The Lion and Susan (Narnia Spoilers)
Dec. 6th, 2005 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsNow that the movie's bringing a lot of focus on Narnia again, I'm seeing the first stirrings of the reawakening of the Great Susan Debate - what precisely happened to her, did she deserve it, and is she in essence damned?
All of the books are pretty simplistic (and patronizing about who the "right" kind of people are to boot) so it's pretty easy to take The Last Battle's passage about Susan at face value - she had been distracted by worldly things and sexuality, and had basically become an apostate. Her punishment is to be "Left Behind" quite literally - her entire family dies (and goes on to have a rip-snorting life after death). Susan is left behind to inherit the Earth, such as it is in comparison.
The reason I'm weighing in is because I've been rereading my favorites before the movie opens on Friday. And there are two plot points that nobody else has mentioned:
1)The Susan that Polly describes in TLB is not the Susan we actually met.
2)Aslan had told Susan she was no longer allowed into Narnia.
Susan Who?
Polly dismissively says that Susan always wanted to rush to a certain age and then to stay there all her life. Which in itself is fine; don't we all know people who essentially tried to be 16 or 18 or 20 all their lives? And don't we all pretty much agree that that's pathetic?
Except that the Susan we actually *met* wasn't like that at all. Susan was kind and compassionate - so much so, that she was dubbed Susan the Gentle. When she was an adult in Narnia in LWWW, she was the one people came to for counsel - and Lewis also goes out of his way to say how many men were trying to get her to marry them. If all she had ever wanted was to be grown up and courted and popular, why didn't she revel in that as much as possible, instead of politely turn them all down? If there was going to be a personification of worldliness among the Narnian heroes, Edmund or Eustace would have been better choices. Certainly not the only one of the girls brave enough to fight in battle and caring enough to sit by Aslan in his defeat.
The only website I've found that argued that Susan was inherently bad is a far-right one that condemns her for being negative - which in the context of the books means she's just being logical. When dumped into a strange, hostile world with two younger siblings to protect, it's not a mark of defeatism to say "I think we should go back." When she has no reason to think that Aslan would hide from her (Book 2), of course she's not going to believe that he is. Susan is a very literal person. Which leads to my bigger point:
When Aslan told her she couldn't come back, why wouldn't she believe him? And more importantly, why wouldn't someone who had dedicated a lot of her life and energy to something she loved deeply - in LWWW she spent decades in Narnia, putting off her own possible wishes to be a wife in order to stay and rule as wisely as possible - why wouldn't it be absolutely natural that she would be would be terribly, terribly hurt? So deeply pained at being locked out of Heaven without even having committed the sin of pride that she couldn't bear the mention of Narnia? That she would throw herself into this world to try to drive off the memories?
Aslan broke Susan's heart in Narnia, and then he broke it again in this world - there is no reason to assume that she had stopped loving her family or her siblings.
And that leads to something that I didn't realize when I was a kid. When you're young, you're so used to being controlled by the adults around you, that one more capricious being making decisions for you is totally natural. But now I realize just how capricious Aslan was - and how demandingly cruel. You never know what he's thinking or what he expects until he gives an order, and he's quick to fault anything but perfect execution of his wishes.
In Joan of Arcadia, God was capricious - but we also knew in general what he was up to; the butterfly principle writ large. And he delighted in the oddities of his creation and patiently soaked up their railings against him.
Aslan is a much colder and frankly crueler God... as Susan came to learn.
All of the books are pretty simplistic (and patronizing about who the "right" kind of people are to boot) so it's pretty easy to take The Last Battle's passage about Susan at face value - she had been distracted by worldly things and sexuality, and had basically become an apostate. Her punishment is to be "Left Behind" quite literally - her entire family dies (and goes on to have a rip-snorting life after death). Susan is left behind to inherit the Earth, such as it is in comparison.
The reason I'm weighing in is because I've been rereading my favorites before the movie opens on Friday. And there are two plot points that nobody else has mentioned:
1)The Susan that Polly describes in TLB is not the Susan we actually met.
2)Aslan had told Susan she was no longer allowed into Narnia.
Susan Who?
Polly dismissively says that Susan always wanted to rush to a certain age and then to stay there all her life. Which in itself is fine; don't we all know people who essentially tried to be 16 or 18 or 20 all their lives? And don't we all pretty much agree that that's pathetic?
Except that the Susan we actually *met* wasn't like that at all. Susan was kind and compassionate - so much so, that she was dubbed Susan the Gentle. When she was an adult in Narnia in LWWW, she was the one people came to for counsel - and Lewis also goes out of his way to say how many men were trying to get her to marry them. If all she had ever wanted was to be grown up and courted and popular, why didn't she revel in that as much as possible, instead of politely turn them all down? If there was going to be a personification of worldliness among the Narnian heroes, Edmund or Eustace would have been better choices. Certainly not the only one of the girls brave enough to fight in battle and caring enough to sit by Aslan in his defeat.
The only website I've found that argued that Susan was inherently bad is a far-right one that condemns her for being negative - which in the context of the books means she's just being logical. When dumped into a strange, hostile world with two younger siblings to protect, it's not a mark of defeatism to say "I think we should go back." When she has no reason to think that Aslan would hide from her (Book 2), of course she's not going to believe that he is. Susan is a very literal person. Which leads to my bigger point:
When Aslan told her she couldn't come back, why wouldn't she believe him? And more importantly, why wouldn't someone who had dedicated a lot of her life and energy to something she loved deeply - in LWWW she spent decades in Narnia, putting off her own possible wishes to be a wife in order to stay and rule as wisely as possible - why wouldn't it be absolutely natural that she would be would be terribly, terribly hurt? So deeply pained at being locked out of Heaven without even having committed the sin of pride that she couldn't bear the mention of Narnia? That she would throw herself into this world to try to drive off the memories?
Aslan broke Susan's heart in Narnia, and then he broke it again in this world - there is no reason to assume that she had stopped loving her family or her siblings.
And that leads to something that I didn't realize when I was a kid. When you're young, you're so used to being controlled by the adults around you, that one more capricious being making decisions for you is totally natural. But now I realize just how capricious Aslan was - and how demandingly cruel. You never know what he's thinking or what he expects until he gives an order, and he's quick to fault anything but perfect execution of his wishes.
In Joan of Arcadia, God was capricious - but we also knew in general what he was up to; the butterfly principle writ large. And he delighted in the oddities of his creation and patiently soaked up their railings against him.
Aslan is a much colder and frankly crueler God... as Susan came to learn.
