Laura Miller (9 page)

There is even some of this self-pitying thirst for revenge in the Harry Potter books. The long-suffering Harry, forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs by his dreadful foster family, the Dursleys, and often unfairly suspected of mischief at school, is always proven to be a blameless hero by the conclusion of each installment. Only at the very end of the series, in the seventh book, do we get a hint (and then only a hint) that Harry’s cousin, Dudley Dursley, might not be awful to the core, although in the first few installments he is not much worse than Eustace Scrubb at the beginning of
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
and Eustace is permitted to reform. More important, although neither the little princess Sara Crewe nor Harry Potter behaves as badly as Edmund does in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
they are in fact what Edmund only believes himself to be: wronged, aggrieved, undervalued, and due a little payback.

Much of the evil done in the world is committed by people who regard themselves in exactly this light. It’s a worthy thing, as Lurie observes, to encourage children to stand up for what they believe is right, even when that means defying authority. Still, this doesn’t impress me as a lesson of tremendous complexity or ambiguity. By comparison, I see great moral wisdom in suggesting that children ought to examine their own motives at the times they feel most injured and self-righteous. (Many grown-ups would benefit from the same exercise.)

You can, incidentally, absorb this aspect of Lewis’s morality without also subscribing to the Christianity that inspired it (just as professing Christianity is certainly no protection against the excesses of self-righteousness). Lewis himself believed in something he called “the Tao,” a term he appropriated from the Chinese to refer to what others have called natural law, a set of core values common to “the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan and the Jew.” Some of those values include the keeping of promises, loyalty to clan or country, and the defense of justice. It is the role of an educator to cultivate these principles in his students.

Lewis didn’t, however, think that literature was particularly well suited to this job. It did not escape his notice that people who read a lot of good books aren’t necessarily the more virtuous for it. In
An Experiment in Criticism,
he wrote that as far as he could tell, the ranks of nonreaders included many individuals who were superior “in psychological health, in moral virtue, practical prudence, good manners, and general adaptability. And we all know very well that we, the literary, include no small percentage of the ignorant, the caddish, the stunted, the warped, and the truculent.” What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: “it admits us to experiences other than our own.”

Late in life, speaking on the subject of writing for children, Lewis remarked that asking yourself “What do modern children need?” can never produce a good story. “If we ask that question,” he went on, “we are assuming too superior an attitude. It would be better to ask ‘What moral do I need?’ for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers, whatever their age. But it is better not to ask the question at all.” As the elements of the story emerge from the imagination, “the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life.”

The moral dilemmas that Edmund and the rest of Lewis’s child characters faced were his own. In his early thirties, he wrote to Arthur Greeves, admitting that his great weakness was pride and the rage that possessed him when his ego had been wounded. “The pleasure of anger,” he explained, “the gnawing attraction which makes one return again and again to its theme — lives, I believe, in the fact that one feels entirely righteous oneself only when one is angry.” It’s tempting, once you’re in control of a fictional universe of your very own, to “put absolutely all the right, with no snags or reservations, on the side of the hero (with whom you identify yourself) and all the wrong on the side of the villain. You thus revel in unearned self-righteousness, which would be vicious even if it were earned.” Instead, Lewis wrote a character like Edmund, who when caught playing a nasty trick, indignantly thinks to himself, “I’ll pay you all out for this, you pack of stuck-up, self-satisfied prigs.”

I didn’t for a moment feel lectured to or patronized by the Chronicles as a child. An adult reader, observing a dose of theology being dispensed, might well experience the irritation that most nonbelievers feel toward someone trying to convert them; it’s almost impossible to proselytize without condescension. However, what I saw in Edmund was not a representation of original sin but a boy whose one great, terrible mistake had been made up of many littler, unchecked moments of spite and ire that I could easily have indulged in myself. Because I wasn’t yet entirely willing to think of Edmund, and everything else in the Chronicles, as merely the invention of one man, I wouldn’t have asked myself if he was psychologically convincing; as far as I was concerned, he was
real.
I would not have believed in him so completely, however, if his creator hadn’t as well. His flaws were Lewis’s flaws; as a moral illustration, he’s a confession, not a lecture. We both hoped to be better than Edmund, and sometimes, no doubt, feared we were worse. In that, we were equals.

Chapter Six

Little House in the Big Woods

A
decade before he started writing
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
in earnest, Lewis jotted down the following paragraph on the back of another manuscript:

This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is mostly about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the army, had gone off to the war and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were being sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.

By the time this passage blossomed into a real book, Mother and Father had been erased from the opener (the vagueness of “some kind of war work” suggests just how uninteresting Lewis found them both) and the main character among the children, the youngest, had become a girl. This looks like an odd choice for Lewis, an Oxford bachelor who could at least claim that he remembered what it was like to be a little boy, but who knew next to nothing about little girls. (A small group of refugee London children did come to stay at his Oxford cottage in 1939, but he doesn’t seem to have had much to do with them.) Lewis would later give the name Peter to the eldest child among the Pevensie siblings, suggesting that he still felt a connection to that early false start, but the Peter of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
is a far more conventional figure than Lucy. And he is not the child the story is “mostly about.” Lucy is.

I identified with Lucy, of course, although, when called to, I could also identify with Edmund and Peter. One of the privileges of the girl reader is this flexibility in performing one of the elementary imaginative leaps of reading fiction. Boys, it is said, have difficulty with — or at least are resistant to — stories in which the protagonist is a girl. For the men I know who read the Chronicles when young, Peter and Edmund seem to loom larger in memory than they do for me, just as Aslan seems to be the brightest point for Christians. Nevertheless, it is Lucy who first gets into Narnia, and it is mostly through her eyes that we see the events of the first three books.

Lewis was a younger sibling himself, but only of two, and in spite of the three-year age difference between Warnie and himself, he was the leader of the pair; A. N. Wilson detects a “real forceful bossiness” in the letters Jack wrote to his brother, detailing plans for what the two of them would do during Warnie’s holidays from boarding school. That’s quite an accomplishment, pulling off a coup against the seniority system that usually prevails in sibling relationships. Perhaps some memory of this feat went into the character of Lucy, who, in the first two Chronicles, is often charged by Aslan with the task of persuading her skeptical brothers and sister to follow her lead. Lucy has a harder time of it than Lewis did, however, and in
Prince Caspian
she has to resort to threatening to strike off into the woods by herself if they won’t come with her. “I was closest to Lucy, because she was the youngest,” Jonathan Franzen told me. “I was the youngest kid. And nobody listened to her.”

Yet Lewis’s own biography can never entirely explain why he wound up switching to a girl protagonist after his initial stab at the story. The Chronicles may reflect some fragments of their author’s past, but they are substantially fashioned from bits and pieces of other books. The narrator’s voice, for example, owes much to the fiction of E. Nesbit, which Lewis loved as a boy. It is in books, as much as in Lewis’s own experiences, that the answer to the puzzle of Lucy lies. She is a believable little girl, as all the girl readers who have loved her can attest, but I suspect she began as a strategic solution to a literary problem. And that problem had its roots not in Lewis’s sympathy for little girls per se, but in the shortcomings and limitations of his ideas about boys.

Lewis preferred to conduct his intellectual and social life in a world of men, an old-fashioned but not uncommon attitude in a man of his background. Asked to write a short autobiographical paragraph for the American editions of his popular Christian works in 1944, one of the tidbits Lewis chose to offer was this: “There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.” “Masculine” was a word he often used approvingly in his literary criticism; in
The Allegory of Love,
he praised a group of poets for their “clear and masculine thought.” Although he had female students and by all accounts treated them kindly, he didn’t take them as seriously as the male ones, or at least didn’t place them among the first ranks. When, in the late 1920s, he decided to take an English degree at Oxford (in addition to his degree in Greats — which corresponds with what we would call Classics), he wrote sniffily in his diary, “The atmosphere of the English school is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and — I can’t say how — one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people.”

Women certainly weren’t included in Lewis’s annual “English binges,” at which his male pupils were invited (or, when reluctant, pressured) to get drunk on beer and bellow out “bawdy” — off-color jokes and songs culled from hoary ballads and Old English sources. (Lewis specified that the bawdy be “outrageous and extravagant,” although one younger friend characterized the typical example Lewis offered as “very mild.”) Lewis Carroll was a meek, socially maladroit don who told stories about a little girl because he found little girls more appealing (and less terrifying) than adults, but C. S. Lewis was the epitome of hearty British masculinity at the time he wrote
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
His manner, according to Wilson, got “bluffer and beerier and louder” as the years went on, but this, the biographer insists, was really a “persona,” a kind of act Lewis slipped into during middle age. Lewis’s bluffness was a mask perfectly adapted to the compartmentalization he had practiced since boyhood, a wall erected against those aspects of life and himself that he preferred to conceal.

Such a man, when writing a children’s book, would naturally begin with a boy hero, and that’s just what Lewis did. But the boy characters in the Edwardian children’s fiction Lewis grew up with didn’t have much emotional range. In
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
Peter — fair, brave, ethical, judicious, and decisive but not domineering — is an ideal eldest brother in every way, but as a human being he’s badly constrained by his role. Writing about Narnia released something free, lyrical, and tender in Lewis, and none of those qualities fit within the limitations of what he would have viewed as an acceptable boy character.

Practically the first thing we learn about Lucy in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
is that she is “a little afraid” of the strange-looking professor and easily creeped out by the huge old house with its empty rooms and corridors. This is perfectly understandable in a small girl, but Peter, unless he were very little indeed, would seem a coward if he expressed the same apprehension. Edmund can be afraid — of the White Witch, to give one example — but only when he is playing the quisling. After his reconciliation with Aslan and his siblings, he has to reclaim our admiration; accordingly, he becomes the most valiant warrior at the Battle of Beruna. Lucy, by comparison, can be vulnerable, can even waver at times, without ever coming across as weak; if anything, her courage, when she exhibits it, is all the more commendable because no one expects it of her. She can plead with Mr. Tumnus not to betray her to the witch and comfort him when he bursts into tears at the thought of his own perfidy — all without appearing “soft.”

Lewis is not the only storyteller to find that his own investment in conventional masculinity makes a female protagonist the most appealing choice. In her book
Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
Carol J. Clover, a professor of Scandinavian and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, considers the curious case of the low-budget slasher films of the late twentieth century. These movies, despite their reputation for catering to the misogyny of their predominantly young male audience, almost always featured a particular kind of young woman as the hero. Clover came up with a name for this recurring figure, usually the only member of a group of teenagers to survive the film’s ordeals and defeat a supernaturally monstrous antagonist: she is the “Final Girl.” Clover writes, “The Final Girl is . . . a congenial double for the adolescent male.” Providing an “identificatory buffer,” the Final Girl allows the men in the audience to experience vicariously “taboo” sensations like fear and vulnerability without shame.