OT: The Problem of Susan

James Wynn · 05 Nov 2004, 15:57 · from 2004-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Fri Nov  5 15:57:15 2004
Subject: (urth) OT: The Problem of Susan
References: <BDB15A70.4A118%adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <005d01c4c393$2b318150$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>

I haven't read "The Problem of Susan", but I have read "Narnia" several
times so I will butt in on only one point.

>Like near-'bout eveyrthing else
>in Narnia, the "lipstick" bit is there for a polemic point - a point
>further driven in by the statement that Susan is "no longer a
>Friend of Narnia," that she regards Narnia as a "game we used
>to play."

>I, and I suspect most others who criticize Lewis, certainly "get" Lewis's
>point. Our point is that as his exemplar of someone who had turned their
>back on God, Lewis chose a girl whose "fault" is to be preoccupied with
just
>those things that most adolescent girls in his society were preoccupied
>with. No doubt you'll retort that it was just by chance that his exemplar
>was a girl, and has no larger significance; I'm not so sure.

The point about the "lipstick and nylons" was that she turned her back on
all things of childhood - such as Narnia (which, in life, only children
could enter). "Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall
not enter in at all" (Mark 10:16). This it the reference Lewis seemed to be
reaching for.

Susan, most significant among all the Narnian heroes as especially
beautiful, was an obvious choice for this type of temptation: to reject
childhood for the *trappings* of adulthood. Had C.S. Lewis chosen Peter for
this role instead, he would doubtless have had him all wrapped up in
"business" or "science". But these are less elegant symbols than "lipstick"
(remember that Susan's rejection of Narnia is explained in 3 or 4
sentences), and anyway the lure of adulthood is profoundly different for
boys than it is in girls and so I would say that Susan was simply the better
choice. She just was. It wasn't misogynistic.

~ Crush

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net