nochd

[nochd]

I seem to have picked up one or two radfem followers since my post on The Silver Chair and misogyny in Narnia went viral, so I'm reblogging this as a teaching moment.

At the very least, this is to let you know: I see transgender women as women. If you don't want to see this on your dash, this is your signal to unfollow me.

(If you're OK with trans people but it's not safe for you to have nudity on your screen because your boss walks past behind you without knocking or whatever, filter the tag #nude photo.)

[nochd]

Wrong sort of "pale", alas. Somehow Bible translators never have the balls to translate this word correctly, purely because everyone knows there's no such thing as a green horse.

So, fun fact about the skinned FurReal pony - I got the ID wrong, but only because Smores and Butterscotch's necks are semi-fixed in position, and I didn't think to google if the image I had of Butterscotch was mirrored.

The skinned horse IS Butterscotch, not Smores, but all of that's besides the point.

The reason I'm making this post is that y'all need to know that they skinned Butterscotch to turn her into a flamethrower

[nochd]

(Sighs) Second World War. Second World War. People kept asking him if it was an allegory for the Second World War. You know, the one that was still fresh in everybody's mind when it was published and prominently featured a weapon of apocalyptic power that should never have been used. His reply in the Prologue to the second edition included him saying, actually I was drawing on my experiences of the First World War a lot, you know, the one that everyone seems to have forgotten about now. And that's without getting into the perennial confusion over the word "allegory", because trying to help people with that is like talking to a brick wall.

no way i just saw people in tiktok comments crying screaming throwing up at the idea of aslan being a jesus figure. worsties the lion literally dies to save edmund (the sinner) and then rises from the dead. he tells the pevensies he can be found under a different name in our world. what else could this have meant

[nochd]

Cold, but only because clothing is compulsory. It's not really the heat itself I can't stand, it's how it magnifies my sensory issues with clothes. On the other hand those issues don't completely go away in the cold either (though there does come a point where the cold is worse), so if naturism were socially acceptable my answer would be "heat".

[nochd]

Right. Final reblog, unless I have to reply to someone. This reblog completes the main thread, anyway.

Those who've read the Silver Chair thread will know this already, but for others: C. S. Lewis's whole worldview, religion and all, was structured around the concept of an essentialistic, hierarchical universe. Masculinity and femininity were pre-existing spiritual realities of which biological maleness and femaleness were merely physical manifestations, and masculinity was spiritually superior to femininity.

I should stress that Lewis came to moderate this belief considerably as a result of his relationship with Joy Davidman (which was blossoming right around the time the last couple of Narnia books were going to press), and his final completed work of fiction, Till We Have Faces, marks a sharp heel-turn in his treatment of female characters.

However. Lewis's pre-Davidman works still exist and it's those we're talking about. And even in later life Lewis was still putting to paper phrases like "God is more masculine than the male".

Now take that, and put it together with what we learned last time from The Shoddy Lands. Lewis approved of sex and nudity (always conscientiously adding a rider of "if only our desires hadn't been put out of whack by the Fall"), but he disapproved of women taking pride in their appearance if it wasn't about attracting men.

Maybe also recall that he didn't believe in the consent ethic. I mean the consent ethic as we know it today wasn't properly articulated until the 1970s, after Lewis died, but still. From what we've already seen it's a good guess he wouldn't have believed in it if he had lived to see it.

Can you see where this is going?

I cannot recommend that anyone read the final novel of the Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, but it is the place to go if you want to plumb the depths of Lewis's misogyny. I could write a much longer rant on That Hideous Strength if not for the fact that, in order to do so, I would have to re-read it; but a couple of passages will suffice to make explicit the attitudes that, so far, we've been inferring from circumstantial evidence.

The female protagonist Jane Studdock is having psychic visions. In one moment of foreshadowing a sentence flickers through her mind for no apparent reason:

The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.

A little later she opens a book in an unfamiliar office, and reads

The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the---

at which point she closes the book. I'm not going to comment on "obedience is the stairway of pleasure". I'm concerned mainly with the bit about Lilith and Eve. According to this women should not try and make men desire them, but they should present themselves in such a way that men enjoy looking at them.

Which should remind you of Peggy in The Shoddy Lands and her "gestures, gestures about nothing"; which in turn harks back to Susan Pevensie and her lipsticks and nylons.

It gets worse. Oh, it gets far worse.

A content warning from here on: the passage I'm about to discuss uses sexual assault as a metaphor. As a positive metaphor.

Jane is in the care of a group of Christians who have coalesced around Elwin Ransom, the protagonist of the previous two Ransom books and a mentor character in this one. She's had another vision, this time a vivid hallucination of the goddess Venus and some lecherous dwarfs setting to ruin a bedroom she's just tidied. She seeks Ransom's advice (he's "the Director" in the following scene). It should be mentioned that her marriage is teetering -- secondarily because her husband has joined the villains; primarily because they haven't fucked for a while.

It should also be mentioned that in the Ransom Trilogy Lewis hasn't yet got the hang of integrating imagery with message-y bits in his fiction, and quite often interrupts the story to have characters "realize", at length, his own religious and philosophical opinions. This sort of "realization" is where Jane's thoughts are at.

I'm quoting the passage nearly in full but leaving out one significant phrase because I want to prepare you for it properly first.

How if the invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated -- but in ever larger and more disturbing modes -- on the highest levels of all? "Yes," said the Director. "There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, [God] would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing ... which breaks hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly." "You mean I shall have to become a Christian?" said Jane. "It looks like it," said the Director.

C. S. Lewis just compared conversion to Christianity to marital rape and thinks this is a good thing.

I feel it should be clarified that the metaphorical assailant here is God Himself; Lewis isn't talking about conversion at sword-point by human evangelizers. He experienced his own conversion as something that happened against his will; he didn't want to accept God but everything he was reading and thinking about kept leading him back there. He later described himself as "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

I first read That Hideous Strength at age twelve and I didn't get that he was talking about sex, or sexual assault, here. (For two or three years the only Ransom book I'd read was Perelandra, which I enjoyed because Ransom got to wander around naked making friends with animals, that being my own preferred career.) When I came to re-read it much later, it was because I was in the middle of a discussion about Narnia and I wanted some context for something else I was talking about.

And that was when I figured out that the metaphor here was marital rape. And because I was thinking about Narnia at the time, the little phrase I've ellipsed out hit me right in the stomach; I felt physically nauseous.

Here's the full sentence restored. This will conclude this thread on the Susan Problem because no commentary I could add will express what this sentence, in context, does to me.

"You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing -- the gold lion, the bearded bull -- which breaks hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed."

So my post from December about the relationship between Tolkien's Lay of Leithian and the Narnia book The Silver Chair has gotten traffic again over the past week for some reason, and someone called @violetutterances left these tags:

#this was deeply fascinating as someone who has read both Lewis and Tolkien #I'd love to hear op's thoughts about The Susan Problem #I have no dog in that fight because I haven't been interested in Lewis since college but I'd love op's commentary within the context of thi

Hopefully this is not going to get "colour of the sky long" this time. Lots of other people have talked about the Susan Problem before, whereas I've never found anyone else who's noticed the Leithian-Silver Chair connection.

In case anyone reading this is in today's lucky 10,000, "the Susan Problem" is about what Lewis does with Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the course of the series, eight children from Our World cross into Narnia; in The Last Battle all of them except Susan have formed a secret society called "the Friends of Narnia". The events of the book see the Friends gather in what turns out to be Aslan's Country (=Heaven) after the Narnian world comes to an end. A Narnian character comments on Queen Susan's absence, and the following exchange ensues:

"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 now-a-days 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.

Not counting Peter, who is clearly uncomfortable with the whole subject, that's three statements about Susan and three points made. The message most readers take from the whole dialogue is: Susan grew up, she got interested in boys, Lewis disapproves so he sent her to Hell.

The real picture is more complicated than that -- but not necessarily better.

Whilst I do hope this thread doesn't get as long as the previous one, that's enough for one post. I'll be back.

[nochd]

hey so where *do* you get Lewis's writing on Polytheism? Does he have a book about it? I was really intrigued from your Susan post

Not exactly. It's more sort of references scattered throughout his works. Lewis was educated in Latin and Greek poetry from childhood and read literature of every period from classical Greece to his own time, and he feels free to dip into any of it when it helps him make a point.

In one essay, discussing whether people believe in God because they hope that Christianity is true, he replies that if that were the case for him then "I like Greek mythology much better; Celtic mythology better still; Norse mythology best of all."

[nochd]

I honestly believe Rabbit and Owl were an actual, live rabbit and owl that the Milnes would see when out walking sometimes.

It has just occurred to me that of all the characters in Winnie the Pooh, the only ones that lack both fingerless stuffing hands and faint seam lines (the indications that someone is a stuffed animal) are Rabbit and Owl. Which carries the possible implication that Rabbit and Owl are just a normal rabbit and owl living with a bunch of sentient stuffed animals.

And somehow this makes Rabbit’s constant consternation with all of his neighbors even funnier to me.

[nochd]

[nochd]

OK, here we go.

C. S. Lewis was a conservative Christian in the 1950s and held conservative 1950s Christian views about things like masturbation and premarital sex -- let alone anything kinky or not cisheterosexual. Officially.

You can say this for Lewis: he really took care not to believe things just because he wanted them to be true. Otherwise, he would have been a polytheist. When he writes about polytheism you can feel the wistful longing coming through the page. Same, but more so, with astrology, which is why I have so much time for the Planetary Theory of his composition of Narnia.

He was, likewise, as sex-positive and as body-positive as his conservativism would allow him. You can almost hear the creaking sometimes as his morals and his sensibilities strain in opposite directions. If the sensibilities had won just an inch more ground he would have been a naturist; he was a regular at Parson's Pleasure, a swimming-hole in the River Cherwell at Oxford University where, until 1991, men were allowed to swim naked in the reassurance that the place was closed to women and they wouldn't be accused of indecency. He also preferred to swim naked on visits to wild beaches in Ireland. He just didn't do it in mixed company.

It's kind of a consensus among Christian moralists that nudity was God's will for Adam and Eve but it's not OK since the Fall. Most of them emphasize the second part of that; Lewis tended to emphasize the first. Discussing Milton's vision of Adam and Eve, he gives us statements like

...shame of the body and the body's operations is consequent on sin and had no place in the time of innocence. ---A Preface to Paradise Lost

This attitude is extremely evident in his fiction for adults, notably Perelandra, the middle book of the Ransom Trilogy, in which two of the three main characters spend pretty much the entire book naked -- the third is the villain. (Perelandra is the planet Venus, currently in its Garden of Eden phase of existence.)

He's more subtle about it when writing for children, but I'll show you in a minute how this comes through into Narnia.

All of which I would personally admire (being a practising naturist myself) except for one little, fatal, flaw: Lewis had no notion of the consent ethic. In The Screwtape Letters he has Screwtape, who is a devil, claim a devilish origin for the idea that people (rather than God) own their own bodies.

This is going to take us to some very dark places.

How can you have body positivity without the consent ethic? I would prefer not to call it "body positivity" at all in that case, but a neatly grim exemplar occurred this year when Bianca Censori turned up naked to the Grammy Awards. I saw more than one naturist social media account celebrating, but I also saw the footage of her husband Ye bullying her into taking her coat off; a violation of her bodily autonomy tantamount to public sexual assault.

Lewis's attitude to sexuality and nudity is like that.

It's possible you may not believe me about nudity in Narnia. The only explicit mention of nudity in Narnia, I'll grant you, is that of the undersea people towards the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, who wear crowns and necklaces and "no other clothes". But you might remember that Mr Tumnus, the very first Narnian creature we meet in the books, is wearing nothing but a scarf despite the heavy snow. Centaurs, too, always have bare chests. Lewis is carefully vague about describing Narnian nymphs; but in particular, he never mentions them wearing anything.

Nymphs, fauns, and centaurs are all (if we understand fauns to be synonymous with satyrs) creatures associated with unbridled lust in Greek mythology; animal hindquarters went with animal urges. Modern depictions of them as solemn repositories of ancient wisdom began here in the Narnia books with Lewis. I believe, for reasons it would take me too long to lay out here (it has to do with a scene in his lesser-known novel The Great Divorce), that the centaurs in particular were for him symbols of what humans could have been if not for sin, healthy godly sexual desires and all.

Then in The Magician's Nephew Lewis visits the Garden of Eden for the second time in his fiction career, and there he does something very interesting. Obviously, writing for children, he can't have his (human) protagonists wandering around naked. Instead, in two separate passages, he dresses the antagonists in extravagantly fine clothing: the gowns and robes of the time-frozen rulers of Charn, and the Victorian gentleman's outfit that Uncle Andrew puts on for what he thinks is going to be a date with Jadis. He also takes the time to tell us that Narnia's first two resident humans, Frank the London cabman and his wife Helen, both look better without their hats on.

There's more I could add but you get the idea. The Narnia Chronicles are secretly nudity-positive. OK? OK.

What's this got to do with Susan?

Let me introduce you to C. S. Lewis's 1956 short story The Shoddy Lands. The story is told in first person, and the narrator appears to be Lewis himself; certainly he's an Oxford tutor who lives in college. A student comes to visit him one morning and, without warning Lewis, brings his fiancée Peggy, so they have to do small talk instead of talking about anything interesting. Lewis is bored and his mind wanders and suddenly he's in a completely different world, which -- spoilers -- turns out to be Peggy's brain. The story is called The Shoddy Lands because everything in this world is blurry and nondescript unless it's something Peggy is interested in, and Peggy is interested only in very stereotypical feminine things like shoes and jewellery.

At the centre of Peggy's world is a gigantic version of Peggy herself, altered to meet popular-magazine standards of beauty. Initially she is wearing a bikini, but as Lewis watches she takes it off and looks at herself naked in a mirror; Lewis is nauseated by the fact that she has tan lines ("two bands of dead white that looked, by contrast, like leprosy") -- a rare example of nudity having negative import in a Lewis story. Then comes the point:

What staggered me was that she could stand and admire it. Had she no idea how it would affect ordinary male eyes? A very disagreeable conviction grew in me that this was a subject of no interest to her; that all her clothes and bath salts and two-piece swimsuits, and indeed the voluptuousness of her every look and gesture, had not, and never had had, the meaning which every man would read, and was intended to read, into them. They were a huge overture to an opera in which she had no interest at all; a coronation procession with no queen at the centre of it; gestures, gestures about nothing.

This is how I know Susan's wrongdoing isn't about getting interested in boys. Lewis thought girls should get interested in boys. What he disapproved of was the idea of women taking any sort of pride in their bodies or appearance or sexuality that wasn't aimed at attracting men.

That's what the lipstick and the nylons are about.

Susan not only throws away her childhood and her faith with it; like Peggy in The Shoddy Lands, she concerns herself with the appearance of trying to attract men when, in fact, she has no interest in attracting men -- just as she lost interest in Rabadash in The Horse and His Boy.

I think we now have a complete explanation of what happens to Susan in The Last Battle; what I haven't shown you yet is the dark side of Lewis's sexual ethic, which I'm afraid you do have to appreciate to see just how twisted this all actually is. That's for the next, and what should be the final, reblog. A warning: there will be discussion of sexual assault as religious metaphor, and I'm afraid you will never be able to look at Narnia the same way again. I certainly can't.

So my post from December about the relationship between Tolkien's Lay of Leithian and the Narnia book The Silver Chair has gotten traffic again over the past week for some reason, and someone called @violetutterances left these tags:

#this was deeply fascinating as someone who has read both Lewis and Tolkien #I'd love to hear op's thoughts about The Susan Problem #I have no dog in that fight because I haven't been interested in Lewis since college but I'd love op's commentary within the context of thi

Hopefully this is not going to get "colour of the sky long" this time. Lots of other people have talked about the Susan Problem before, whereas I've never found anyone else who's noticed the Leithian-Silver Chair connection.

In case anyone reading this is in today's lucky 10,000, "the Susan Problem" is about what Lewis does with Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the course of the series, eight children from Our World cross into Narnia; in The Last Battle all of them except Susan have formed a secret society called "the Friends of Narnia". The events of the book see the Friends gather in what turns out to be Aslan's Country (=Heaven) after the Narnian world comes to an end. A Narnian character comments on Queen Susan's absence, and the following exchange ensues:

"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 now-a-days 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.

Not counting Peter, who is clearly uncomfortable with the whole subject, that's three statements about Susan and three points made. The message most readers take from the whole dialogue is: Susan grew up, she got interested in boys, Lewis disapproves so he sent her to Hell.

The real picture is more complicated than that -- but not necessarily better.

Whilst I do hope this thread doesn't get as long as the previous one, that's enough for one post. I'll be back.

[nochd]

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

A jolly sight too keen on being grown-up. This is Lewis's own opinion of Susan, which he repeated when readers asked him what went wrong. As we've seen, he wrote her like that from the beginning; this was not an afterthought.

So what's so wrong, to Lewis, about wanting to be an adult? Well, I think it's not that Susan wants to be an adult, so much as that she wants to not be a child. What's the problem with this?

First of all, in Narnia, children are as good as adults. It's not just that the child protagonists are routinely trusted with the fate of nations; that's par for the course in children's adventure and fantasy fiction. It's that from time to time adult characters question this trust, and they are wrong every time.

Lewis respected children as human beings, to a degree that is rare anywhere but especially hard to find these days among his fellow conservatives.

Once in a hotel dining room I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes." "So do I," came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized; we talk to him as man to man. But the worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle. We must of course try to do them no harm; we may, under the Omnipotence, sometimes dare to hope that we may do them good. But only such good as involves treating them with respect. We must not imagine that we are Providence or Destiny.

---C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

If you want to see the best side of Lewis's worldview, I urge you to follow that link and read On Three Ways of Writing for Children.

"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."

Once again I refer you to On Three Ways of Writing for Children. Lewis's work was often criticized as "juvenile" or "adolescent", and he replied with what he called a tu quoque (a Latin phrase meaning approximately "what were you doing at the devil's sacrament?")

To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

This is echoed in the dedication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

TO LUCY BARFIELD My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis

(She was fifteen, in case you're wondering.)

Narnia fans may have noticed a related recurring motif, which is more marked when the characters visit Aslan's Country and heavily emphasized when they take up residence there: it becomes harder and harder to tell how old they are. They combine the innocence of childhood, the vigour of youth, and the wisdom of old age.

This is perhaps connected with Lewis's view that God, being eternal, exists outside the flow of time; to him, all times are now. Hence, all times in a person's life are present, real parts of that person. Our childhood is not gone just because it's in the past.

In trying to leave her child self behind, Susan is denying a part of her reality. But there are no lies in Aslan's Country.

As for the nylons and lipstick and invitations... well, look, like I said, Lewis's respect for children is the best side of him. Things will get dark later on.

The first thing I think of is another theme spread through Lewis's fiction and his moral essays: he disapproved in general of people doing things to win the admiration, envy, or approval of other people. Not that approval or admiration are bad in themselves, but he felt we shouldn't be wasting our time doing things that bring no joy or sustenance or protection or anything good except other people's approval.

And that's what I think, on the surface level, Susan's "grown-up" preoccupations are about. Nylons and lipstick are things put on to garner admiration. Invitations, or (I presume) the social gatherings that they are invitations to, are again useless except to inflate one's status.

Which you might consider judgemental on Lewis's part and I wouldn't disagree; but I think most of us have a similar kind of impatience with the social niceties of communities we are not ourselves part of. It's not an egregiously bad attitude to take.

The bad is coming, next time, when we look at what the nylons and lipstick say about Susan's sexuality.

So my post from December about the relationship between Tolkien's Lay of Leithian and the Narnia book The Silver Chair has gotten traffic again over the past week for some reason, and someone called @violetutterances left these tags:

#this was deeply fascinating as someone who has read both Lewis and Tolkien #I'd love to hear op's thoughts about The Susan Problem #I have no dog in that fight because I haven't been interested in Lewis since college but I'd love op's commentary within the context of thi

Hopefully this is not going to get "colour of the sky long" this time. Lots of other people have talked about the Susan Problem before, whereas I've never found anyone else who's noticed the Leithian-Silver Chair connection.

In case anyone reading this is in today's lucky 10,000, "the Susan Problem" is about what Lewis does with Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the course of the series, eight children from Our World cross into Narnia; in The Last Battle all of them except Susan have formed a secret society called "the Friends of Narnia". The events of the book see the Friends gather in what turns out to be Aslan's Country (=Heaven) after the Narnian world comes to an end. A Narnian character comments on Queen Susan's absence, and the following exchange ensues:

"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 now-a-days 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.

Not counting Peter, who is clearly uncomfortable with the whole subject, that's three statements about Susan and three points made. The message most readers take from the whole dialogue is: Susan grew up, she got interested in boys, Lewis disapproves so he sent her to Hell.

The real picture is more complicated than that -- but not necessarily better.

Whilst I do hope this thread doesn't get as long as the previous one, that's enough for one post. I'll be back.

[nochd]

sat among the soft seagrass🌾🐚

✦ find me on instagram @the.flightless.artist ✦

[nochd]

It's kind of you to say I deserve praise, but I think I've understated the problem here. "People dismiss your support" was not a strong enough phrase. Many people do just dismiss your position; a smaller but impactful number of them mark you as a predator who's out to ogle breasts.

I can see that deflecting the conversation from gender equality to nudity is not the way forward from there. But I don't know what is the way forward.

New webcomic page! "Female nipples are not penises"

Thanks for hanging out with me during my Joystick livestream while I finished drawing this "day in the life of a top free equality activist" webcomic page!

The VOD will be up for Patreon donors and Promo Squad members by tomorrow, then will go up for free for the public a month from now. But guess what--all you have to do to get free access to all my behind-the-scenes content and early access videos is simply share links to my content on your own social media pages, then post a screenshot of it to our discord server to watch the streams there! More info on how to do that: https://www.toplesstopics.org/promosquad

[nochd]

Red and Yellow by the great Andrey Surnov … notice the color changes before your eyes, so creative!

[nochd]

(I should apologize about the long delays between reblogs. I'm having a busy time at work catching up on notes in time for my student's exams while at the same time recovering from the illness that caused the delay in the first place. I should have more time soon.)

Let's start with Eustace's statement.

"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.'"

Though Lewis drops Susan from the narrative after this discussion, he doesn't drop this theme. The whole next chapter is titled How the Dwarfs Refused to Be Taken In, and describes how a whole troop of Dwarfs take exactly the same attitude to things that Eustace has just attributed to Susan.

A little context is probably necessary here, in case you haven't read The Last Battle or have blanked it from your memory. The Calormenes have conquered Narnia; our protagonists are among the last hold-outs. There's also a group of Dwarfs who've been fighting against both sides. Nothing is going very well for any of these groups, but the Calormenes and their Narnian agents have been using a small stable for various purposes, most recently an execution chamber for their prisoners of war. The Dwarfs and the protagonists have been shut in the stable---

...except it's not a stable; it's Aslan's Country, all bright skies and gorgeous scenery and delicious fruit trees, and this is where the Friends of Narnia have appeared. What's actually happened is that they've all died and gone to Heaven, which -- this is critical to remember -- Lewis believed was both an actual real place and a better place to be than Earth. Indeed Earth is merely a shadow or reflection of the solid glory of Heaven, a point which Lewis, through Aslan, hammers hard and repeatedly when we get to the end of the book. Dying and going to Heaven is a good thing to happen to someone.

But the Dwarfs don't see Heaven the way the protagonists do. All they can see is the darkness of the stable. Try to pull them out and they complain you've bashed them against the wall. Show them fresh flowers and what they smell is rotting straw and horse-dung. Aslan creates a marvellous feast for them and they taste old turnips and water out of the donkey-trough. Aslan sadly remarks that to make them see the truth is something even he cannot do.

The same thing has happened to the Dwarfs' perception of Aslan's Country as previously happened to Susan's memories of Narnia -- the same thing, come to that, as happened in The Magician's Nephew to Uncle Andrew's perception of the Talking Beasts.

Just to be clear: the theory Lewis is advancing here is that we unbelievers don’t see the evidence for God and the supernatural, not because it’s hidden, not because it takes some effort to understand, not because we are looking in the wrong places, not because Satan is telling us lies, but because we are closing our minds to it. On purpose. Because we just don’t want to know.

And if atheists to you are a Them instead of an Us, consider: exactly the same argument dismisses anyone who believes in a different god than the arguer's. Lewis makes it abundantly clear, especially in The Last Battle, that he is not an adherent of what has become the progressive consensus, that each religion is true for its own believers and there is no factual dispute to be had. Other gods exist in the Narnian world, but every one is either Aslan's servant or his enemy.

This is already a long diversion, but this is something I have to say. I was a believer before I was an atheist; I am not entirely unacquainted with religious ecstasy or the experience of communion with the divine. I know what "evidence" Lewis is talking about. Since I no longer believe that it signifies the existence of a real God -- real in the Philip K. Dick sense of "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" -- I am, in Lewis's schema, lumped in with Susan and Uncle Andrew and the Dwarfs.

Here's the difference. Suppose the Dwarfs, thinking themselves to be in a dark stable, had taken the protagonists aside, separately, and asked them for a detailed description of the surrounding scene, in whispers so they couldn't collude; suppose they had then come back together and compared notes. They would have found the descriptions matched each other, tree for tree, flower for flower, rock for rock.

Suppose Uncle Andrew had asked Digory, Polly, and Frank the Cabman separately what they imagined each of the Talking Beasts had said, again taking care to prevent them from colluding. He would have gotten almost verbally identical answers from each.

In either case the sceptic would have been faced with incontrovertible evidence that there was something going on beyond their ken.

Now imagine doing the equivalent with the mystical visions and divine experiences of people from different religious traditions around the world and across history. You might be able yourself to weave all the narratives together, if that was what you were interested in, but the narratives wouldn't do it for you. It would be more reasonable to conclude that each visionary's experiences were coming from a private reality than from one they all shared.

But Lewis isn't here for me to say all that to him.

Susan has forgotten Narnia because, like Uncle Andrew and the Dwarfs, she has "chosen cunning instead of belief". She wants to be an adult, not a child; she looks down at the world in cynicism, not up at it in wonder.

What's that got to do with nylons and lipstick and invitations? I honestly am trying to keep this thread shorter than the Silver Chair one, honestly, guys, but that question is going to have to wait till next time.

So my post from December about the relationship between Tolkien's Lay of Leithian and the Narnia book The Silver Chair has gotten traffic again over the past week for some reason, and someone called @violetutterances left these tags:

#this was deeply fascinating as someone who has read both Lewis and Tolkien #I'd love to hear op's thoughts about The Susan Problem #I have no dog in that fight because I haven't been interested in Lewis since college but I'd love op's commentary within the context of thi

Hopefully this is not going to get "colour of the sky long" this time. Lots of other people have talked about the Susan Problem before, whereas I've never found anyone else who's noticed the Leithian-Silver Chair connection.

In case anyone reading this is in today's lucky 10,000, "the Susan Problem" is about what Lewis does with Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the course of the series, eight children from Our World cross into Narnia; in The Last Battle all of them except Susan have formed a secret society called "the Friends of Narnia". The events of the book see the Friends gather in what turns out to be Aslan's Country (=Heaven) after the Narnian world comes to an end. A Narnian character comments on Queen Susan's absence, and the following exchange ensues:

"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 now-a-days 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.

Not counting Peter, who is clearly uncomfortable with the whole subject, that's three statements about Susan and three points made. The message most readers take from the whole dialogue is: Susan grew up, she got interested in boys, Lewis disapproves so he sent her to Hell.

The real picture is more complicated than that -- but not necessarily better.

Whilst I do hope this thread doesn't get as long as the previous one, that's enough for one post. I'll be back.

[nochd]

I did not actually scream...

[nochd]

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my argument. I don't blame you for reblogging just the first post instead of the entire thread -- I got very long-winded -- but for the benefit of other readers, it's here.

Now if I may respond to your points:

You're correct that there is no positive, documentary support for my hypothesis, hence why I've had to adduce so much circumstantial evidence. Lewis, unlike Tolkien, did not keep past manuscripts once the finished works were published; he burned them. Also, although huge collections exist of letters from Lewis to a tremendous variety of people, very little is available of his correspondences with Tolkien. Apparently after Lewis's death when people like Walter Hooper (his secretary) were going around collecting his letters for future scholarship, they rubbed Tolkien up the wrong way somehow. In any case, although their friendship had long since cooled, Lewis and Tolkien were not at such loggerheads in the 1950s that one would expect Lewis to go around openly declaring "this book is about that shrew of a wife of Tolkien's".

The Lady of the Green Kirtle is not strictly "proof of Lewis's misogyny"; Lewis openly declared his belief in the superiority of the masculine in many other writings, fictional and non-fictional. As well as the passages I've quoted from A Preface to Paradise Lost, I'm currently writing a (hopefully shorter) thread on the Problem of Susan, and I will be quoting some more examples in there. They won't be anything like an exhaustive collection either; there's just too much of it.

If you haven't seen people criticizing the White Witch as another exemplar of Lewis's sexism, you must be fairly new to the Narnia-critical online community. I suggest you go through the Narnia stories again looking at female main characters not for whether they are "positively portrayed", but for whether they are allowed agency or authority. Susan and Lucy are queens in name, but you will search the books in vain for any instance of either of them exercising their royal authority to lead their subjects -- unlike Peter or Edmund. In fact I believe there is, in the entire series, one single example of a good-coded female character giving another character an instruction of any kind.

I have seen speculations, including by Humphrey Carpenter, that Tolkien disliked Joy Davidman on the grounds that she was a divorcee and an American; I have not seen the evidence behind these speculations. I know of no instance of Tolkien disparaging Americans as such; he just comes across as the sort of frousty old English professor who one imagines would dislike Americans. What he is on record as saying, after Lewis's death, is that their friendship was strained by Lewis's "extraordinary marriage" as well as his acquaintance with Charles Williams. (I don't know much about Charles Williams compared to Lewis or Tolkien, and this may have been simple jealousy on Tolkien's part, but my impression is that Williams was still more misogynistic than Lewis and may well have influenced him in that direction. But I would have to do a lot more research before I started hanging any arguments on that.)

Lewis's marriage to Davidman was "extraordinary" in Tolkien's eyes not just because Davidman was divorced, which carried a much heavier stigma back then and was something Lewis himself had had strong views on, but because they got married twice. Their civil marriage was not the fruit of any kind of romantic relationship; Lewis did it purely to help Davidman get British citizenship. He is on record, before ever meeting Davidman, as believing that legal marriage for the purpose of state records was a completely separate matter from Christian marriage in the eyes of God. It was only after they were legally married that Lewis fell in love with Davidman and began taking her ideas on board.

So thank you, as I say, for taking the time to engage with my ideas. That Susan thread is in production and will hopefully not be more than another two or three reblogs; feel free to answer that too when it's finished.

This was on @whatareyoureallyafraidof's post where they put up this:

And I responded with this image:

and promised in the tags to elaborate if asked. And, @frodo-the-weeb, I will. But it's going to get long and I'm going to have to split it up into several reblogs.

First of all, since not everybody in the world is a Silmarillion enthusiast, let me explain what we're referring to.

One of the stories in the Silmarillion, and possibly the one Tolkien cared about the most, is the tale of Lúthien and Beren; a highly condensed version of a narrative poem called the Lay of Leithian, which Tolkien began writing in the 1930s and tried to get his publisher interested in after the success of The Hobbit.

(Their readers said no, and they tactfully asked him to focus on his Hobbit sequel instead. "The result," in Tolkien's own words, "was The Lord of the Rings.")

The skeleton of The Lay of Leithian is as follows; I'm intentionally leaving out a bunch of information that weaves it into the overarching story of the Silmarillion but isn't relevant to the thesis I'm advancing here.

Lúthien, an Elven princess and enchantress, falls in love with a mortal man, a ranger called Beren. Her father, the Elven King Thingol, disapproves and sends him Beren off to fetch one of the jewels from the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. Lúthien tries to join Beren but her father imprisons her in a tower to stop her, only it's actually a treehouse because they're forest elves. Lúthien magically grows her hair long and uses it to escape. By the time she catches up with Beren he is chained in the dungeons of Morgoth's second-in-command, Thû (whom Tolkien later renamed Sauron). She rescues him with the help only of a dog, who defeats Thû himself in single combat. They then live in the forest together for quite some time, but Beren feels bad about being the reason she can't go home to her family, and still intends to finish his mission and get the jewel. He leaves one morning while she's still asleep, so as not to put her in danger, and then when he's on the threshold of Morgoth's underground fortress in the far North of Middle-Earth she catches up with him again and he accepts that she's not going to be put off. Together they enter Morgoth's fortress and make their way to his throne room. They are in disguise but Morgoth is not fooled and uncovers Lúthien in front of everyone, declaring his intention to make her one of his many slaves. Lúthien offers to sing and dance for him, which is the way she works her magic. She puts everyone in the throne room to sleep, including both Beren and eventually Morgoth. She wakes Beren and he takes the jewel and they flee, but as they get to the outer door they are stopped by Morgoth's guard-wolf, who bites off Beren's hand holding the jewel.

That's as far as Tolkien ever got with the poem, but we have the synopsis in the prose Silmarillion to tell us the rest of the story; again cutting it down to the quick, Thingol accepts Beren as his son-in-law, Morgoth's guard-wolf attacks Doriath, Beren goes and hunts it but is mortally wounded, his spirit goes to the Halls of Waiting in the Undying Lands where the dead in Middle-Earth go, Lúthien also goes there and, again through her magical song, persuades Mandos the god of the dead to let him come back. Mandos offers her a choice: live on immortally as an Elf without Beren, or return to Middle-Earth with Beren but both of them will grow old and die. She chooses the latter.

Tolkien created Lúthien as a portrait of his wife Edith, which makes Beren a picture of himself. We know this for a fact because he had LUTHIEN written on her grave when she died, and when he joined her in it two years later the name BEREN was written for him:

Now on the lower right side of my response image you'll see Pauline Baynes' illustration of the Lady in the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories. A quick synopsis of the Lady of the Green Kirtle's part in the story:

The Lady is a witch who rules a gloomy kingdom underneath Narnia, accessible through a fissure in the earth in an old ruined city far to the North. Before the story opens she has enspelled and kidnapped King Caspian's son Prince Rilian, whom she intends to send leading an army to conquer Narnia in her name. For twenty-three hours a day he is her willing slave and lap-dog; to maintain the spell, he must be bound to the titular silver chair for the remaining hour, during which he is sane and aware of his imprisonment. The protagonists, Eustace and Jill and their guide Puddleglum, meet her and Rilian unawares on their journey to the North; she sends them astray and almost succeeds in getting them eaten by giants. Eventually they rescue Rilian from the chair, but she sings a magical song which very nearly puts them all to sleep but for Puddleglum's intervention. Foiled, she transforms into a serpent, attacks them, and they kill her.

It is my contention that the Lady in the Green Kirtle is Lewis's caricature of Lúthien, with the enslaved and befuddled Prince Rilian representing Beren; and further, that Lewis knew or recognised that Lúthien and Beren were a literary portrait of the Tolkiens, so that The Silver Chair is ultimately a nasty commentary on their marriage.

In forthcoming reblogs I will lay out my evidence for this thesis.

[nochd]

The last few days I've been trying to figure out where to start unwrapping this. I guess the easiest place is with Susan herself.

Susan is introduced in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with an adult-sounding line that gets the response "Stop trying to sound like Mother" from Edmund. She is presented as the voice, not of reason, but of common sense, in a situation where common sense is a liability -- where logic (as the Professor presents it to the children, and as opposed to Susan's common sense) says Lucy must have entered another world, because otherwise she must be either a liar or mad and she is manifestly neither a liar nor mad.

Does this sound familiar? If you've heard it from Christian public figures like William Lane Craig, they got it from Lewis: Jesus said he was God, Jesus therefore either was God or else a liar or a madman, and Jesus was manifestly neither a liar nor a madman. This is already an aside, so I'm not going to pull apart either the claim that Jesus said he was God or the inherent stereotyping of people with delusional mental conditions; it is enough to point out that Lewis himself, seeing his own argument applied to a different matter, realized no human being would actually draw such an extraordinary conclusion from it unless they already had more solid evidence under their hats, and so he wrote a story about the Professor going to Narnia as a boy.

Anyway. Susan has more common sense than abstract reasoning, and she is the least brave of the four Pevensies. Faced with an angry wolf, she flees up the nearest tree and almost faints, giving Peter an opportunity to rescue her and "win his spurs". But in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe she is (unlike Edmund until his repentance) a faithful follower of Aslan.

Susan returns in Prince Caspian. Now I've seen the complaint that her characterization is wildly inconsistent in that book. She's perfectly willing to do her part to save Trumpkin and travel back to Caspian's camp with them -- until Lucy sees Aslan and conveys his commands to the others, whereupon "Susan was the worst." Suddenly she's behaving like an impatient parent faced with a disobedient child. Did Lewis suddenly decide to change her character halfway through?

I don't think so. If you read the earlier part of the story carefully, there is one thing Susan never does. She never fights. When the Telmarines arrive with Trumpkin captive, she shoots to warn them, not to kill. She repeatedly tries to stop her brothers' perfectly friendly sparring (physical and verbal) with Trumpkin. She herself beats Trumpkin at archery but tries to deny it, claiming his shot was spoiled by a stray breeze; and sure enough, when they are actually shooting for their lives (at an attacking bear), Trumpkin is the one who kills it. In the book unlike the Disney / Walden Media adaptation, she stays far away from the action during the climactic battle.

Now as I said in the Silver Chair thread, I do credit the Planetary Theory about Narnia to some degree. Again, my argument here is informed by, but does not require, the hypothesis that Lewis wrote Prince Caspian to reflect the ideas, values, and atmosphere he associated with the astrological character of Mars. Even without that hypothesis, it is certain that Lewis liked to quote (without attribution, and I haven't been able to track it down) a phrase about courage needing to be "stern to inflict" as well as "stubborn to endure". The first half of Susan's arc in Prince Caspian serves to show that she is not stern to inflict; the second, that she is not stubborn to endure.

Susan is very briefly mentioned in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; we are told that she has gone to America with their parents, on account of her being uninterested in schoolwork but "otherwise very old for her age". Put a pin in that phrase.

Susan's final appearance is in The Horse and His Boy, in which she plays the role of Helen of Troy. No, I don't think she's just another example of the trope which happens to include Helen of Troy, I think Lewis very consciously modelled her after Helen of Troy. I think this because he also put in Helen's three quadruplet siblings by Zeus and Leda. Shasta / Cor is Castor and Corin his twin is Pollux, described by Homer as "master of horses" and "the mighty boxer" respectively, while Aravis's backstory has been strung together from disarranged events originally attached to Clytemnestra.

Though Susan's predicament is the lynchpin of the story, she appears in only one scene, where she confesses that she was attracted to Prince Rabadash when he visited them in Narnia but has seen him for what he is now that the Narnian party is returning the visit in Calormen. The party rescue her by a clever plan in which she herself plays little part. When Rabadash attacks the castle of Anvard, Lucy and Edmund fight to defend it but Susan is not there. (Nor is Peter, but Lewis gives him the excuse of fighting another battle elsewhere.)

The Horse and His Boy was published after The Silver Chair but written before it, between it and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My belief is that when Lewis first conceived it, The Horse and His Boy was going to fall into the within-world history after the Voyage; this would resolve a number of inconsistencies within the Narnian chronology and also follow through on the Voyage's prediction of a coming war with Calormen, which as things stand is left hanging. But if so, then what changed his mind? The only thing I can see is that, having settled on a Helen of Troy story, he felt that only Susan could play Helen's role.

Finally, I think it needs to be pointed out: though Susan, by her own confession, was happy to flirt with Rabadash when there was no prospect of a romantic outcome, she loses all interest when things get serious. I hope you've got another pin to put in that as well.

That's it for Susan in Narnia; the only thing remaining is her conspicuous absence, already noted, in The Last Battle. The three statements made about her by Jill, Eustace, and Polly will each prove to have significance.

But that's for next time, because I'm up very late right now.

So my post from December about the relationship between Tolkien's Lay of Leithian and the Narnia book The Silver Chair has gotten traffic again over the past week for some reason, and someone called @violetutterances left these tags:

#this was deeply fascinating as someone who has read both Lewis and Tolkien #I'd love to hear op's thoughts about The Susan Problem #I have no dog in that fight because I haven't been interested in Lewis since college but I'd love op's commentary within the context of thi

Hopefully this is not going to get "colour of the sky long" this time. Lots of other people have talked about the Susan Problem before, whereas I've never found anyone else who's noticed the Leithian-Silver Chair connection.

In case anyone reading this is in today's lucky 10,000, "the Susan Problem" is about what Lewis does with Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the course of the series, eight children from Our World cross into Narnia; in The Last Battle all of them except Susan have formed a secret society called "the Friends of Narnia". The events of the book see the Friends gather in what turns out to be Aslan's Country (=Heaven) after the Narnian world comes to an end. A Narnian character comments on Queen Susan's absence, and the following exchange ensues:

"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 now-a-days 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.

Not counting Peter, who is clearly uncomfortable with the whole subject, that's three statements about Susan and three points made. The message most readers take from the whole dialogue is: Susan grew up, she got interested in boys, Lewis disapproves so he sent her to Hell.

The real picture is more complicated than that -- but not necessarily better.

Whilst I do hope this thread doesn't get as long as the previous one, that's enough for one post. I'll be back.