the Last Battle pt9
I would agree that C.S Lewis had some…issues. Every author does and the majority of them are flawed people in their personal lives. But it's unfair to flip out and overreact to every percieved instance of sexism in books that are hardly worse about gender relations than a lot of their contemporaries. I'm not under the delusion that he's some great feminist, but I can definitely say I've seen much, much worse. Like the last season of Angel.

Perhaps I own some special edited versions of the books, where all the Horribly Offensive Stuff has been removed?

Lewis has a chatty, conversational style, at least in these books. And while this means you feel as if he’s confiding in you personally, it also means people tend to feel like he’s personally approving or disapproving of their lives- the favorite uncle telling you wonderful stories by the fireside is someone you do not want to feel like you've let down and you feel betrayed when it turns out he's not perfect. They get very upset if his opinions on something are different from theirs- much more so than they do when they disagree with JKR or Terry Pratchett or Stephen King. And sometimes they overreact when they think he is making judgments about them, and start yelling before even considering that there might be something more to it or that they are taking things too literally or looking at it from the wrong angle. Everyone comes to a book with filters on based on their own life experiences, and sometimes we take these basic sets of meanings and try to plug them into every book whether it works in that book’s universe or not. Even if answers to questions asked are contained in parts of canon we haven’t bothered to read. But this is not a post about why Jadis is no misunderstood feminist icon.

It is, however, a bit of an UnPopular Fannish Opinion I'm about to express. And I'm probably going to regret it. This one's a two parter, folks.



She is drawn to the fire, some people never learn

This post took shape after one too many comments like this one:
"As some of you might know, Lewis never permitted the girls in the books to engage combat, despite giving Susan a bow that never misses."

Damn it people, YES HE DID. Yes, I just yelled but how can you claim to have “written your thesis” on this and not know that? To say that he never allowed them to fight is just plain wrong and a sure sign someone didn’t read all the books.

The person I just quoted said books. It was one book, one book in which Susan and Lucy were told to stay out of the battle. And in LWW, yes it was clumsily handled and a poor choice of words but it did result in Susan and Lucy seeing Aslan’s resurrection. Which the boys did not get to see and C.S Lewis seems to consider their god coming back from the dead the more important moment since he glosses over most of the battle and concentrates his narration on the girls. And this makes perfect sense, if you’re aware of the Easter story parallels, because it was three women who found the empty tomb of Jesus. Lucy is Mary Magdalene and so Lucy must be at the Stone Table. And someone considered more sensible and less excitable has to be there with her so other people believe it when she claims he died and rose again (otherwise, they’d say “sure, Lucy, he’s back and everything but he was probably faking being dead. Or not quite dead. Or…”). No one would ever accuse Susan of being confused or letting her imagination get carried away. Peter was definitely needed in battle. And Edmund’s a liar- even in PC, Peter and Susan do not consider Edmund taking Lucy’s side in the “I totally really did see Aslan again” debate as a ringing endorsement of Lucy’s argument. Instead, Lucy *and* Ed’s protests are ignored.

How can you have read “The Last Battle” (which you need to have done in order to write your thesis on The Problem of Susan) and not know that Jill Pole fought in the final battle for Narnia and if she hadn’t died in a train crash in her own world at the same time, it’s likely that she would have died in that battle? King Tirian shows very little surprise or disapproval of her joining them in the fight. He relies on her quite a bit, she kicks ass, actually, more ass than Eustace who really isn’t good at fighting, and half the final battle scene is done from her point of view. The author didn't just put a woman in battle, he wrote from her point of view during the battle. I guess that didn’t happen in this AU version of Narnia these people read. She probably doesn’t even exist in that version. In this AU Narnia, Lucy also never went into battle during H&HB. Her title isn’t “Queen Lucy the Valiant” and her prowess in battle is not discussed in awed voices among her own people. She didn’t gleefully enjoy being in battle either. Oh no, not in AU Narnia.

I often wish people would just shut up about The Problem of Susan. Yeah, I said that You heard me. It’s inevitable, and it drives me nuts when people boil the entire series down to “But C.S Lewis screwed over Susan.” I mean, geez. They act as if this Susan thing destroys everything good about the series, using words like “horribly betrayed”. Maybe I'm being too easy on him, maybe I'm deluded, but this just doesn't upset me as much as it seems to upset so many other readers.

Don't most people treat women who like clothes, makeup and boys, the same way? And award some special status of “intelligent human being” to girls who prefer traditional male pursuits? Come on guys, you know you do. Bookworms and geek girls usually have a special level of disgust for girls who talk only about makeup, clothes and fashionable parties (and it's not that she liked them, it's that it was *all* she cared about anymore). In any other fandom, the Susan character would be the one you all hated, bashed and kept trying to get rid of. This is why, in H&HB, Lasaraleen is funny, and if you bothered to read that one, you laughed just like everyone else and you were probably glad Aravis was the heroine and Lasaraleen just a brief sidekick. If Lewis had presented Susan’s obsession with boys, parties and her appearance as virtues instead of flaws, everyone would still cry “sexism!” I certainly never got the impression that it was meant to “teach little girls that liking lipstick will bar you from Heaven”. If that’s what you got out of it, that’s your problem, not anyone else’s (and is probably the result of someone else’s Views on lipstick, someone who got to you long before you read these books). I do not think C.S Lewis cared whether you personally liked makeup and parties or not. I really don’t. Don’t be so bloody literal minded- the thing, the obsession to the exclusion of other things, which distracted Susan from Aslan could have been anything, school, sports, money, politics, even a job. It was never about the damn makeup. And if you try to say “well, it was because she didn’t believe”, then you get the people who don’t believe all upset.