Laura Miller (19 page)

Those who wish to defend Lewis against charges of misogyny often point to the many heroines in the Chronicles. Besides Lucy, there’s Jill Pole, Polly, and Aravis from
The Horse and His Boy
— all sensible, stouthearted girls. But the first three are still children whose sexuality and physical allure have yet to emerge, and Aravis is a tomboy, in full flight from the womanly fate of marriage to a husband chosen by her Calormene father. While Aravis and her friends are attempting to escape the city of Tashbaan, she encounters a childhood friend, the Tarkheena Lasaraleen, who embodies all the feminine foolishness that Aravis has so wisely rejected.

Lasaraleen simply can’t fathom why Aravis would reject her prospective groom — a sniveling elderly sycophant, but also a rich and powerful vizier. Nevertheless, finding the whole intrigue “perfectly thrilling,” she agrees to help her old friend escape. Getting Lasaraleen to focus on practicalities, however, proves difficult. She takes forever to pick out an outfit and prattles on about court figures when they ought be on the move. The exasperated Aravis remembers how “Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming.”

The menace threatening Narnia in
The Horse and His Boy
is an invasion from Calormen. The story takes place during the reign of the Pevensie siblings, and it’s the only Chronicle in which we get to see much of them as adults. A party from Narnia, led by Edmund and Susan, makes a state visit to Tashbaan to consider a marriage proposal Susan has received from Prince Rabadash, the son of the Calormene potentate, the Tisroc. Now grown-up, Susan has become a great beauty, and her judgment has already begun to weaken.

As Rabadash’s true character becomes apparent, Edmund marvels that his sister could ever have entertained the idea of marrying him. Susan says that the prince had deceived her by behaving very “meekly and courteously” while in Narnia. (It’s hard to imagine that the arrogant, hotheaded Rabadash could have been very convincing at this.) The Narnians, suspecting that Rabadash won’t take no for an answer, are then forced to leave the city by stealth. Afterward, the enraged prince urges his father to invade Narnia: “I cannot sleep and my food has no savour and my eyes are darkened because of her beauty,” he wails. “I must have the barbarian queen!”

At best, in Lewis’s view, a taste for “clothes and parties and gossip” makes a woman useless and annoying; at worst, the snares of sex lead to danger, war, and devastation. We expect a children’s book to avoid depictions of sex, but Lewis takes this further by surrounding almost every approach to the subject with contempt or fear — for what are “clothes and parties and gossip” if not tools in the art of meeting and attracting a mate? Grown women are the chief agents and arbiters of this unfortunate business. Without them around, men can concentrate on the adventures that delighted them as boys, albeit on a larger scale — just as Lewis might have spent far more time on reading, writing, and drinking with the Inklings if he hadn’t succumbed to the charms of Janie Moore in the waning years of the Great War.

Girls, of course, aren’t necessarily excluded from adventures in Narnia, but they must learn to be less girly first. They ought to abandon feminine wiles and concerns. Lucy, in contrast with her sister, is a paragon in this department. When she turns up, armed with bow and arrows, for the climactic battle in
The Horse and His Boy,
a character remarks that she’s “as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy. Queen Susan is more like an ordinary grown-up lady.” Instead of helping to win the war, Susan causes it.

It took me quite a while to recognize the trap in this. I didn’t have much use for clothes or parties myself until I reached my twenties, and I’m still no aficionado of gossip. But unlike Lucy, who apparently dies a virgin, I eventually faced the paradox that confronts most heterosexual women: revel in girly stuff and you’re viewed as shallow; reject it and you’re unattractively mannish. The best you can hope to be is “as good as a boy,” and the worst is a man-eater, a time-waster, a “hindrance” or perhaps, as Janie Moore would discover, the occasion for someone else’s martyrdom. The only way out is to remain a child forever, as Lucy does, but somehow even this is much easier for men — nostalgic bachelors like Warnie Lewis — to pull off. Besides, I
wanted
to grow up, didn’t I? As a child, I’d always believed that Lewis was on my side in that. As a young woman, I realized he’d disappointed me again.

Chapter Thirteen

Blood Will Out

T
he Natural History of Make-Believe
by John Goldthwaite is a little-known “history of the world’s imaginative literature for children,” a passionate and partisan work, full of fiery tirades against several titles that are usually published with the words “The Beloved Classic” stamped on their covers. It was recommended to me by Philip Pullman, who said that he’d encountered one of the best articulations of his own criticisms of Lewis in the work of Goldthwaite, an American academic. Pullman thought I’d find
The Natural History of Make-Believe
particularly interesting because Goldthwaite is a Christian, and his animus toward Narnia can’t be summarily written off as anti-theist prejudice, the way Pullman’s often is.

Perhaps the most unconventional argument that Goldthwaite mounts in
The Natural History of Make-Believe
concerns
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
which he regards not as a charming flight of fancy but as a risible “bout of rancor.” Lewis Carroll’s novel, he maintains, is the toxic product of its author’s thwarted artistic and social ambitions. I’m not sure I can entirely agree with that, any more than I would argue that children’s fiction ought to be devoid of anger, but he has a point; a friend of mine stopped reading the book to his four-year-old daughter because she found the characters upsettingly “mean.”

In Goldthwaite’s chapter on Middle-earth and Narnia, he raises some familiar objections to the Chronicles — Lewis’s evident fear of powerful, sexual women and the occasional sideswipes at such crackpot progressive notions as coed schooling. He also brings up a few others that I hadn’t considered before. Goldthwaite (who knows a thing or two about rancor) has a tendency to work up a full head of rhetorical steam and then let it run away with him for pages at a time. Still, he’s undeniably intelligent and he makes a troubling case against Lewis’s elitism.

Goldthwaite particularly detests a passage from
Prince Caspian
in which Aslan leads a jubilant procession through a Narnia that he has just liberated from another occupation, this time by humans, the Telmarines. The lion’s party comes upon a school. Under Aslan’s influence, magical ivy grows over and then crushes the school’s walls and desks, freeing a classroom of miserable girls dressed in tight collars and “thick tickly stockings.” Most of the girls scatter in fear, but one, Gwendolen, hesitates and is invited by Aslan to join his companions. Gwendolen’s school is one in a series of dreary, workaday scenarios Aslan’s entourage upends along their way. The procession, which includes Bacchus and his Maenads, releases a river god from a bridge, a boy from a man beating him with a stick, and a tired girl teaching arithmetic to “a number of boys who looked very like pigs,” (and who will, à la
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
eventually turn into pigs).

This scene, with its rambunctious celebrants, enchanted vines, frisking beasts, and general holiday air, has long been one of my favorites. Jonathan Franzen calls it “erotic,” and Lewis himself seemed a bit overwhelmed by the wantonness of all the dancing, drinking, and sticky-fingered grape eating. At one point, he has Susan whisper to Lucy, “I wouldn’t have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.” This is the only point in the Chronicles where we can sense any concern in the author that his readers might get swept up in all the pagan delirium. For myself, I remember thinking that, contra Susan, Bacchus’s “wild girls” sounded like one of the few clubs I’d really like to join.

Goldthwaite sees something else again in Aslan’s march. The narrator dismisses the rest of the students from Gwendolen’s demolished school, the ones who run away from Aslan, as “mostly dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs.” The line infuriates Goldthwaite to the degree that he calls it “the vilest passage ever to poison a children’s book.” Imagine, he suggests, a vulnerable child somewhere, reading this description and recognizing that her own chubby legs must forever relegate her to the ranks of the unchosen; such a slur, Goldthwaite maintains, constitutes nothing less than “sadism.” Fat-legged girls are “Lewis’s Jews”: “The word evil springs to mind,” he fulminates, “and, if not evil, then certainly the word shame.”

Goldthwaite’s outrage may be over the top, but it’s not unfounded. Classic fairy tales, like the ones collected in Andrew Lang’s nineteenth-century color books (
The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book,
and so on), commonly make their virtuous characters beautiful and their wicked characters ugly. But Lewis, a twentieth-century author attempting to model Christian values, ought to have known better. He wasn’t writing a traditional fairy tale; those stories feature brutalities that he would never have dreamed of including in Narnia: torture, people thrown into ovens alive, dismemberment, cannibalism, and so on. Besides, Lewis condemned petty vanity and prided himself on not caring much about appearances; his clothes were notoriously shabby and even his house was run-down. To make the primitive error of linking someone’s unattractive looks with spiritual unworthiness (or vice versa) is exactly the sort of thing a “silly, conceited,” and superficial young woman like the grown-up Susan Pevensie would do.

Goldthwaite views the crack about fat legs as one among many instances of in-group snottiness in the Chronicles. Caspian rejects a potential bride because she “squints and has freckles.” Eustace Scrubb, at the beginning of
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
is derided not just for reading the wrong kinds of books, but also for having parents who “were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underwear.” Such remarks, writes Goldthwaite, work like “keep-out signs on the clubhouse door.” (He also reads a great deal into the name Gwendolen, with its posh intimations of the most popular girl at boarding school.) And true enough, a whiff of clubbiness
does
waft through the Chronicles — an unthinking complacency about the superiority of “our kind” (that is, Lewis’s kind) of people which goes beyond even the knee-jerk attitudes about race. Nowhere does this seem more apparent to me than in
The Horse and His Boy,
my least favorite among the books (after
The Last Battle,
of course).

The Horse and His Boy
has several villains, but in a way its least appealing character is Corin, a boy made more disagreeable by being offered to readers as one of the good guys. Corin is the twin brother of the book’s hero, Shasta; both are born princes of Archenland, Narnia’s close ally and neighbor. They were separated in infancy when Shasta was kidnapped, lost in a battle, and then raised by a Calormene fisherman as his son. Even a casual observer can tell Shasta doesn’t belong in his adoptive father’s smelly seaside cottage; a Calormene visitor describes the boy as “fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North.” (That the Calormenes invariably find the light-skinned Narnians beautiful is yet another of this book’s unsavory motifs.) Furthermore, Shasta harbors an instinctive fascination with the north, a yearning that Bree, the talking horse who escapes with him, believes comes from “the blood that’s in you. I’m sure you’re true northern stock.” Much later, when Shasta finds his way to Archenland, a northern lord remarks, “The boy has a true horseman’s seat, Sire. I’ll warrant there’s noble blood in him.”

Blood will out, and some blood is finer than others: these are persistent ideas in
The Horse and His Boy.
Shasta is modest, loyal, and likeable, and despite being raised amid Calormene “slaves and tyrants,” he behaves much like the Pevensies and the other children from our world who get to Narnia. He has been reared by the wily and avaricious Arsheesh, yet he has very Pevensian scruples, objecting to a plan that involves “a certain amount of what Shasta called stealing and Bree called ‘raiding.’” He even talks like a British schoolboy: “Oh bother breakfast,” he says after waking up saddle-sore on the first morning of his flight north. “Bother everything.” Shasta sometimes expects other people to act with a Calormene ruthlessness (“He had, you see, no idea how noble and free-born people behave”), but his own natural responses always resemble those of the fair-playing, unpretentious Narnian lords he first sees whistling through the streets of Tashbaan.

Corin, by contrast, is an unadulterated upper-class alpha boy: cocky, insensitive to others, easily riled, and always up for a fight. In Tashbaan, Shasta is mistaken for Corin in the street and winds up spending an afternoon in the Narnians’ quarters while the truant Corin is off getting into a brawl with the locals. Later, in Archenland, Corin disobeys orders by sneaking the two of them into the novel’s climactic battle at the gates of Anvard, even though Shasta has no experience with a sword or any other kind of fighting. Corin consistently plays a pint-sized Hotspur to Shasta’s prepubescent Hal; perhaps Lewis meant him to be a character like the heroes of the school stories he read as a boy, someone he thought his child readers would admire. And perhaps that’s why, for me, Corin contributes to the impression that this novel celebrates what Goldthwaite calls “an elitist clique for Top Boys and Girls.”

It is Corin who explains to Shasta that Lucy is “as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy.” For Corin, merit in battle is all that really counts. He is the first to publicly mock Rabadash once the Calormene prince has been mortifyingly defeated and captured in the battle of Anvard. (A hole in Rabadash’s hauberk gets caught on a hook as he is leaping down from a mounting block, and he’s left hanging from the castle’s wall like “a piece of washing.”) Corin’s father, King Lune, does reproach his son for the taunt, but that is merely Lewis’s way of having his cake and eating it, too, of permitting himself to humiliate Rabadash while pretending that his characters are too good to kick a man when he’s down. There’s more than a touch of the bully in Corin, yet the narrator clearly expects us to like him, to shake our heads fondly at his excesses just as the adults around him do, with the conviction that at heart he is all right, and he is all right because he is one of us.