great crimes of twentieth century literature - susan pevensie

8/9/2019 Great Crimes of Twentieth Century Literature - Susan Pevensie

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Great Crimes of Twentieth Century Literature - Susan Pevensie Kevin Anslow

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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 theLion the Witch and the Wardrobe. It is a series of 7

books. While what is technically first volume, The Magicians 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 urbanlandscape 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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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 youngwoman. 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 survivedmore 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 paradisebasically 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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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 couldnot 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.

great crimes of twentieth century literature - susan pevensie

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