a good one to have.

For a less extreme real life example, once upon a time the US government gave my state government some money. This was not an investment or a purchase, it was a gift. But it was a gift with strings. It was given to us because we were planning to do a certain thing for a certain length of time and on the condition that we use the money for that purpose.

When my present governor was elected he decided not to do what we said we would do. We said that we would install and display a certain mural. He didn't like the mural so he decided to take it down and hide it in an undisclosed location while giving contradictory reasons and occasionally having his staff make vague threatening utterances. (The mural was of labor history, he's not a big labor fan.)

At this point the federal government pointed out that there were strings attached to the gift, and if we stopped holding up our end they'd yank on those strings and take the gift back.

I don't think that was morally wrong on the part of the human beings who make up the federal government. The gift was only given because we made a claim that turned out to be false. We were not lying, at the time we fully intended to use the money for what we said we'd use it for, but when we didn't follow through I think they were right to think there had been a violation. If the only Reason Y gives X to Z is that Z made claim A, I think that making the gift of X conditional on A being true, which is very much attaching a string, is reasonable.

-

It should be pointed out that neither of these examples even remotely applies to the Narnia discussion.

It should also be pointed out that there are more than 300 posts in this thread.

Brin Bellway said...

It should also be pointed out that there are more than 300 posts in this thread.

Ooh, somebody else got a first-X-hundredth-comment for a change. Who was it? *reads back* Kit. Yay, Kit!

Kit Whitfield said...

If I've got a gift for Edmund and then mistakenly give it to Peter because Peter told me he was Edmund, I don't consider it morally wrong to demand that the gift be given to Edmund or returned to me so I can give it to Edmund.

I don't think mistakes apply in this context.


once upon a time the US government gave my state government some money. This was not an investment or a purchase, it was a gift. But it was a gift with strings. It was given to us because we were planning to do a certain thing for a certain length of time and on the condition that we use the money for that purpose.

I'd call that a contract: you can have this money conditional on using it for X purpose. Both sides knew the undertakings in advance.

Presenting a fait accompli universe to someone, hurling them into it without a by-your-leave, is not a contract. They don't have the option of considering the offer before accepting it. The gift is made, and then the strings are revealed. Such a contract would be considered null and void under the law, and the person attempting to add the strings would be considered dishonest.

The closest human analogy is having children. I brought my son into the world; I didn't make the world, but I and my husband made him - or at least, we made the beginning of him, and then I carried him around feeding him blood for nine months* while he began the lifelong process of making himself. We couldn't consult him beforehand. Therefore, he didn't make us any promises. Creating him was something we chose to do, and we have no right to impose conditions about it. We can, of course, impose other conditions now he's here, but those aren't about his presence in the world. 'You can have the sippy cup conditional on not spitting the water out' is a contract (and one we're currently struggling to make clear). 'You can be in this world conditional on' - well, anything, is not something we can do. We don't get to revoke his existence, and we certainly don't get to cast him out of the world. Not just because it would be morally wrong, but because he never promised us anything in exchange for his existence.

If you're in the world not of your own choice, it's a gift, not a contract. No strings.


*closer to ten, actually, because he was overdue, but that's another story

chris the cynic said...

If it wasn't clear, I wasn't comparing anything I said to Narnia. It looked to me like what you said was making a general claim beyond the specifics of the situation in Narnia. That's what I was responding to.

I understand why what I was talking about doesn't apply to the specific but if you did make a generalization, and I'm still not quite sure if you did or not, then whether the generalization was true wouldn't depend on the specifics of the Narnia situation.

I was responding to the perceived generalization that may or may not have actually existed in reality.

-

I think we define gift somewhat differently, but other than that I don't think I disagree with what you're saying at all.

Thank you for explaining your position again.

Ana Mardoll said...

(How can ya'll see that it's 300 comments? Blogger says 280-something to me. I'm curious.)

Brin Bellway said...

(How can ya'll see that it's 300 comments? Blogger says 280-something to me. I'm curious.)

Blogger says 289, but below that Disqus says "Showing 250 (if you haven't clicked 'Load More Comments')/307 (if you have) of 307 comments". (Except now that I've posted it's 308, but anyway.)

hapax said...

t I think it was something along the lines that I can only love a god who loves me as much as I love my cats.

Okay, let's run with that analogy. If Ex-Boyfriend's cat had been diabetic, and needed insulin shots, would he have given them, no matter how much distress it caused her? If his house had been being fumigated, would he put her in a carrier and yanked her elsewhere? If he was moving, and he knew that no one locally would continue to feed and water her, would he have taken her away from everything she knew? If she was so ill and the choice was a prolonged and painful suffering with no hope of cure, or a swift and gentle overdose of painkillers, would he choose to put her down? Would he do any of these things knowing that there was no possibility of explaining them meaningfully, let alone obtaining her consent?

I'm not trying to pick on your Ex-Boyfriend, or say that there isn't a possiblity of multiple "right" answers to any or all of those questions. I'm suggesting that this analogy -- like most, when you try to talk about the Divine -- can lead into very uncomfortable territory.

Ana Mardoll said...

And I'm afraid that I'm going to have to risk "lowering your opinion of Jesus" by pointing out that -- even if we stick to just the canonical Scriptures -- Jesus wasn't all Nurturing Shepherd all the time. In fact, instances of Stern Jesus, Angry Jesus, Incomprehensible Jesus, Dictatorial Jesus, Boring-As-Paint-Drying Jesus, Smug Jesus, Unpleasant-and-Rather-Dickish Jesus, and the like far outnumber far outnumber the passages of St Francis and Suffer-The-Little-Children Jesus, and are just as much "objectively fact in the text." And let's not even get into the Old Testament smitings and plagues and dead babies and whatnot.

But as you know there are quite a few Christians who reject some or all of those texts for valid reasons well outside the scope of this deconstruction. We *cannot*, however, reject Aslan's bad deeds because they are occurring "historically" in the text we're analyzing.

(I will say, though, that Jackass Jesus isn't someone I care for. But I do not want this discussion to become "Ana hates Jesus" because no good will come of that.)

Would he do any of these things knowing that there was no possibility of explaining them meaningfully, let alone obtaining her consent?

I think I already said in my analogy that I do things my cats don't like and don't understand for their own good. However, I do try to explain things to them, and if I spoke fluent cat I would probably be able to at least have a discussion with them about it. Aslan speaks English, but never explains his decisions to Susan or the others, so I feel confident in reaffirming that I care more about my cats than Aslan does about the Pevensies. :)

(True story, when the cats were little, I tried to lick their ears because I wanted to be a "good cat mom". This didn't work so great, but I did try. :))

hapax said...

Topically, though, we *cannot* reject Aslan's bad deeds because they are occurring "historically" in the text we're analyzing and there's really one author (Lewis) as opposed to dozens or hundreds in play here.

Fair point.

But then, we cannot bring *any* "Jesus" into the discussion, since he is only alluded to (possibly) three times: in the name of the holiday "Christmas" (which has nothing overtly to do with Aslan), Aslan's statement that he has "another name" in England (which could be Mithras, for all we know), and one which refers to something Big "inside a stable" in the world the Pevensies come from -- so they are rather ambiguous and contradictory as to how much we should identify the oversized Narnian lion with the first-century Palestinian Jew.

And there are zero textual reasons to consider Aslan Omni-*anything*, let alone OmniOmni.


Why yes, I live to make the life of a Deconstructionist difficult. How did you guess? Please excuse me while I go out to snatch candy from children and trip old ladies crossing the street.

Ana Mardoll said...

If you snatch any caramels, I should mention that there's a candy tithe on this blog... :P

I will concede that there's about as much textual reason to read Jesus into Narnia as there is to read Mormonism into Twilight, if that makes sense. I see the FedEx arrow - whether it's there on purpose or because of author subconscious bias or not there at all but I see it anyway is a subject for hearty debate. :)

Kit Whitfield said...

But then, we cannot bring *any* "Jesus" into the discussion, since he is only alluded to (possibly) three times: in the name of the holiday "Christmas" (which has nothing overtly to do with Aslan), Aslan's statement that he has "another name" in England (which could be Mithras, for all we know), and one which refers to something Big "inside a stable" in the world the Pevensies come from -- so they are rather ambiguous and contradictory as to how much we should identify the oversized Narnian lion with the first-century Palestinian Jew.

To be honest, I really just don't see that. Three big hints seem pretty conclusive to me. I would agree that if someone decided to read Narnia as a non-Jesus story they could construct a justification - you can justify almost any reading of any text if you have enough practice - but I would think they were reaching.

On another point: Lewis denied that the book was a Christian allegory. He also wrote that letter to his little reader. Those two seem to contradict each other. As to the denial, there are two possibilities. The first is simply that he was back-pedalling because he didn't like the interpretation some people were putting on it. I wouldn't put it past him, but maybe you would. The alternative is that he was talking about the experience of writing it. Fair enough, but since only he could ever be privy to that, what we're left with is the text. And to be honest, I find his writing an awful lot less subtle than the theological distinctions between Jesus and 2nd person of the Trinity.

Steve Morrison said...

Well, he wasn’t disputing the Christian part, he was disputing the allegory part. If you use a sufficiently strict definition of allegory, the Narnia books fail to qualify.

Irina said...

Please write the grammar book! I so want to read it!

chris the cynic said...

It's something that I have been meaning to do, no doubt, but it's also something that would be difficult in the extreme.

First i have to come up with a coherent theory of time travel. I think several months ago I was considering bouncing ideas off of Will Wildman, not sure why I never got to that. Then I have to figure out how it interacts with grammar. For example if I say something like, "Tense is always that of the subject," doesn't that make things too simple?

He will have killed the overlord by this time yesterday.
The overlord was killed by him by this time yesterday.

Same event, but it's in his future and the overlord's past. For him it's future (future perfect because we're talking about what it will have been done before) for the overlord it's simple past.

Over, done with, nothing to see here.

If I try to complicate things enough for a grammar textbook to be work it, then the theory of time travel becomes too convoluted to be understood. And theories of time travel have a tendency to eat themselves.

-

I do know that I wanted to introduce the negated articles. As in, "This is how you preface something that has been erased from history." It doesn't exist in the past, present or future, no amount of time travel can get you there, but in the personal timelines of some people it did exist. I was thinking something simple and silly, and having the text book look down on it ("unfortunately, it caught on and is now standard" or something to that effect) so ne for the, na for a (nan for an?) the problem is that the and a can both be pronounced with a shwa in certain contexts which might lead to confusion because in those contexts ne and na would sound the same.

"Ne North American Federation was the first nation to erase itself from history. The large number of refugees created found they had a need to describe things that, in the new timeline, had never existed but were very real in the original timeline."

Or something like that. It lets you distinguish between Ne city of Cincinnati and the city of Cincinnati without saying, "No, not that Cincinnati, the other Cincinnati. That's because it never existed. No, it's not hypothetical. It was real, now it isn't and never was. I grew up there."

Though that does bring up that there might be a need for other tenses. Past timelines are different from past times, and that might need entirely different forms of the verb to be.

There's also a question of whether there's space for another mood which does for negated actions what the negated article does negated things. (Though that would overlap with the alternate past tense mentioned above.*)

Ok, so maybe it isn't over and done with just by saying tense sticks with the subject.

It does seem to be a lot of things that I haven't figured out yet and all of the difficulty of figuring out a coherent theory of time travel that allows paradoxes to exist.

-

*Oh good god, there needs to a tense matrix. Maybe. If I can get away with a negated mood I might be able to avoid going too far into that, but think about it, something can be in the past, present or future, and it can be in a past, present or future timeline. The good news is that timelines would lack aspect (no difference between perfect and imperfect) but you'd want to be able to have a sequence of past timelines so at the very least you want to put things in a pluperfect timeline. Probably future perfect as well, so that's five timeline tenses being multiplied by all normal tenses and ... oh good god.

Ana Mardoll said...

Like all good things, this reminds me of Hitchhiker:

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It has been built on the fragmented remains of … it will be built on the fragmented … that is to say it will have been built by this time, and indeed has been—

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

To resume:

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering.
It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.
This is, many would say, impossible.

In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptuous meals while watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.

This, many would say, is equally impossible.

You can arrive (mayan arrivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome).

This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.

At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.

This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.

You can visit it as many times as you like (mayan on-visit reonvisiting … and so on—for further tense correction consult Dr. Street-mentioner’s book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.

chris the cynic said...

he Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

Always fun, even if it is a horrible pun.

I don't think it need to be quite as complex as Adams makes it out to be.

Something that was going to happen until you skipped forward in time to avoid it. Did it actually happen in a past timeline? Describe it using the previously mentioned language of negation. (Or past timeline tense.) Was it always avoided because you skipped it in the original timeline? Then it's just how we describe avoided things now, "It would have have happened."

One also wonders if there should be tense based imperatives. If you order someone to do something it will always be in their future, so you'd think you only need the existing imperative, but if the thing you're ordering them to do is in the past, should there be a past imperative? I'm thinking no. You just say, "Do it yesterday," or whatnot.

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

Regarding the violence distribution in ASOFAI, it should be noted that REALISTICALLY, women experience mere sexual violence but less general violence. Take the fall of Srebrenica, for example: Men were KILLED while women were raped but generally LEFT ALIVE. So it is realistic, and not skewed,, to introduce this in fantasy setting as well: in many cases, women are not subject to excessive physical voilence precisely because the captor doesnt want them disfigured. Sansa probably WOULD be beaten to death if Joffrey didn't want to save her for later. So this trading (sexual violence for general violence) exists in real life, and Martin truthfully depicts it. Women ARE raped more often. Men ARE killed more often. In fact, this is why Arya's behaviour is so dangerous: by entering men's world, she makes herself vulnerable for BOTH thereats: physical violence during her fights and sexual violence should she be captured.

Kit Whitfield said...

So this trading (sexual violence for general violence) exists in real life, and Martin truthfully depicts it.

It's truth that's the problem: a lot of women feel that his portraits of women are not truthful. And that being the case, 'truth' becomes a doubtful defence against misogyny. Putting a lot of rape into a book doesn't make it respectful of women's experience; putting good female characters does. The rape without the respect is not a comfortable read for many women.

Ursula L said...

Well, golly gee, it’s not like this doesn’t happen to people ALL THE TIME in this world. My spouse and I disagree strongly about some of our most important beliefs. I think many of my dearest friends believe and practice things that are silly, tedious, and even profoundly incorrect about how the way the universe works. People in relationships do not have to think in lockstep; it’s healthy to have different interests and worldviews.

Assuming that the Friends of Narnia *do* have frequent formal meetings – and the text in fact indicates the opposite – there’s plenty of other ways this conversation can go, if Lucy’s that important to Howard.

He can say:

“Well, I’ll attend one meeting and see how it goes”.

Or, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe what you believe. I have no problem in you’re believing it, though, as long you don’t expect me to. I hope that you find meaning and comfort in your beliefs.”

Or, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe what you believe. I’m a Buddhist. How about we try alternate going to my temple and your Friends of Narnia meetings?”

Or, “I’m sorry, but I was raised in an abusive cult. I’m sure that this group makes you happy, but when you discuss it, it triggers terrible memories for me. Will it work between us if I go to the football game on nights when you have your FON meetings and we just don’t talk about either of our hobbies?”

Or even, “I’m sorry, I love you, but this Narnia thing? It’s just too weird for me. I don’t like to give ultimatums, but I don’t think our relationship will work so long as you keep hanging with your siblings and your cousin and your other friends.” (Although in this case, I think she’d be well rid of him, and perhaps he of her).

Or any one of another million possibilities besides saying “Well, fancy you still playing baby games at your age!”


The problem for the FoN is that Narnia isn't a belief for them. Narnia is a fact, an actual place where they've been, and lived, and had amazing adventures. A couple can agree to disagree on matters of faith. But no one is entitled to their own facts. So none of these responses from Howard are acceptable to Lucy, because they all dismiss the reality of her life.

The FoN are in the position of Amelia Pond, biting her psychiatrists because they insist that her Raggedy Doctor isn't real.

We don't know what kind of response the kids had from the adults in their lives when they talked about their experiences. But it wouldn't be one where their firm knowledge of this real place of talking animals and magic would be accepted.

Essentially, the real world would have the effect of gaslighting the FoN with regards to their Narnian experiences. It is no wonder that one of them cracked under the strain.

BaseDeltaZero said...

BaseDeltaZero, since it was my broken arm you were absent-mindedly complaining about, perhaps you'd like to address yr acknowledgement to me. and since it seems you actually knew n couldnt be bothered to double-check yr memory (or this site, where i'd prevously explained), i wld like an apology. i have a 14-mth-old n my arm in a cast from wrist to shoulder; i have enough to deal with without ppl complaining abt my limited recreation abilities.

I'm sorry about your injuries, and for upsetting you. I merely quoted that segment because it was the first response.


Is that the Oh, John Ringo, No! series? The one even the author admits is completely bonkers on multiple levels (including the misogyny, if I remember correctly).

Yeah, pretty much. Although John Ringo has some... interesting ideas in any case.

Finally, I second Hapax on the subject of Susan, and want to add that she also rejected the reality of Narnia after spending most of her life there

I will not apologize for not having a perfect memory, or not running through the archive before every response in the chance something has been mentioned before.

Makabit said...

Which makes the whole "lipstick and nylons" thing later seem a bit weird. Okay, so we can't be warriors, but we can't care too much about our looks or society either, so...housewives and nurses or nothing? Is that where we're going?

The impression I get is, yes. Susan can't fight in battles, because that is a man's part, but Susan also can't express her sexuality, because that is a BAD woman's part. WIfe, mother, nanny, nurse, helper, completer...

One thing that bothers me about all of this is my own personal crank about fantasy--the privileging, even in very gender-determinist texts, of the tomboy over the lady. Lucy is the one who will challenge her gender role, not only here but as an adult in The Horse and His Boy, where she is described as leading archers to battle, while Susan is more of a 'regular grown-up lady'. And yet Lucy is self-evidently meant to be the more interesting and wonderful of the two, while Susan will ultimately be damned (possibly literally) for wearing lipstick. (And possibly for having been involved with Rabadash, although that's rather soft-pedaled.) There is absolutely no winning for Susan. She's told to be feminine, but she will be punished throughout the series for acting like a woman.

Joshua said...

Not as deceiving as a low down dirty *stops to think for a while* deceiver.

That right there is a brilliantly witty quip. On the part of the writer, not the character. It uses humour to entertain the audience, helping to make Jayne lots of fun to watch.

The clever writing part is how much fun he is to watch, contrasted with how horrible he would be to come into contact with, even briefly.

Makabit said...

Tyrion is definitely messed up, no question about it. He's a fan favorite because he's got a sense of humor and rather more of a brain than most of the cast (also, he can fix the drains when they're stopped up, shades of Miles Vorkosigan), but he's still a mess. Like almost everyone else, one way or another. He knows it, too.

Tyrion is warped. All Lannisters are warped. They know it, too. I think Tyrion has a good heart in there somewhere, but he wasn't given much of a chance.

I find the relationships of the Lannister siblings rather interesting. I'm enjoying it now that we get some chapters from Jaime's point of view.

hapax said...

The deep shiver of solemn gladness -- I think that's a pretty good description of what Rudolf Otto (who Lewis refers to in other works) called the mysterium tremendum, the liminal joy one experiences at the threshold of the Holy. It's akin to (but not the same as) the "sensawunda" sff fans talk about. If you've had it, you recognize it (I did, immediately, as a child reading that description); if you haven't, no amount of description will convey it.

[shrug]

Other than that, I've got no defense for Lewis in this section. Complete worldbuilding Fail; and gender essentialism so overt that even child-hapax fell into complete CAPSLOCK RAGE (or would have, if she had any exposure to a typewriter at that age, being far too early for word processors; I suppose I could call it PURPLE INK AND TRIPLE UNDERLINE WITH MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS RAGE, but that isn't nearly as catchy and I can't really reproduce it in disqus anyhow)

Well, no, I have one defense:

Part of the problem, of course, is Mrs. Beaver's insistence that she knows the future

Of course she can! Didn't your edition of TLTW&TW contain the second verse of the Aslan prophesies? You know, the one that goes:

When you miss a young traitor, a Witch will come later;
When you get ready to leave, a quarter hour you'll have;
If you can't carry enough, she will mess with your stuff;
But when the lock she must pick, you'll have tea with Saint Nick.

Makabit said...

There was some good discussion of this over at Tiger Beatdown when Sady dissected the hideous sexism in Song of Ice and Fire, both on the part of characters and the author. Defenders said that the author obviously had feminist leanings because the tomboy daughter got to have awesome adventures while the daughter who was trying to be a 'proper lady' was made to endure endless psychological tortures, sometimes physical abuse, and see everything she loved destroyed. Right. As long as it's clear that there's some kind of woman we're supposed to hate.

That was certainly my take from seeing the first season of the TV series, but I have to say now (about halfway through the books) that I think Sansa is a deeper character than she gets given credit for by the producers of that. Still, my first reaction was "Oh, great. Little sister wants to play with swords like the boys. Big sister likes boys and pretty clothes, and embroiders well. I can see who gets to be the heroine here." It seemed especially galling, given that Sansa, in the TV version, is essentially being punished for doing what her culture tells her she is supposed to do, and doing it well. It's as though one of her brothers worked his ass off learning to sword-fight and was therefore considered too boring and trivial for words.

The books actually seem fairer. The girls are very different, and end up in different situations, but Sansa is a pretty smart chicken for a twelve-year-old in an appalling situation--and I like that occasionally Arya will pause and realize that her sister was good at things she's not--Sansa knows heraldry (an important skill in this sort of society), Sansa knows more about music than she does...

I'll have to go and read the TB on it, though.

Pthalo said...

@Chris: thanks for saying that. It meant a lot to me.

@everyone else:
I don't know about you guys, but I'm mostly going with what I vaguely remember having read over a decade ago. Luckily, I do have the Last Battle on my computer, and my girlfriend says that 10% of the work is fair use, which would be 13 pages, and this scene is less than a page, so to get all of us onto the same page, here is the only mention of Susan in the book, which takes place exactly after they've just arrived in Narnia:


"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"

"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."

"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, `What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"

"Oh Susan!" said Jill. "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."

"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."

"Well, don't let's talk about that now," said Peter. "Look! Here are lovely fruit-trees. Let us taste them."

And then, for the first time, Tirian looked about him and realised how very queer this adventure was."


So, I can see some of hapax's point. What Eustace reports Susan to have said is very close to the dismissive "sky daddy and the easter bunny" thing.

And, well, early adulthood is quite a silly time. You're trying to figure out how to be an adult, but you lack experience and you value things that you may not value as much later. I've known many young twenty somethings who were vapid and dull because they thought they knew everything. Some of them got better with age. Caring too much about appearances and not enough about what's underneath is silly. Not because she isn't settling down and having lots of children -- for all we know the lipstick and nylons may be a means to that end -- but because she's being shallow and vapid. Or at least that's how she's seen by her friends and family.

There's nothing wrong with being a young adult, or engaging in fun activities that young adults tend to engage in, it's just that people continue to age and mature as they get older. i'm a better person now than i was at 20. i wasn't a bad person then, i was just younger. hopefully i'll be even better at 30 and 40 and 50.

But the book is a Christian metaphor, and the fruit trees seem evocative of the garden of eden just here, and well it does seem like the characters who retained their innocence get to stay.

Also "friend of Narnia" is not capitalised as "Friend of Narnia", so perhaps they don't have any sort of meetings at all. they are just either friendly towards Narnia or hostile to it.

so i'm a fence sitter. i'd have to reread the book and i'd rather reread the others first. i don't remember what half of them are about. i don't think we liked the last battle that much as a kid though. we didn't know the word strawman, but the antichristlion felt like one. as non Christians, we missed that it was a Christian metaphor on the first readthrough as children, but we'd probably cottoned on by the last battle, and it was so alien to us as to be confusing and hard to follow.

chris the cynic said...

I did actually mention the Thor thing earlier today, because that came to my mind too. It always seems to be the most manly character who cross-dresses. Well, that's what I thought.

Then Pentheus was brought up, though. Pentheus was convinced to crossdress as a prelude to having his head ripped off. It was definitely about humiliation in that case. Moral of the story could be that you shouldn't make fun of someone for being girly because if you do he might turn out to be a god in disguise and then your screwed, but if we're going with Euripides version (the only version I know) I think the moral of the story is that the gods are evil.

For as long as there has been a Slacktiverse blog I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on the parallels between the Bacchae by Euripides and Left Behind and see if that's something that might be posted there. The presentation of Dionysus in the Bacchae is, I'm told by people who know much more about Greek myth than I do, unlike anything before or since. None of the other works we have present "a god as behaving more savagely towards human beings." And at one point, near the end, Dionysus basically says that what he does is ok because it's on the checklist.

Discussions I had in class about the Bacchae almost exactly mirrored the discussions then going on on Slacktivist about Left Behind.

The difference, in my opinion, beyond the fact that Euripides was a better writer than Jerry Jenkins is (and I say this as someone who is not a Euripides fan), is that Euripides knew that's what he was doing. I think Euripides, writing at the darkest time in the history of his homeland when total oblivion seemed to loom on the horizon, wanted people to watch his play and think of the gods of the day the way that we think of Left Behind God. I think his point was: the gods are cruel and evil, the gods suck, we shouldn't be worshiping them.

But part of the reason I tend towards that interpretation is that some part of me insists that no one could write something like that and be on the side of the god in the story. And then I think of Left Behind and L&J. They wrote something with a cruel and evil god, they want you to read it and side with the god.

-

Achilles being made to crossdress by his mother is almost the opposite of the Pentheus situation. She wants to save her son. Dionysus wants to humiliate his cousin Pentheus before killing him.

[Added]
Zeus, it should be pointed out, goes beyond crossdressing. Zeus has been known to be a woman when it suits his whims.

[Added again:]
And yet none of the times he had babies occurred while he was female. At least none that come to mind.

Gelliebean said...

Re. lifebonding: I do give Lackey credit for points where she pointed out some of the drawbacks, particularly in the Mage Storm trilogy where Firesong becomes obsessed with finding his lifebond because he thinks it'll solve all his problems in life, and the aftermath thereof.... Also in one scene where she discusses Talia and Dirk's lifebond particularly as a way of pairing up a support system for Talia who's under extreme stress, an incredibly strong Empath, and damaged emotionally from everything she's been through. So it does move away a bit from the sicky-sweet "we can't talk to each other, and we can't live without each other" presentation in Arrow's Fall....

Makabit said...

As for Theon, if he's a favorite of yours, all I will say is to brace yourself before you begin on Book Five.

Oh, I don't expect him to come to any good end...in fact I thought he might be dead in Book 2. And I was OK with that. He's got it coming. I just enjoy him.

Makabit said...

n if you find it attractive or romantic ... brace yourself, cos yr love life is gonna be a rough ride. maybe worth it, maybe not, but rough.

Are we still talking about Snape?

I don't require people to be moral 'successes' for them to be interesting or appealing to me. I feel for Snape, I find his life arc compelling, and I identify with him to some degree. Also, he's played by Alan Rickman, which does not hurt.

He's certainly flawed--but so is everyone in the story, and I don't get the idea of rejecting a character as a character because he fails some sort of 'get happy' bar. Snape manages to be a key part of defeating Voldemort, while still being miserable and pining over Lily Potter. To me that's a bigger moral success than, say, becoming mentally stable and letting the world burn.

And I'm perfectly capable of swooning over dark, damaged men while being happily married to a practical soul who complains that I don't put the can opener back in the drawer after using it.

I guess it annoys me for an author to create a memorable character and then become critical when people to don't respond to him or her 'right'.

Makabit said...

I always assumed all the kids had been given a combat boost by Destiny just so they could fight at ALL. Maybe it's not a magic bow, but a symbol that Destiny has juiced up Susan's archery skills and Santa didn't want to take the time to explain? In the books the kids are never seen practicing, though they do in the movie-- it's a cute scene, Susan is shooting at the target and then Lucy THROWS that little dagger, proving that she's able to kick some butt after all. The movie does improve a lot of what's wrong with the book.

One thing to bear in mind is that while Peter has probably never been trained in how to swing a longsword, or Lucy to use a dagger, Susan may well have taken archery in school. It wasn't uncommon once upon a time. My mom learned.

Amaryllis said...

Well, wait a minute, how old are the Pevensies supposed to be be at the time of TLB? I never had the impression that they'd be old enough for spouses and children and careers. Jill and Eustace are still referred to as children themselves, and they're a little younger than Lucy, which means the others can't be all that much older. I assumed that the three youngest are still at school, Susan is doing the debutante thing, and Peter and Edmund are at public school or at most university.

From Tirian's vision of what looks like an actual meeting of the Friends of Narnia, seven people around a table (but maybe it's just a tea table):
He who sat at the right hand of the old man was hardly full grown, certainly younger than Tirian himself. but his face had already the look of a king and a warrior. And you could almost say the same of the other youth who sat at the right hand of the old woman. Facing Tirian across the table sat a fair-haired girl younger than either of these...

Youths and girls, not men and women, younger than Tirian who is in his early twenties. Which is not to say that they wouldn't grieve for what they left behind on Earth, just as they grieve for Narnia, but they're moving toward the place where all tears shall be washed away.

Beroli said...

because GRRM is trying to show how hideously sexist the stereotypical medieval fantasy world is.

If that's what he's trying for, either he reads very different books from me or he lost track of it somewhere along the line, because what he's actually doing is presenting a medieval fantasy world which is quite uniquely misogynistic and horrible. Not at all like "real medieval Europe" (garg, that excuse is aggravating), and not like any other fantasy world I've encountered.

Beroli said...

this is just my interpretation, but i see the books as arguing that good moral action n mental stability are linked - voldemort n dementors function much like mental illnesses. snape fights right side of battle but also bullies harry; if more stable, could have done one without other, n prob wld have come in on right side sooner.

Not to say, for the right reason, instead of, "I'm afraid my master won't do what I asked and murder Lily's husband and infant son in front of her and leave her personal hide alone."

Beroli said...

I just wish people would stop sneering at other people's tastes. There's nothing better about grim'n'gritty, but there's nothing worse either.

Amaryllis, I'm sorry, but you had said that

"Martin certainly creates a brutally misogynistic society, but I don't think you can extrapolate too much about the author from that-- except that his world is based on fourteenth-century Europe and a high degree of misogyny is to be expected."

And that's, I'm sorry to be so blunt, crap. His world has the same realism quotient as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. He just prefers a horrible, gory, rape-y fantasy to a cheerful one with ponies. I have no objection to "I like a grim and gritty fantasy"; I do object to "this particular world is more realistic and less fantastic because it's so grim and gritty" and to "this world is grim and gritty only because it's realistic and you shouldn't draw any other conclusions from the grimness."

Rikalous said...

Joining Ice and Fire discussion with knowledge of books 1-4.

The idea that Arya was being lauded and Sansa was being bashed never occurred to me since a.) horrible things happen to decent, worthy characters all the time in these books and b.) their arcs came off as more parallels than right/wrong contrasts. Arya, the sister who likes playing with swords in the woods, ends up with a sword in the woods, where bad things happen to her, mainly because she's at the mercy of people with more physical power than her, like mercenaries and outlaws. Eventually, she gains a mentor, long on the badass and short on the morality, who's willing to teach her physical prowess. Sansa, the sister who likes castles and princes, ends up with a prince in a castle, where bad things happen to her, mainly because she's at the mercy of people with more social power than her, like royalty and knights. Eventually, she gains a mentor, long on the badass and short on the morality, who's willing to teach her social prowess. So I think the contrast is "Arya's realm is physical violence, Sansa's realm is less-literally-cutthroat politics," not "Arya's way is right, Sansa's way is wrong and we should hate her for it."

This obsession of Lord Tywin's with keeping Tyrion away from loose women? Why? What's it to him?
A couple people, including Twyin's brother, mention that Tywin's father was ineffectual and suggest that Tywin's spent his entire life trying to not turn out like him. One of Cersei's chapters mentions Tywin kicking out his father's mistress in context with his disapproval of prostitutes, so I think Tywin views Tyrion's proclivities, like his stature, as un-Lannisterly weakness.

no one blinks twice at Tirion strangling a prostitute for not being loyal to him.
She tried to kill him. She perjured herself to give testimony against him for a capital crime. That goes beyond "not being loyal to him."

The Renly/Loras thing has some subtext, including one memorable moment where Jaime threatens Loras with shoving something up him "somewhere even Renly never found." On the sapphic side, there's Lady Merryweather (one of the many characters lusting after Cersei) and possibly Dany and/or her handmaid (Dany thinks about men during the process, and handmaid seems to only be doing it out of duty). Oh, and Oberyn Martell and his lover are enthusiastically bi. That still does seem pretty scarce, given how many characters and how much sex there is.

Makabit said...

I don't think the fact that Tyrion killed her is proof that the author hates women. I think the fact that Tyrion killed her and the author thinks we should all be okay with that is worth contemplating

I am going to to comment one last comment on this whole thing, which is that I've gotten up to that part of Book Three, and I would like to mention that, while I would not like to use the fact that Shae has lied in court about the murder Tyrion is accused of as a defense of his act, nor the fact that his brother has just revealed something that makes the deepest shame of his life much, much worse, I would say that the fact that he kills his father minutes after he kills Shae might tend to indicate not so much misogyny as someone who has gone completely off the deep end.

BaseDeltaZero said...

just write women as human beings instead of Women. forget the gender stuf n write people. :-)

This! Although... do we really need the chat speak?


And, obviously, the Amazons were famous for fighting using their bows so we've got an association with bows and women at least that far back. Unlike Paris though, I don't think they were looked down on for that.

The Amazons were basically a joke/'monster', so I don't know if I'd count that...



I'm not as concerned about the murder of unfaithful women being tragic for the man -- I think it's possible to have it be tragic for them and still be a terrible, monstrous thing

scary thing to say. check intimate partner violence stats. also privilege

Admittedly, I initially wanted to counter that with 'yeah, murder of unfaithful women is still tragic for men, just because they were unfaithful doesn't mean...' Then I realized you probably meant 'it's not a tragic event to *kill* an unfaithful woman'. Which... it still could be, in the classical sense. Or with sufficient finagling.


One of my big "no, you cannot do this and remain a sympathetic/heroic character" buttons is violence against a partner or ex-partner for being unfaithful. Well, violence against a partner or ex in general, but then we have a lot of media saying it's okay if they were cheating, and...no. No, it is not, and it won't be, and shut the fuck up, Carrie Underwood, oh my God.

Well... definently for the cheating, but in general, it's unacceptable unless there's a damn good reason, of the sort that would justify violence against anyone else.

The sword is an obvious phallic symbol, and the fact that it is drawn by Peter (the "stone") may be an allusion to his right to kingship.

The sword is an obvious 'stabbing things' symbol. It's long and pointy because otherwise it doesn't work terribly well. Same basic story with missiles, submarines and rockets.


Jayne Not as deceiving as a low down dirty *stops to think for a while* deceiver. Cobb? That Jayne Cobb?

okay, *funny* quips.


Yet, for all of his . .. whatever, I've never seen a discussion of if Joss Whedon is a misogynist.

Haven't been paying attention. There's an article floating around about how Joss Whedon is a rapist (because of Inara... or something)

Rikalous said...

Haven't been paying attention. There's an article floating around about how Joss Whedon is a rapist (because of Inara... or something)
I remember that. The author referred to male feminists as unicorns, and considered Mal's joke about duct taping Kaylee's mouth shut damning evidence of misogyny.

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