Great Crimes of Twentieth Century Literature - Susan Pevensie Kevin Anslow

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Great Crimes of Twentieth Century Literature - Susan Pevensie

By this I do not mean the criminal acts perpetrated by characters within the pages of
books, but rather crimes perpetrated against characters within those pages by the
writers who bring them into being. It almost sounds like the plot of a 2006 updating of
Who Framed Roget Rabbit, but it is not. Read on, and you will understand.

And yes, I do believe such a thing is possible. Just because you invent a character and
they live entirely from you and of you during their creation, does not mean you can do
what you like to them. Oh no. Even writers don't get to play god, or they shouldn't.
There are times when writers commit acts of injustice against their creations and it is
up to the readers of books to show the error of their ways. No piece of writing that
reaches the public is ever entirely your own; it belongs to the imagination of many:
woe betide the writer who does not respect the reality and dignity of their own
creation.

What brings this subject up is the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. It is a series of 7
books. While what is technically first volume, The Magician’s Nephew deals with the
creation of Narnia, the magical land central to the tales, the final volume, The Last
Battle, concerns its destruction, and a sort of kiddie fantasyland last judgement, where
its inhabitants are ushered through a great gate, off into a heavenly version of Narnia
or down into somewhere else, hell I guess. Though wherever it is, a lot of people with
turbans end up there (Lewis' Calormenes, sort of fantasy Muslims as far as most
people can figure), so it could be the set of a Arabian Nights feature or the urban
landscape of the average UK city.

Throughout these books, children from our world are taken into Narnia and appear at
various parts of this land's history to assist with the benign designs of Narnia's Christ-
like, lion deity - Aslan. The most important of these visitors are Peter, Susan, Edmund
and Lucy, who feature in the film currently in cinemas, The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe. After they help save the day and defeat the wicked witch, they end up
spending a good portion of an adult life time as kings and queens of Narnia before one
day being returned to their former lives, once again children, as if they had never left.
Which is kind of strange and even slightly creepy, but when you are a kid you don't
care about things like that.

They return in Prince Caspian, to find that in Narnia hundreds of years have past and
their glorious kingdom is just a memory. After that adventure and restoring the Narnia
of old, Peter and Susan are deemed too old to return to the magical land by Aslan the
god lion and so new children are drafted in later books , Jill and Eustace, and Lucy and
Edmund become too old and so on.,..

In the final book, the entire cast of the series gets wiped out in a train crash and ends
up in Narnia at the time of the last judgement.... except one.

Susan.

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Great Crimes of Twentieth Century Literature - Susan Pevensie Kevin Anslow

Susan Pevensey, former queen of Narnia. She does not make it into Narnia, because
she has grown up and forgotten about the land of her childhood and the events she
experienced there. She no longer believes in Narnia. She has become a creature of
nylons and parties and other adult concerns, in other words a pretty average young
woman. Because of this, she gets left behind when the gig gets wrapped up. And this is
despite the fact that lion god Aslan promises "once a queen of Narnia, always a queen
of Narnia."

And this, is one of the greatest crimes of modern literature. Susan laid down her life to
help Narnia recover from the reign of the wicked witch. Susan lived an entire lifetime
in another world, helping rule a nation state, and dealing with the day to day affairs of
keeping the talking animals and centaurs and such happy, which can't have been that
easy. After all that work she gets turned back into a forties English schoolgirl again.
And then... she returns for a second innings in Prince Caspian and once again faced
combat and other forms of moral peril. She was a heroine who faced and survived
more than many hardened Vietnam veterans and heads of state put together.

And then, in the end, because she grows up and fancies getting laid, she ends up being
denied entry to Narnia heaven. Not only that, but this talking lion god, Aslan, takes her
entire family, parents, siblings, cousins in a train crash it probably orchestrated, and
leaves her alone, an orphan in the every day world. Alone. That's right, after all that,
alone, her world shattered ,the rest of the twentieth century ahead of her.

Susan Pevensey is one of the most tragic and wronged characters in modern literature.
She was sacrificed for the author's sense of philosophical and metaphysical
completeness. C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer in his later years, denies her paradise
basically because someone had to take the fall; someone had to show what happens to
sinners who have turned their back on the truth once the last judgement arrives. I
understand what C.S. Lewis was trying to do conceptually. Narnia, and the childlike
innocence that can accept it as real represents the higher spiritual truth within us, and
the material world and its adult fascinations represent the temptation that makes us
forget that truth. By identifying with the promise of the adult world, and dressing up to
impress boys Susan has lost her innocence to a certain extent and lost touch with the
vital spark she once held within. But this is a 1950's woman. What crimes C.S. Lewis
imagines her committing are probably about 1/15th of what the average teenager has
contended with these days by the time they reach adult maturity.

And did Susan really have to suffer so tragic a fate to make that point - not really. The
whole book, in contemporary terms is so fundamentally silly and contrived and dated,
it seems almost like an act of spite from an aged, crusty cleric wanting to deny the
promise and contradictions and mistakes of youth ever existed. Lewis was a middle
aged Oxford don when he wrote the story, I would guess he probably had absolutely
no idea whatsoever what went on in the minds of young girls or what impact his crime
would have on the imagination of future young women. To him, it seems to me, it was
just a philosophical point that needed to be made and I think, he made a mistake
sacrificing this brave young woman to do it. She deserves more. She at least deserves a
second chance. But Lewis is dead now; he will not be able to give it to her.

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Great Crimes of Twentieth Century Literature - Susan Pevensie Kevin Anslow

I am not the only one who feels the wrongness of what C.S. Lewis did in condemning
this young woman, hardly even old enough to truly understand the consequences of her
actions to solitude and heartbreak. The internet is abuzz with it. On one blog a woman
describes how, while reading the Narnia books, Susan felt like a big sister to her, and
to find her condemned for wearing sexy stockings was a blow and a tragedy she could
not comprehend a strike against female adolescence as a whole.

Here is a link to a story someone has written about what happens to Susan after the
events of the Last Battle.

http://honorh.livejournal.com/226358.html?view=1697078#t1697078

There are others out there too.

Go Susan, we love you and we forgive you, even if your crusty old creator didn't.