C.S. Lewis failed. He failed to clearly say what he was trying to say. He failed his readers. He failed Susan.
When I read The Last Battle as a kid, and got to the moment when Susan was “no longer a friend of Narnia” I was shocked. Well, I thought, there are still some pages left to go. I’m sure she’ll be back before the end. But she wasn’t. And all of her siblings and friends, her cousin, even her parents, were romping along through New Narnia without ever mentioning her again.
It felt strange, and dismissive, and horrible. Much of the end of the book is about catching up with old friends, with cameos and reunions with beloved companions from previous books, even those who were dead—Reepicheep and Fledge and Puddleglum and Caspian—and yet somehow Susan never gets a moment. We don’t even peek in on her back on Earth, and no one thinks to ask, “Is Sue alright?”
Many readers felt this way as they made their way to the end of The Last Battle. Neil Gaiman famously wrote his story “The Problem of Susan” to explore those feelings. (Not, as some have suggested, as a point by point refutation of Lewis. As Gaiman himself said, “There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature.”) He has also said of Susan’s fate, “It’s this weird moment that just seemed wrong.”
J.K. Rowling didn’t like it, either. “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.”
And Philip Pullman said, “I just don’t like the conclusions Lewis comes to, after all that analysis, the way he shuts children out from heaven, or whatever it is, on the grounds that the one girl is interested in boys. She’s a teenager! Ah, it’s terrible: Sex—can’t have that.”
So let’s look at what Lewis meant to say and then explore what we heard. What’s the argument he’s making, and who is Susan? What was he hoping we’d come away with? And did we understand him?
To start, we should look at the entire conversation about her in The Last Battle:
“Sir,” said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. “If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?”
“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”
“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'”
“Oh Susan!” said Jill, “she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”
“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”
“Well, don’t let’s talk about that now,” said Peter. “Look! Here are lovely fruit trees. Let us taste them.”
And then, for the first time, Tirian looked about him and realised how very queer this adventure was.
Yes, Tirian, this adventure is very queer indeed!
I should say this first, because—even knowing what Lewis intended—this still irritates me: I think Lewis knew early on what he intended to do to Susan. There are too many clues in the other books.
In a letter to a young fan who wrote upset about Susan, Lewis replied, “Haven’t you noticed in the two you have read that she is rather fond of being too grownup? I am sorry to say that side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia.”
What we know about Susan is a good place to start. What do we know as we’re entering The Last Battle?
Well, we know that even in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Susan tended toward being the adult in the Pevensie family. She told Edmund when to go to bed, she’s the only one who suggested taking coats from the wardrobe as they stepped into the Narnian winter (cleverly suggesting they weren’t even stealing because they were still in the wardrobe).
It was also Susan who asked for permission to go with Aslan to the Stone Table. She was there at the death and resurrection of Aslan. She played tag with him after he came back to life, she rode upon his back on the way to the White Witch’s castle and watched him breathe the statues back to life. In fact, in an early article in this series I argued that in many ways she’s the most suited to Narnia of all the Pevensie children.
When the Pevensies return to Narnia the second time (we talked about Susan in Prince Caspian at length here), Susan is still in the “second mother” role for her siblings… which seems both natural and right, given that they’re without their mother at this time. She’s the practical one who makes sure they eat. Lucy is annoyed by her talking “like a grown-up” when Susan says things like “Where did you think you saw” Aslan. She’s become a bit of a skeptic, though she admits that she believed all along “deep down.” But she’s still Susan the gentle. When they come across a wild bear she fails to shoot at it, because she’s worried it might be a talking bear gone feral. Once she’s back with Aslan she’s completely with Aslan. She and Peter offer to walk through the doorway between worlds at the end of the book, even though they know it means they will never come to Narnia again. (As Aslan explains, they’ve become “too old” for Narnia and it’s time for them to find him in their own world.)
Whatever Lewis is getting at in The Last Battle, it’s not just that Susan is beautiful and is interested in boys. In The Horse and His Boy, we see her when she’s about 26, ruling in Narnia, and she’s gorgeous. Tall and gracious and gentle. Everyone loves her. Many princes want to marry her, and in fact the Pevensies are in Calormen because she’s considering marrying Rabadash. Not once are we told that she’s being inappropriate, or working against the will of Aslan, or doing anything evil. She’s not kicked out of Narnia for it. Aslan doesn’t speak to her sternly about it. She’s become a sort of surrogate mother to Prince Corin, who thinks of her as “an ordinary grown-up lady.”
So if we’re looking at everything we know about Susan all together, we realize that the issue—according to the “friends of Narnia” even—isn’t that she’s gotten too mature, or that nylons and lipsticks and invitations are bad, or that sex is evil, or that Susan has discovered boys…it’s that she’s become so focused on what she thinks an adult should be that she’s lost sight of Aslan. She has settled for something she thinks she wants instead of something better.
She’s interested in nothing but nylons and lipstick and invitations. She’s so focused on growing up that Polly says she’s not a grown-up at all. Where is Susan the Gentle, who not only entertained suitors at court, but also cared for orphans? She’s become all about the one and forgotten the other. She’s become, Lewis says in one of his letters, “a rather, silly, conceited young woman.”
It feels a little forced to me, and I know to many others. Susan always came around before, so why not this time? She loved Aslan as much as anyone, how could she just forget?
Of course, here we come to another problem, another place Lewis failed.
This time it’s very much because he needs all his characters to stand in for something. He needs them not just to “be” but also to “represent.” We see this beautifully done on occasion, like when Eustace shows us what it means to be spiritually transformed. We see it awkwardly done in his short stories. So Lewis has a variety of characters standing in for various things: Emeth is the good heathen. Puzzle is the deceived but well-intentioned believer. Lucy is the natural believer, Edmund the redeemed traitor, Peter is St. Peter more or less, Eustace is the completely transformed person. We have the skeptics who can’t see they’re in paradise (the dwarves), we have the atheist scared literally witless by the true vision of Aslan (Ginger the cat).
But Lewis needed someone to answer the question, “What about a true believer who walks away from God and is distracted by the world?” It couldn’t be Lucy, of course. Couldn’t be Peter, the True King. Couldn’t be Edmund or Eustace, it would destroy their previous stories. So he chose Susan. He didn’t realize how much we loved her. Lewis’ need to “say something” overshadowed the story here. It was a mistake, and for some people it has destroyed the rest of Narnia retroactively.
A further failure is that Lewis has Susan’s family and the “friends of Narnia” behave so nonchalantly about her absence. They’re all saying, basically, “Silly Susan.” We the readers are horrified once we realize what’s happening. How could they be so cruel? As Gaiman forces us to ask in his story, “What about how Susan had to go identify her family’s bodies? Isn’t that horrible? She’s an orphan now herself, she’s alone.” But it’s good to remember that the Friends of Narnia don’t yet realize that they’re dead. Would they really have been so callous if they had known Susan was alone? I think not. They had no reason to think Susan would even know they were gone before they’d pop back into Earth like they had in the past. If they had known they were dead, well… Lewis has shown that he can write about death with considerable depth of emotion and compassion. Surely one of them would have expressed concern for Susan then, instead of annoyance?
Some have read these few paragraphs in The Last Battle to mean that Susan won’t get into Aslan’s Country (i.e. not into Heaven). Lewis says otherwise in his letters, “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end…in her own way.”
Also, Lewis doesn’t think Heaven and Hell work that way. Some of us are all caught up in a theological construct Lewis didn’t share. He doesn’t believe in “Oh you got caught up in sex and appearances and now you’re in hell forever because you didn’t believe in Jesus at precisely the right time in precisely the right way.” Remember, Lewis told us that Edmund was forgiven before Aslan died. In context we can see that Lewis is not saying “Susan can’t go to heaven because she likes makeup.” His theology of heaven is much more generous than that. Emeth got in and he didn’t even know Aslan. Just because Susan wasn’t in the club of those seven “friends of Narnia” doesn’t mean she’s not a friend of Aslan.
And notice—how strange—that neither Aslan nor Lucy comments on Susan’s absence. We don’t know for sure why she’s not there, we just hear the theories. And Aslan has corrected every single one of these people before, so maybe they’re wrong. Lucy, who most often has the “natural” understanding of what is happening, doesn’t say anything about Susan. Why is that, I wonder?
Someone wrote Lewis once and asked him about Susan’s story after The Last Battle, and whether she ever found her way. He said this: “I could not write that story myself. Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country; but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?”
So Lewis failed us, or perhaps thought too highly of us. He thought we’d follow the argument, that we’d understand what he was saying. But instead we’ve been angry, or confused, or annoyed, or frustrated because we loved Susan or suspected that maybe we were Susan and we’ve had to find our own way (like Susan), had to write our own story (like Susan), and maybe even struggled (like Susan) to see Aslan in the whole thing at all.
For me, here’s the way I’ve found to look at it.
I like to think that maybe there’s a scene somewhere that got cut. There’s this little sheaf of paper somewhere, with Lewis’s handwriting on it, written in the middle of the night at his desk while the mice came out to look at him and take a crumb as he wrote. And though we don’t know exactly what it might say, I think the scene would be something like this:
It was Lucy who remembered Susan then, and cried out to Aslan, “Susan, Susan, but what’s to become of Susan?”
Aslan came to her, the joy in his face replaced for a moment with sorrow. “Her story is not yours to know, Daughter of Eve.”
“But she’s alone,” Lucy said, and tears sprang from her eyes.
“She’s not alone,” Aslan said, his voice low and soft, and Lucy leaned against his broad back, just as she and Susan had done, oh, years ago. “But she must find her own way.”
“But what if she doesn’t?”
“Emeth found his way,” Aslan said. “Do you truly think our good Queen Susan the Gentle will fail to find a doorway home when the time comes?”
“I know that I’m meant to be happy here, Aslan, it’s just…it’s just that it’s terribly sad.”
Great, shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. “She will know more sorrow than you. But perhaps her joy will be greater, too, in time.”
His tears fell to the bright grass and formed a crystal pond, bright and clear. Aslan blew upon the water, and where the water was troubled she could see Susan, sitting in her room at home, looking at herself in the mirror, putting on her mascara.
“Susan, Susan!” Lucy cried, and her sister looked up for a moment, as if she heard a voice in another room.
“She does not yet know,” Aslan said, “What has happened to you and your brothers and your parents. She does not yet know the pain that lies ahead of her. But because of your great love for her, Lucy, you may speak one last sentence to her. One sentence to help her on her way.”
Lucy fell to her knees beside the pool, her tears mingling with Aslan’s. She did not know what to say, and she began to wonder whether it was better to say nothing at all, when the great lion said, “Speak, dear heart, it will mean more than you can know in the years to come.”
Lucy leaned close, so close to Susan she felt she could reach into the water and touch her, and she said, “Dear Susan—dear, beloved Susan—always remember…once a queen in Narnia, always a queen in Narnia.”
Susan set down her mascara. “Lu, is that you? Are you home so soon?” A gentle smile came onto her face. “How strange. For a moment I thought…but of course that can’t be. I’ll have to tell Lucy all about it when she gets home.”
Aslan blew on the water again, and Susan was gone.
Lucy threw her arms around Aslan’s great neck and buried her face in his golden mane. “Was it enough, Aslan? Did I say the right thing?”
As for Aslan’s answer, well, that is Lucy’s story to tell.
And then, of course, higher up and further in…
In my wrestling with the problems of Susan here is where I’ve landed. Susan’s problem is not so much femininity except in a sense that Lewis often failed to understand: she cared about what was put on her by others. Why lipstick and nylons and invitations? Because that’s what a patriarchal culture teaches her should matter to her…even though, once upon a time, she was Queen Susan the Gentle, who hunted werewolves and attended a party with the gods and once even wept into the mane of a God in lion form, and played tag with him after his resurrection. It wasn’t that Susan was “silly,” it was that she believed the lies of the culture around her that told her this is all she was good for, that this was her best life.
I can’t help but remember that it’s Susan who wanted to stay in Narnia forever. It was Susan who told her siblings not to chase that white stag further at Lantern Waste. It was her siblings who pushed to leave, and Susan who said, “in the name of Aslan, if that is what you all want, then I’ll come, too, and we’ll take whatever adventure befalls us.”
She didn’t know then what that meant. She didn’t know that by agreeing to go along with them, she would find herself—years later—journeying alone.
In his letters, Lewis said maybe she would find “her own way.”
He never meant to say Susan wouldn’t make it back to Narnia. He never meant to tell us that she would be alone forever, cut off from Aslan and her loved ones. He didn’t believe that’s the way the spiritual world works.
But that doesn’t change what we heard. That doesn’t change what most of us understood him to be saying. That doesn’t change the way we felt.
And we, many of us, frustrated and angry and hurt, shouted out, “Aslan would never do that! He would never abandon Susan! I don’t care if she was wearing nylons or writing ‘Aslan sucks’ on the Underground with her lipstick.”
Because Lewis had taught us that Aslan was good, was loving. That Narnia was a place for kids like us, that maybe were bullied or had absent parents or felt alone. That even if you were a traitor, Aslan would literally die for you.
We knew that even though Lewis had introduced us to Aslan, even though he had written all the books, we knew for a fact that this time C.S. Lewis had gotten it wrong.
We looked at the story and knew it wasn’t right. Aslan is better than that. Kinder. More loving. Forgiving. Compassionate. He wouldn’t hurt Susan that way, and he definitely wouldn’t lock Susan out.
Lewis wanted so badly to introduce us to Aslan. He wanted so badly for us to find Aslan in the real world. I wonder how he would have felt to know that we not only knew the great lion, but that we, on this topic, knew Aslan better than he did?
I can imagine him leaning back in his chair, a great smile on his face, pipe in one hand, eyebrows raised as he said, “Ah, you’ve met Aslan, too?”
I can see old Jack’s face lighting up with wonder as we tell him: Jack, believe me, if Susan looks for Aslan, she’ll find him. If she asks a question, he’ll answer. If she—even in her old age, even years and years from now—finds herself finds herself alone in that great house, and wanders into the old guest room and gently, not quite believing, raps her knuckles on an ancient wardrobe door, believe me, Jack, Aslan will be waiting to throw it open.
And then at last the true happily ever after can begin.
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
Oh thank you.
I am crying. All over my phone.
I read The Last Battle for the first and only time when I was in my thirties and it never occurred to me that Susan is denied Narnia because she has become a sexual being, but because she has become shallow and interested only in surface things. I was quite startled when I found out that the latter theory was the widely accepted one.
Thank you for this. That scene could have fitted PERFECTLY into the narrative. It is now officially in my head canon! I realized long ago what Lewis was doing with Susan and why it had to be her and not anyone else for all the reasons you stated. It still hurt that the woman who had witnessed Aslan’s resurrection could deny him like that.
This is excellent! Thank you. And your inserted scene is wonderful.
Matt, that scene with Aslan and Lucy is now my official headcanon for what happened. Well done!
I’ve loved all these posts, but this is the one that made me cry in the best way. Thank you.
It’s very possible I was naive but even when I read the books early in college, I didn’t pick up the implication that Susan had become specifically a *sexual* being and that was why she was rejected.
Instead I overlaid it with my own experience – I was always on the outside of most feminine circles. A little tomboyish, nerdy, bookish, etc, and my family didn’t have a ton of money growing up. Not good with fashion, makeup or considered very attractive and defintely not being asked out. And the people who were always cruelest and caused me the most harm were the ones who were very interested in things like that – who were kind of vapid and superficial and just cared about appearances and status and the brand of your clothes and thought it was weird that I wanted to talk about books or science or whatever else. I followed the rules, and they would sneak off and party or do whatever else. And yeah, that probably also involved kissing/sex and dating and being popular.
So, to me, it felt like Susan was replacing something that was real and deeper with…dross.
This isn’t to say makeup and nylons and fashion are bad – in a way I’ve had to overcome my own prejudices about those things and the myriad of reasons women might enjoy them, or the types of women that do. But it took me a long time to break those associations.
And as one of those ‘grown up’ kids I do also kind of resent this implication that there’s something wrong with her for being the practical one, especially when she HAD to be. Although I also know I got kid of obnoxious about it myself at a certain age when I thought I had it all figured out (including in my spiritual life). I think Lewis has written elsewhere about how the most childish thing is to want to ‘outgrow’ childish things and to have the pretention that comes with thinking you’re all ‘grown up’.
But I think you’re right that CS Lewis gravely misstepped and miscalculated the love we would have for Susan and so the message didn’t land, especially as he never provided that resolution.
Truly, thank you. This heals something deep and old. I cried hard for Susan when I was a child.
I have work to do.
I can’t be sitting here choked up and misty-eyed.
This is very good, both as analysis and as solution. Thank you.
This wonderful piece is a great example of why formats like Twitter just aren’t up to the task of our most fraught and complex fan debates. This is a lovely, lovely, nuanced take.
I’ve always thought it a misreading to take “she’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations” as a reason why Susan is “not allowed” in Narnia; rather, it’s the reason she has chosen (for the time being) a life other than that of Narnia. Susan’s is an act of free will.
Anyway, thanks for a good read!
So maybe Susan got all Martha as opposed to Mary, except a Martha who was preoccupied with her social life instead of meal prep (cf. Luke 10:38-42)?
This is beautifully written and I would like to think that it’s true. But then I think about how the other characters are shown, and how their relationships are presented.
Susan is the only ruler of Narnia we see who actively searches for a partner. Peter and Edmund’s interests in this area are never mentioned, though as the oldest it would make more sense for High King Peter to be looking for a consort. And while we are told many princes desire Lucy to be their queen, no mention is made of whether she is interested in return and I think we’re supposed to think she isn’t. The lack of heirs produced by Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy gives the Telmarines an opening to take Narnia over since only humans can be in charge.
Polly, Digory, Eustace and Jill stay single. Caspian’s parents are dead and his uncle is a usurper. He marries someone he met by chance, but a witch kills his wife and steals his son. Tirian runs around with his best bro, Jewel the Unicorn, and hasn’t married or produced an heir for Narnia as his duty would require. Aravis and Cor marry but then their story is over, as is Bree’s and Hwin’s. King Frank and Queen Helen are already married when they begin their reign over Narnia and I’ve always supposed that their line wasn’t that fruitful, given how the White Witch was able to completely stamp out the royal lineage.
Also, women who are more feminine-identified get the short end of the stick in the Narnia stories in general. Jill, Polly, Aravis, and Lucy have more traits that are traditionally defined as male. This is presented as a superior way to be when compared to Lasaraleen and Susan, who are described as “silly.” Corin states that Susan, who has shown great bravery in the past and is known to be an excellent archer, is an ordinary grown-up lady (because she’s looking for a husband?). On the other hand, Lucy is as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy, thus establishing that even boys are better in some essential ways than grown women.
We know from Lewis’s life that intimate relationships were difficult for him, and I would say that his understanding of what it might have been like to be a woman in his day and age was, shall we say, lacking. Representing Susan as no longer fit for Narnia because she’s going through a phase that many female-bodied persons went through on their way to maturity is always going to seem problematic to me, especially because this isn’t shown for any other characters.
I must disagree with this point:
“Because Lewis had taught us that Aslan was good, was loving. That Narnia was a place for kids like us, that maybe were bullied or had absent parents or felt alone. That even if you were a traitor, Aslan would literally die for you.”
Aslan loved Susan so much that he would not force her into happiness. He loved her so much he would not steal away her free will.
I find this line of thinking problematic—God loves you “so much” that he’ll send you to Hell for eternity if you are ignorant enough to think it’s better there. I think this is an abuse of the word “love”. It’s not God’s love that allows people to go to Hell—it’s His justice.
It’s akin to a parent who loves their child so very much they allow their child to run into a street full of busy traffic. Hmm, what kind of love is that?
It makes me sad there are still people who believe this line of thought—that God loves people so very much that he will torture them forever. This is the same mindset that I believe leads some Christian parents to brutally abuse—emotionally and/or physically—their children. They think if God loves us enough to torture us, then we must love our children enough to torture them.
It’s a terribly misguided concept and results in messed-up children.
Quite right, Aslan never lets Susan back into Narnia. What a loving King!
I read the idea once that Susan’s post-series journey was Lewis’; he had fallen away from his childhood understanding of faith, then later in life became a true believer. In that case, Susan’s “too grown up” story in rediscovering Narnia and Aslan would be perhaps too personal for him as well.
But I remember the first fanfic I ever tried to write (with a pencil in my little “locked” hardcover diary) as a young teen was Susan, married with her own children, and the kids finding a strange box of rings she had inherited from Professor Kirke. She was reminiscing of her lost friends and family, the stories of Narnia–then one of the children put on a ring and vanished, and suddenly Susan had to guide her family on a magical adventure to a new world and reunite with Aslan and have new adventures where she found herself again.
Love the missing scene!
@17- what a great idea!
I wonder if ‘Susan is an adult’ is a reflection of the name. Arthur Ransome’s Susan was also responsible for her siblings and made sure that things were done correctly.
I seem to recall Lewis writing elsewhere – perhaps The Great Divorce – that grief for those left behind would not be permitted to impede the joy of those entering into heaven. That occurred to me when I read the complaints that no-one was mentioning Susan as they went “higher up and further in”.
As for Susan herself, it never seemed to me a problem – just now she is distracted by the world, but no-where is it written that this will always obtain, nor did I ever read the text as assuming she was “lost”…
Full disclosure, I am not (any longer) a particularly religious person…
I don’t know. You make a solid case and your suggested appended epilogue was beautifully written, but repeatedly stating “Lewis failed” as an immutable fact seems a little arrogant . I don’t really take issue with your overall argument, but I’ve never felt let down by where we left Susan. On the contrary, as I’ve gotten older I’ve found it an apt allegory to real life. Some of us, even the best of us, sometimes lose our way…if only for a while. It’s also very true in the specific Christian context that Narnia is built upon. Our hearts can wander and sometimes our loved ones never know where we went or why or if we’ll ever see each other again, in this life or the next. We choose to have faith.
I think your argument has even made Susan’s fate (or lack thereof) more poignant.
Well, dang. I can pass off a little sniveling at my desk as being allergies, but today I might have to step outside and bawl for a minute. I’m thinking of printing out that new scene and clipping it into my copy of the book, to be read in the appropriate place in future.
truly outstanding post… wish Lewis could have read it himself.
@15 That was the opinion of a boy of ten. Talking about their utility in a battle fought with swords and spears.
I first read The Last Battle when I was 10 or 11. My understanding was that Susan prioritized our world over Narnia and that was why she wasn’t there. It wasn’t just sex, it was worldliness that she got wrapped up in. (Admittedly, that is partly my own religious upbringing bleeding into how I understood these books. But, then again, maybe that was something that Lewis was expecting from his readers?) As a result, I have always gotten upset over interpretations of Susan’s story like JK Rowling’s. This explanation works better for me. And this is a MUCH more hopeful future.
It never occurred to me that Susan might change her point of view later and come back to Narnia. I hope she did. And if she did, than anyone else that forgets Narnia can find their way back, too. There’s a very important lesson in that.
It’s Corin who describes Susan as an excellent archer, though he also points out that she doesn’t “ride to wars.” But Lucy does? What happened to Father Christmas’s “battles are ugly when women fight?”
Thank you for this. I remember when I was a kid reading that last book, and thinking how unfair it was to make Susan become the doubter of the four. As an adult, I still think that. I can respect that Lewis wrote Susan based on his perception of women back in his day. But to think that these things she found recent interest in made her a vain and silly person always struck me as disingenuous.
@15 I often thought it was strange too that none of the rest had even a whiff of having a crush on someone at the least. Or even a beau who was attempting a courtship. He just skipped right over it.
I don’t fully believe that an author can truly fail any of his characters. Instead the authors fails not his characters but the actors that we have transmuted into our characters.
I agree, Lewis failed, for precisely the reasons you give: he picked Susan to throw under the bus as a backslider and he continued a pattern he followed in other Narnia books: blaming female characters for conforming to patriarchal expectations (mistaking learned behavior for expressions of character) when he disapproved of those expectations. he didn’t disapprove of Susan’s gentleness and motherliness in the earlier books (the Angel in the House), as he did of frivolousness and “silliness”, a word carrying an awful lot of baggage that includes a focus on self and a connotation of sexuality, as well as a focus on material things.
And, again, you’re the best possible advocate for Lewis. I might give a child 3 of the Narnia books, but not the whole series. especially for a girl, I would look elsewhere for books that treat their female characters as equal to the others, and fully human. Girls face enough misogyny in daily life as it is. “As good as a boy” doesn’t cut it any more.
“She [and Lucy] played tag with him after he came back to life, [they] rode upon his back on the way to the White Witch’s castle and watched him breathe the statues back to life.” That section of TLWW remains my favorite memory of the whole series.
Matt,
Are we a little guilty here of of not turning “from the good expected to the given good”?
Lewis was never one for telling us all the answers. Surely you’ve read the Space Trilogy?
No, Lewis, like any great writer, expects his readers to do some of the work as well. And readers can do really great work, like the kind you’ve done here in your article. But you are clearly working within enough of the same framework (i.e. theology) as Lewis to allow for that work to culminate. Gaiman, Rowling et al. apparently were not.
I struggle to see how this is really a failure on Lewis’ part. Perhaps it was shortsighted of him to believe his audience would draw the conclusions you’ve drawn here; as prophetic as he could be, it’s unlikely he could have anticipated the Sexual Revolution and of the 60s/70s and the rapid decline of Christendom thereafter, ultimately depriving future readers of the necessary framework. Such is the fate of fairy tales imbued with Reality, I guess.
I remember being heartbroken and angry when I first read this as a kid. I was raised in a pretty conservative, religious, church-on-Sunday-and-Wednesday home. I never resented that part; I resented being made to feel I had to be the adult instead of the kid. As the oldest sister tasked with taking care of my mom and younger siblings, I always identified most strongly with Susan. I was always the practical, dutiful, caretaking, trying hard to be the grown-up, making sure everything and everyone got done one. I also craved makeup, pretty dresses, parties and wanted to be around people who had fun. When I finally got my younger siblings safely out of the house, I went nuts making up for all those suppressed years and feelings. It never occurred to me until I slowed down a few years later that I had lost my true focus and wandered so far off the path of my faith; after all, it wasn’t like I did anything “bad” or excessive. I was helping my sister with a paper she was writing on The Last Battle when I ran into “the problem of Susan” again. I read that part over and over and identified with Susan again as an adult and began to really look at myself and my priorities. I started refocusing right there and then. I still find joy and fun in the “girl stuff”; it’s just not my priority and first love anymore. I have to say that it never occurred to me that there was even a possibility that either Susan or myself would not be joyfully and gracefully welcomed back into the fold. Sometimes, a person’s story is just their own story, and there are reasons it’s not meant for others to know the entirety . Sometimes, it takes an open ended story like Susan’s to show someone else that they, too, can make better choices and still get their HEA (“further up and further in!”). I’m not sure how, or if, I would have found my way again without Susan. Thank you for this post; it’s one of my favorites!
@19:
“I seem to recall Lewis writing elsewhere – perhaps The Great Divorce – that grief for those left behind would not be permitted to impede the joy of those entering into heaven.”
This idea mirrors an atheist critique of heaven: How can people be fully happy in heaven if some loved ones do not end up there?
Either you claim that all of a “true believer”‘s loved ones are in heaven too (and by extension, THEIR loved ones, and the loved one of the loved ones of the “true believers”, etc.) which is in contradiction to orthodox Christian doctrine – or the people in heaven don’t care (or forget or whatever) about their previous loved ones, which raises the question if the person in heaven is the same person they were on earth.
I don’t want to hijack this thread into atheist territory but Lewis seems to suggest the second option.
As an atheist myself I don’t believe in an afterlife so these questions are not relevant to me but I must give Lewis credit to provide a “difficult” answer rather than pretend that there’s nothing to see.
@20:
I wonder whether this particular part of Narnian lore sits more uncomfortably with non-Christians than with Christians (or more comforably with Christians if you want to phrase it like that).
I no longer believe in god(s) or the afterlife (even though the idea of an afterlife in particular certainly is appealing to me) so this narrative decision which clearly seems to be originating from Lewis’ religious belief sits especially uncomfortably with me.
Susan is the only one of the four siblings we know for sure had some type of love life while an adult in Narnia. Imagine being an adult woman who nearly got married, only to turn back into a child again. That would be truly traumatizing.
I think the main “failure” of Lewis in the treatment is Susan is not so much that he threw her under the bus as that he allowed us to think he did. It’s our interpretation of the new Narnia as a static, in-or-out Heaven like we probably had in mind before we started reading that makes us worry so much about Susan being left behind.
By contrast, the Heaven and Hell that Lewis presents in The Great Divorce seem themselves to be more journeys than static places. Hell, for example, can be ridden away from, and then “…it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory.”). If the rest of the characters don’t happen to meet Susan right where they happen to be on the road to Deep Heaven, why is that such a big concern? It doesn’t mean she didn’t get in; only that she hasn’t arrived yet. Will she ever arrive? She was always the most material-minded of all of the children, so maybe she’ll be caught up in the worries of this life and will never quite make it. But she’s met Aslan, so maybe she will.
@15, the comment I recall about Lasaraleen is that “You will guess that [Aravis and Lasaraleen] each though the other silly.” and I don’t think anyone ever calls Susan silly.
I love that scene you wrote between Aslan and Lucy. As a kid I thought it was grossly unfair that Susan hadn’t returned to Narnia. When I was older it was tempered with, “Well, at least she’s still alive.” But whenever I met profoundly religious people, it seemed that they were looking forward to being in their own Narnia and didn’t think much about the people that mightn’t be joining them, rather like what you intimate here about the state of consciousness of those in Heaven.
An excellent and poignant essay. I don’t know anyone whose read The Last Battle and is NOT put off by what “happens to Susan” by the book’s, the series’, end. This analysis gives fans and readers a better understanding of what should have been included in the book.
Lisamarie says: I think Lewis has written elsewhere about how the most childish thing is to want to ‘outgrow’ childish things and to have the pretention that comes with thinking you’re all ‘grown up’.
I was thinking of this line too. IIRC, it’s something like, “When I was a boy, I read fairy tales in secret. Now that I’m a man, I read them openly. For when I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of being thought childish and the desire to be very grown-up.”
I’m also reminded of the Gospel passage where the disciples try to shoo away some children who run up to Jesus after he’s finished preaching. He tells them, “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these” and also that “those who do not change and become like one of these little children will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
I don’t think Susan has ceased to be a friend of Narnia just because she wears pantyhose and lipstick. I think that maybe she’s come to see Narnia and Aslan as “childish things” that she shouldn’t be interested in anymore. Maybe she’s changed in such a way that she wouldn’t lean against Aslan’s side with Lucy right now. That said, she’s still a young woman, and there’s plenty of time for her to rediscover the wonder of Narnia.
Hey everyone!
I typically try, at least on the front end, to respond to everyone who comments, but I signed on after work today to see that your many excellent comments put me pretty far behind on that!
So I’ll just say this:
I am so humbled and pleased to see that the piece resonated for so many of you!
For those who have critiques or disagreements, you are of course welcome also. Lewis was never short of strong opinions or willingness to argue about them with his friends.
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to comment so far… I love reading all the comments and I’ll continue to read them as more come in!
@Matt: did you mean “Fledge”, or is Fletch a character name in the British English version of Narnia that got changed when it made it over to this side of the pond?
Susan is a very beautiful young woman who has been tempted by the pleasures offered to such a woman. She hasn’t committed any great sin she’s just been distracted from who and what she really is, Susan the Gentle, Queen in Narnia. All she has to do s remember. She’s got her life ahead of her, plenty of time to find her way back to Aslan and I don’t doubt that she does. Her aunt and uncle, Eustace’s parents are still alive. They will need comforting. Susan the Gentle is just the person to help them.
Without knowing the overlying Christian themes, I always sympathized with the hurt and frustration the others must have felt when Susan claimed that the greatest adventures of their lives were nothing but childrens’ games of make-believe, an absurd notion from a reader’s perspective. But I’ve increasingly sympathized with Susan resolutely turning her mind and heart away from the beloved place that had cast her out for completing her designated work there — especially after I unhappily graduated from a college I adored, a homeplace less hidden than Narnia but equally closed-off to me. Aslan told Edmund and Lucy — or maybe Jill and Eustace; I don’t remember — that “the next time you come to Narnia, it will be for good.” Did he also tell Peter and Susan that, or simply say they were “too old”? Susan’s behavior seems to hint at the latter, that she had no hope of returning to the place and thus tried to forget about it and focus on what her current world and birthplace offered her and wanted from her.
(These differing experiences of children returned from portal worlds, in this and other stories, gave Seanan McGuire such fertile grground for her own writings…)
@39/ Konrad. Eep! Nope, that’s a typo.
Like everyone else, I didn’t like how he handled Susan and think he should have written some sort of happy ending for her, maybe in a later book, but it was obvious he was accusing her of shallowness and not of being interested in sex. I think the mistake comes because people have a stereotype about the sorts of hang ups a conservative Christian will have. Lewis had his hangups, but he spells it out in very plain English that Susan loved the world ( not the flesh or the devil, but the world).
But all that said, he blew it here. It didn’t ruin the books for me, but it was an annoyance.
@39/42 – Typo fixed, thanks!
I like the witty and insightful Jill Bearup’s take on the famous “problem of Susan.”
Thank you. Yes. That was always my understanding. And your scene brought me to tears. Perfection.
I respect your respect of CS Lewis’ writing. But it was always strange that Susan alone was ever given the “too much of the real world” condemnation. Why not at least one of the boys? The non-Narnian physical world is clearly male-run. Why couldn’t Peter grow up to be a glory seeking jock or soldier? Or a money hungry banker? Any one of those would be more in keeping with anything Jesus ever condemned… He certainly never said anything against lipstick…
Couldnt this simply be Lewis’ perceived alienation of anything dealing with female adolescence?
I found Lewis’ letter long ago, in which he says Susan’s story is still to be told, and maybe that is up to others. It seems so final in the series, but once I found his thoughts on the matter I knew that he had not given up on Susan and neither could I. Your scene is lovely, Matt, and I consider the duty fulfilled.
As much as I love Neil Gaiman, I was very troubled by his take on Susan with the dream of Aslan and the Witch and their violent sexual relationship. To me he ignored the heart of the story, which is his right as his own author, but as an author who also write’s children’s novels, I wondered at his decision to take one of the most beloved characters and sexualize it/him (Aslan) in that way with the Witch, or make him Susan’s killer. I can’t imagine him taking Coraline or Bod and Silas or anyone else in that direction year down the road.
T. Kingfisher’s short story “Elegant and Fine” has another sympathetic take on Susan – looking at what she lost when they stumbled out of Narnia the first time, and how she was rushing to be older than her physical age trying to get it back. And the anger.
http://www.redwombatstudio.com/elegant-and-fine/,
Coming into the Chronicles as a former Catholic and current Pagan, I never saw the issue with Susan. I never thought that her lack of entry into Aslan’s Kingdom had anything to do with boys or sex or superficiality itself. One thing I learned is that Spiritual concerns should rise above Material concerns. This is why many feel that the Roman Catholic Church has lost its way, because they seem to be all about money and material power. Their priests adorn themselves with gold and jewels. So the Problem With Susan is that she has lost focus on the Spiritual, and favors the Material. And of course there is time for her to course correct! She’s still alive!
Also, why do all the other characters just brush it off and not show any sadness or concern? This is another theory, but by this point, they are all dead and, body and soul, are in Heaven. In Heaven, there is no strife, no worry, no depression. “The mortal world? What’s that? Let’s go be blissful on that cloud over there.” It wouldn’t be much like Paradise if they could still feel pain. But that’s just my theory.
I first read the Narnia stories when I was about 9 or 10. My family were also members of a church that today might be called quasi-fundamentalist; certainly conservative. When it was said that Susan was no longer a “friend of Narnia,” the overwhelming reaction was that she fell away from the faith and became secular. After all, that’s the fear of people in highly religious families, that someone will willingly reject the faith. I did that myself, so I understand that path. I haven’t read the books in quite a long time. Given my own journey, it might be time to pick them up again and see how my point of view has changed.
Since I was a kid, my interpretation has been that Susan had chosen our world (and the Pevensie parents) over Narnia. They also died, but went to a different heaven. If there are different worlds, there must be different afterlifes.
I just went back to reread Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan” after reading this post and it does not take a good view of Aslan at all, it draws a really strong parallel between Aslan and Jadis, something some of us were discussing on one of the Magician’s Nephew posts. I do think how readers view the Problem has to do with their religiosity, their views on God and their conception of heaven as a few posters have indicated. Gaiman’s Aslan in the short story is hugely different from the one Lewis portrayed.
For me the problem existed insofar as that’s where the story ended, and that’s where each character ended up, there is no more story after, the characters didn’t exist beyond that end, therefore Susan was kept out of heaven, it was static in that way. I don’t remember being too affected by Susan’s status at the end of the series when I first read it, I came to the series later in adolescence, I wasn’t too invested in it, and I’ve never bothered to re-read it–still haven’t re-read the entire series in fact. Now that I think about it, I might have only realized the problem was a Problem when I read Gaiman’s story and his intro to it.
Many commenters have already said wonderful and perceptive things about Susan’s alienation from the true world of her childhood as she strives to become “a jolly sight too grown up” while still too much of a callow adolescent to understand what real adulthood is. And I agree completely with @37, Nina, that Lewis is dramatizing, here, the warning of Jesus that “unless you become as little children, you shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of God.” The “imaginary world” of “the games we played when we were children” is far truer, more real, than the shallow obsession with fashion and social life that is attributed to her.
And yes, I also second the comment of @43, Donald, that it’s definitely “the world,” and not “the flesh” or “the devil” that has her enthralled. (And @34 — Susan herself may not be called “silly” by anyone, but Polly declares that “Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can,” which comes pretty close.) I think Lewis here is piggy-backing on the long-established tradition in English novels from Jane Austen through Trollope and George Eliot and beyond, of portraying shallow female characters as interested only in clothes and fashion and getting invited to the right parties.
And as for none of the child characters being portrayed as having any kind of romantic interest or crush (except when safely ensconced in the fairy-tale world of royal Narnia adulthood), I feel pretty confident in saying that this omission was pretty much a fixed rule of mid-century children’s literature. It simply Wasn’t Done, especially in British books for children, and I doubt if Lewis would have had any interest in challenging that taboo!
What actually put me off as a child reading The Last Battle was the weird and (I still think) gratuitous dragging in of the Pevensie kids’ mother and father, via the contrived coincidence of their traveling on the same train. I’ve always speculated that maybe the editor or publisher induced him to include them, out of some kind of fear that the idea of three out of four of the children dying in a railway accident and leaving their parents so bereft would somehow be traumatic to the children reading the books; or perhaps that children facing death without their parents somehow “coming along” was taboo in a children’s book in 1956. Never mind that instead it leaves poor Susan alone in the world!
The parents are barely real in any of the other Narnia books — or in this one until this final plot twist. A standard device in children’s adventure stories has always been to get the parents out of the way so that the children have the opportunity to practice agency and take risks, i.e. so that the story has a plot. Yanking Mother and Father into The Last Battle in this last-minute way struck me then, and still strikes me, as a violation of the rules of adventure storytelling; as a leakage, into the world of the Marvelous, of the dreary and practical modern (“grownup”) world with its policy of Safety First and its distrust of danger and adventure and valor and sacrifice. That, in my view, is where Lewis truly “fails.”
(long-time reader of your posts, first time I commented)
Thank you for this. Like 7, I cried at this post.
Like you and all other readers, I never was comfortable with how dismissive the story seemed towards Susan. One reason this has touched and infuriated so many is perhaps because it feels like a form of parental abandonment. A child does something which is perceived by the parent as not okay and is punished with exclusion for it. It also hurts that no one speaks a word of sympathy for in the story.
That fragment you wrote would have done so much to reassure the reader it was not that. Again, thank you, reading that gave some closure on that. The power of fanfiction: fixing the neglections of the creator. :)
The problem with Susan is that everyone sees her as a problem and everyone wants to save her from her folly except, possibly, Susan herself. The article above is a much better take on it than Gaiman’s, Rowling’s or Pullman’s, although the latter is a militant atheist so I wouldn’t expect him to get it. I’m terrible with the Bible but I did read it as a child and one of the things that such with me was Verse 11. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” I assumed that this was what Susan was doing, because she wanted to grow up in her own world. She’d already grown up into a little girl’s idea of a fantasy queen but then it was time to explore the world into which she’d been born. And hey, you may disapprove of lipstick and stockings, but a lot of us don’t: please don’t make the equally dodgy assumption that this is internalised patriarchy because yet again, here we have a man telling us how we should look and behave. I don’t want to hunt werewolves, cheers all the same.
As a writer, I find it irritating when people rewrite other people’s work because it makes them uncomfortable. I too found Susan not getting into Narnia distressing but it set me up for the understanding that sometimes people will change in ways that you do not like, that make you uncomfortable. I’ve always been grateful to Lewis for that. Fan fiction is all about ‘making things better’ but it’s your idea of what’s better, not the person’s. Discomfort, unease and estrangement and loss are part of life, and I suspect Susan had a very good one.
@45 Skallagrimsen that was outstanding, thanks for the link
For what it’s worth, Lewis had a character with a case of specifically male superficiality– Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength.
I would want all the children to have access to both Narnia’s heaven and Earth’s heaven.
It’s not just that the children mysteriously don’t miss Susan, they apparently aren’t concerned with never again seeing anyone they knew from Earth. It’s as drastic as the split between elven and human afterlives in Tolkien, but Tolkien treated it as important.
Thank you for that extra scene with Aslan and Lucy! It was beautiful and made me cry! As always, I appreciate your insightful analysis.
I read the Chronicles as a child and as an adult and I never had a problem with what happened to Susan. Sure, it was sad but it also rang true in a way. People change as they grow up and often put away things they were once interested in for many reasons. And yes, it is easy to get caught up in the lies of the culture, as you put it.
With the comments about being grown up, there’s also a sense in which the wonder of childhood is lost and along with it, that child-like faith. That’s not always a bad thing as our faith should mature and deepen over time but without that wonder and awe, the “magic” as Lewis might put it, our faith loses a little something.
In “The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader'” Lewis may have been foreshadowing what he was going to do with Susan. There’s that line in Chapter 1, where it’s mentioned that Susan is accompanying her parents on a trip to America:
“Grown-ups thought her the pretty one of the family and she was no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age) and Mother said she ‘would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters’.”
Hah, now I wonder if that’s also a burn on the US.
@49
That’s just wonderful; many thanks. So many quotable lines, but I have 2 favorites:
”It should have occurred to them by now that battles are ugly when anyone fights.”
”if he was not a tame lion, she was not a tame woman”
Lewis’ failure with Susan has opened a lot of doors for other artists.
I’m very moved by your addition; it addresses a deep grief. But even though I understand that Lewis was writing out of his own theology and culture and sexuality, all limited, I don’t forgive him.
The best things I know that were written about the Problem of Susan are these:
https://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/79664265175/i-was-so-tall-you-were-older-then-can-we
https://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/69470941562/there-comes-a-point-where-susan-who-was-the
“A lion told her to walk away, and she did. He forbade her magic, he forbade her her kingdom, so she made her own.”
×
I always figured that since Susan was still alive that there was plenty of time for her to get back to Narnia. I’ve always been relatively agnostic in my beliefs, but I have never believed in any kind of eternal hell — if there’s a “good” afterlife I think everyone gets there eventually. I don’t have specific scripture to back up my beliefs but I strongly believe that no one will ever be condemned to eternal hell. With that POV I just always figured Susan would have her life on Earth and then eventually when she died she would be reunited with her family. Maybe there would be some kind of interim “hell” or “purgatory” or something she would have to face, but in the end she would get back to the “real” Narnia and her family and friends. I never saw her being left on Earth as a punishment — it just wasn’t her time to die yet.
I find it interesting that a number of respondents have commented that the problem is not sexuality but worldliness. It seems to me that this is not to solve the Problem of Susan but to simply transfer it, based on those Gnostic ideas that the world is at best an irrelevant distraction and at worst a deeply corrupting trap in which the Spirit is mired. Why should she not be worldly when the world is what she has to live in (having been sent away from Narnia for good), and is, moreover, for believers a divine creation. Is such a Creation not worthy of being experienced to its fullest?
I was not expecting to cry when I read this, but here we are.
Turns out I can type and cry at the same time. Thank you so much for a scene that completes the series and heals its readers.
Oh, that added page you’ve written made me cry. I’m going to add it from now on when I read it to my own children. I have reread and love the Narnia books every year since childhood, and I’ve dealt with Susan in much the same way–knowing she had been distracted, but knowing she had more time, and the loss of her family would perhaps open another door for her, knowing she must find her way in the end, but that life really does distract even the best of us. Lewis knew Dante well (he quotes Dante sometimes in this very series), and I think he recognized that Susan was in the upper tiers of Dante’s Purgatory, not those who succumb to evil, but those who are distracted from the best by a love of lesser good. Maturity–how I read it–and even sexuality–how others have read it–are all things that could be strengths in their places and proportions, but when loved to excess/to the exclusion of truer love, they draw one down. And I know Susan has the inner trueness to overcome these in the end.
This article was exactly what I needed. Thank you.
I like the alternate scene here – but what I like even more is the counterexample of another Susan, Susan Walker in Swallows and Amazons. Like Susan Pevensie, she’s the second child of four and the elder of the two sisters. Like her, she is the responsible one, the second mother … but unlike Susan Pevensie, Susan Walker is respected for it. It’s her practicality and responsibility that make adventures possible for everyone, because she is trusted by the adults and children both. She falters only once, when her own body betrays her (by succumbing to seasickness in We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea); otherwise she takes adventures in her stride, only making sure that everyone gets a glass of milk, a good night’s sleep and an early bedtime along the way.
Having the oldest girl be the responsible one is probably inescapable in older children’s books; the social pressure was strong. Given that Swallows and Amazons was published 20 years before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I really wish Lewis had followed Ransome’s example a bit better.
Thank you for this thoughtful and wonderful addition to Susan’s story. It means a lot to us.
I tend to think that Susan lost her first love Aslan which follows his theology. Perhaps he is saying that just as John who writes to the church of Ephesus in Revelation that they have lost their first love (Jesus) and that is what He holds against them. Just as Susan. And as a warning to us all who want to know Aslan. Relationships must be protected and nurtured.
while irritating, it also opens up the possibility of hope for her. If we indeed have free will, Aslan is not forcing anyone to be with him, instead allowing them to choose their love.
The scene with Aslan and Lucy is a beautiful addition Matt, thank you.
I realise that Susan lost her parents and her siblings in the train crash, but we have no idea if she was happy with her life before or after that point. Some people find fulfillment in nylons and parties and worldly things, and there’s nothing wrong with that (though obviously the Friends of Narnia disapproved, they should keep their judgementalism to themselves).
I very much regret that Lewis never actually wrote the rest of Susan’s story. It might not have been a children’s book that fit in with the rest of the series, but it would be a final coda rather than leaving us hanging, wondering and trying to guess what he intended – or whether he knew himself. I’m inclined to agree this was a failure as an author, he might have been trying to tell us something, but heaven knows what it was!
Hm, my impression of the whole thing was that Susan LITERALLY STOPPED BELIEVING NARNIA WAS REAL AND EXISTED. Not that she’s too much of a hot to trot teenager looking for boys, or whatever, but she’s somehow learned or talked herself out of (or was shamed by an adult, for all I know) that it was a reality for her.
‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”
Susan now literally thinks that Narnia was a game that they made up as kids. She literally lost the belief that it was real, somehow. I can see where that’s a problem on getting her to Aslan-heaven if she literally doesn’t think it was real or existent any more.
I have a somewhat different take on all of this, as my understanding of Armageddon is different than what film and TV portray. If I remember my high school age Sunday school lessons correctly, noone gets to the kingdom of heaven until Jesus returns and brings all the worthy souls back. All the dead lie in the ground until then. I read the Last Battle as Armageddon. That everyone was dead and maybe not recently dead. And that Susan wasn’t there because she had become a non believer. And since it was Armageddon, that was it, she’s out, done.
I’ve read (or tried to read, I’m an Atheist) the Screwtape Letters and it’s pretty obvious what Lewis is getting at. He was showing what would happen to a nonbeliever. The whole thing is an allegory for Heaven and God and the end of the world. Susan was a nonbeliever and missed her chance. (And yes, I’m sort of glossing over what the children’s trips to Narnia, and their return to their original world mean, as well as the Magician’s Nephew).
I was upset when I read she was left out, but Lewis needed a fall guy. Should have been Eustace tho. I hated that little shit.
@68 – ‘worldliness’, at least in my circles, tends to have specific connotations that are not specifically gnostic or Manichaeist (nor was Lewis one that I know of – I believe that he said something like ‘God loves matter, he created it’). It’s more about a certain type of mindset, usually something similar to loving things like status/wealth/power/pleasure for their own sake.
Which, to some people isn’t a bad thing either, but isn’t compatible with the Christian worldview in which this world and life – even if it is right and proper to enjoy it and what it offers – is still a stepping stone/foreshadowing of an ultimate destiny.
Beautifully written, thank you. I always felt that we were meant to enter Narnia as a child, which to me is the innocence and natural faith of Lucy. We grow up and at some point in our lives return to that childhood. Susan will too, but the Last Battle is indeed a sad book, and to think there is one seed that survived! What would happen if all those who knew Narnia had died? In that sense, it’s a good thing that a Queen of Narnia lives on to invite others. I like that Lewis invited someone to tell the tale of Susan. I thought of doing it myself. Your words are lovely.
This is a good take and, maybe more important, it’s also good theology.
@Matt — I have really enjoyed this series. My Christian beliefs don’t line up exactly with Lewis’s (or yours), but I love how Lewis’s writings (and yours) make me think about my own beliefs and bring them into clearer focus on certain aspects. I haven’t read any other C.S. Lewis works (though I’ve intended to), but I will certainly continue to follow your posts about them. Thank you!!
I don’t think Lewis failed at all. This book brought home to me how childish a vision of Christianity Lewis had been peddling all along. Susan was the reality. Christianity excludes anyone who doesn’t follow its arbitrary rules, and so many Christians turn their backs upon those who break the rules. They’re to be shunned, forgotten, othered. It’s not this book that has a failing, but rather the philosophy that Lewis is portraying, and he managed in this one example, possibly without intending it, to show us exactly what a failure it is.
This was such a beautiful read after recently finishing the book “Gentle and Lowly” by Dane Ortlund and studying the book of Hebrews for the last 8 months. <3 John 17:3
Thank you for addressing the fate of Susan in the Chronicles of Narnia. One of the reasons that I am an ex-Catholic and, indeed, an ex-Christian is the treatment of women in the Abrahamic religions. I take my spiritual comfort elsewhere
I read the Narnia books when I was about ten, and loved them for what I thought they were – thrilling and original fantasy stories. Our family attended church but we weren’t especially religious, so the fact that Aslan was God completely passed me by until The Last Battle, when I realised I’d been preached at. I felt upset, angry, disappointed and betrayed – to the extent that when I read the series to my son, more than twenty years later, I told myself that if he expressed an interest in The Last Battle, I’d tell him that he’d have to read it himself. We never got that far (we discovered Harry Potter, far more exciting), but I still remember how horrible I found that book, the almost sado-masochistic emphasis on suffering and sacrifice which is an essential part of the Christian religion (all those paintings of martyrs in ecstasies of agony), and of course the sad fate of Susan, which I didn’t consider sad because, hey, at least she’s still alive! Ironically, I now think my journey towards atheism began with that book, which of course is the opposite of what Lewis intended.
I love this article, and especially the missing scene! Reading over these comments, I’m realizing that I had a somewhat unusual reaction to Susan’s fate.
I was a very lonely, bookish child, desperately looking for some way out of the difficult circumstances of my life. I was being bullied at school and sexually molested outside of school. I so desperately wanted Peter Pan to fly in my window and take me away, that I left it open even when it was thirty below (Celcius). I looked for other worlds behind every door and around every corner. So, to me, Susan being shut out of Narnia was simply Lewis making explicit what many other children’s books had hinted at. Magical adventures are only for children. No Adults Allowed.
But, I also knew that nothing can stop the inexorable march of time, and I was painfully aware that puberty was coming for me. I would soon be too old, and then there would be no way out of my life. I remember reading the Last Battle and feeling very sad and frightened that I’d been left behind with Susan. I’d tried so hard to be good, and innocent, like Lucy!
Later, though, as a teenager, I got angry. I decided I didn’t believe in magic any more, because magic had never stepped up to save me when I needed most. I’d had to save myself. I’d had to be an adult.
This article took me back there, but also makes me feel much better about it all. I really like the idea that a kind old C. S. Lewis would have been quite saddened if he’d known how I’d interpreted his treatment of Susan.
@66, I came to the comments to share the same thing! The writer did a seven-part series that I have revisited several times and gave me a lot of closure and empathy.
I did not grow up religious and cannot comment on that aspect like a lot of others, although I was surrounded by many religious people and thus was quite inclined to search for God. I can say this: when I read Narnia over and over as a child, I was tomboy-lite with a bad relationship with my mother and thought Susan, the motherly and feminine figure, was generally a wet blanket at best. I was properly horrified that she would either become too girly or refute Narnia’s existence. Her absence seemed like a fine consequence for all that. Unlike many others, I didn’t really think it so horrible that all the children were dead, nor did I really reckon with what it would be like for her to be left behind. Confronting those truths and what that really means, as this fanfic series does, felt like an important part of growing up (Susan was only 21, never mind for the second time or no! Lucy was 17!). Looking back, all of those reactions of mine feel pretty awful.
We can consider Lewis’s intentions, and the allegorical context, and all that, but real children out there do indeed read the books and internalize things like “femininity is bad” and “it’s okay to forget/not care about people who have their priorities all wrong” and even things like “dying is fine/great” which, when that child becomes a struggling teenager, is not a great thing to have internalized. I still treasure these books – along with Tolkien, and L’Engle, I suppose they raised me – but addressing these things, even just hinting more toward them, would have helped.
I love this discussion of Susan. So many thoughtful comments. I loved the Narnia series and still have such a vivid memory of the story of a guy after death trying to push on a flower but not being substantial enough and it being like the flower was glass (sorry, not sure which CS Lewis book but it was one of his apologia) – I think of Lewis every time I think of the glass flowers in the museum at Harvard.
I read Lewis as a child of a mixed background — one part of my family was from a Christian tradition and the bulk of the family was from a tradition that was outside of both Christianity and the Christian-focused atheism that is found in people who are raised in a Christian tradition but are not active believers. I also had some very active “lets make you a Christian” people actively trying to convert me. So, i was a little child who thought about religion and identity and read Lewis after being read Pilgrim’s Progress when i was even younger.
CS Lewis was a delight to read and my strong reaction to his reading helped me understand and value my non-Christian traditions because on so many points of religious faith I would pull up cold and say “WHAT?” It was not lack of a christian education — I had that also, heaps of it — it was that I also had a lot of influence from a different ethnic tradition entirely. It is fun to engage with Lewis, five times as fun to engage with the commentary around his writing, but it is emphatically not a failure to be religious that made me stop with a streetch when I got to the fate of Susan. CS Lewis made a very Christian case and was engaged with very Christian atheists and it was an education to read and his books were fun. But his treatment of Susan confirmed for me that I was not a Christian.
Love all the links about Susan.
@77: On the one hand, this is Narnia’s Armageddon, not Earth’s. And post-Armageddon Narnia, the “Real” Narnia of the final chapter, isn’t Heaven. It’s no more than one of the doorsteps of Heaven, one of the low hills at the foot of the “highest of the mountains, exalted of the Lord” (as the prophet Micah puts it). “Further up and further in,” says Lewis. Susan has missed Narnia’s Last Days, so she is neither In nor Out: she hasn’t been judged at all. She wasn’t there.
On the other hand, we can speculate all we like about what Susan might have done with the rest of her life and her afterlife. We can credibly imagine that she found her own way in her own time, from the world where she was born, like all the rest of us. Many nations will come streaming to that mountain, says the prophet, each from their own path. But in the text which is the only place she actually exists, she is, if not explicitly Out forever, not In. Susan will never be either In or Out because Lewis left her hanging, alone, not included with the rest of her family and friends although she had been as much a Friend of Narnia, a Queen in Narnia, as any of them.
And it feels callous because Lewis took a character and turned her into a Moral, and he seems to have chosen her because she was expendable. Who else is going to serve as the Bad Example? Not Peter the High King– we won’t have Narnia’s Aslan-given authority corrupted at the last (although we’ve seen plenty of corrupt authority in our own world). Not Lucy the Favorite, whose instincts are always right (although in our world, sometimes people believe they’re right when they’re pretty badly wrong). Not Edmund or Eustace– they’ve had their redemption stories, and once saved always saved (although repentant sinners often go on to sin again). Not Diggory or Polly, the Elders who’ve held to the truth of Narnia all their lives– they’re not going to be allowed to falter at this late date (although even the faithful can get discouraged after years of “trouble here below”).
But it seems we’re not going to include the parenthetical possible in this children’s tale. So Susan? Apparently there’s nothing special about her, nothing to keep her from error. That leaves a bad taste in my nouth, anyway.
My problem with Susan isn’t really about what happens to her, but how the others are so mean & judgmental when discussing her and don’t seem to care about her at all. And I’m supposed to okay with the fact that these people are the ones getting into ‘heaven’…
Thank you. This is lovely.
I love this, it strikes not only at the heart of the main problem–Susan’s abrupt disappearance just doesn’t make sense–while also showing possible different explanations (the patriarchy) and ways to read and enjoy it regardless. Thank you!
Thank you for that scene. I only wish that Lewis had written it.
MEA@@@@@ #90 I think that the flower was in The Great Divorce?
I understand the annoyance about Susan, but I have lived something like this. In my family most of us were conservative evangelicals in the 60s and 70s. My older brother married a wonderful passionate believer, smart, intense, devoted. My mother was the most devout person I knew up until then. My brother and his wife were a part of an intense, unique church / community of believers, in another state. At one time, myself and my new wife, considered moving to their state and joining the faith community; but over the course of 5 years, the community transformed into a cult, and the leader developed delusions of grandeur. The whole thing fell apart as the scales fell off the eyes of my brother and his wife and some of their other leader / 20 -30yrs-something friends. This shook my whole family, but we remained people of faith. My other brother and sister and I and my wife continued on in faith. Fortunately we all grew beyond evangelicalism and after 40 years we would all fall into the category of “progressive Christianity”. My brother and his wife divorced soon after their faith community was exposed as a sham and the leader as a charlaten. My ex-sister-in-law, the most devoted person I had ever known, with an extremely intelligent faith, evolved into an agnostic, and sarcastic person. The negativity and judgement she had reserved for people (Christians) who did not believe as “correctly” as she did was all turned outward towards ALL matters of Christian faith. The materialistic American culture that she held in some contempt was now embraced as the guiding trajectory of her life (to be fair, she was a good provider for my 2 nephews– my brother lived his life successfully as a poor starving artist!). To me, my sister-in-law’s loss of faith, and almost complete transformation of her purpose and avocation left me angry and bitter. I had to unceremoniously “let her go” from my heart and mind. She was relegated to the back of my mind, the mother of my nephews, that’s all. So, I can see how Lewis’ portrayal of Susan is not so far fetched, nor a betrayal of her character. She embraced the convenient parts of her life, and that did not include faith.
Well written, Matt. But if Lewis failed in the way he presented Susan’s conclusion in the books, he failed in a spectacularly successful way. Your article is another in a long series of authors who have been so bothered by this point in the story that they have rewritten it. Haha. Major published authors have had this stick in their craw.
Your assumption in saying he failed basically argues he made us feel uncomfortable and unhappy. That he didn’t explain his theology in a way that would release us from the tension of that moment. I would contend your assumption is wildly wrong. He absolutely intended for Susan’s story to do exactly what it did. Bother people deeply.
At this point in my life, I know many people like Susan’s character. I grieve thinking about them, pray for them and wonder how, when they had been to Narnia and known Aslan, they now call it all a silly story.
I think Lewis is pleased, as he looks on from the great cloud of witnesses, at the amount of ink, the amount of discussion, that has been generated by “the problem of Susan”. We should all be so lucky to “fail” like Lewis.
Thank you so much for this. As a 10- or 11-year-old girl, devoted to Narnia and reading TLB for the first time, I got the message that I was going to be Susan, and the betrayal broke my heart. Clearly it was the same for a lot of us. I will cherish your revised ending to Susan’s Narnia story.
A few years ago, before it’d heard with some relief about The Problem of Susan, I wrote a very short story about Suzy Pevensie in the 60s, running the Stock Exchange – powerful and driven but always searching for a lost something. Now, thanks to BrendaA (post 49 above), I’ve read Elegant and Fine by T Kingfisher and am in awe of thistruly great story.
@@@@@ Meg
I’m very sorry to hear that you were abused. Best wishes.
@@@@@97
One key sentence is incomplete. I would finish it this way:
“Your assumption in saying he failed basically argues he made us feel uncomfortable and unhappy.” because readers find his treatment of Susan to be cruel and unfair.
Those are judgements that lead to feelings, and neither should be dismissed.
Matt is also arguing correctly that it’s an artistic failure because Lewis forces a character to be a symbol. it’s a fortunate failure in stimulating further artists to tackle it in new ways, but that’s nothing to praise Lewis for. It’ll be interesting to see if efforts to repair the damage done by Lewis’ Suck Fairy continue, as that would indicate the books’ continued relevance. They were important to me as a child, but that was decades ago. If I were looking for SFF books with a spiritual theme to give to a child today, as my parents did for me, I would look elsewhere. That’s not a condemnation of Christianity, just a recognition that books have lifespans, like the people who make them.
Thank you so much, I’m crying onto my toast as I write this…
I’ll just quietly join the camp of those who have never seen a ‘problem’ with Susan, for some of the reasons that have been laid out so eloquently above.
But I am here to say thank you to everyone who is sharing the story of their own faith journey, to or away from Aslan. It’s lovely. This is likely what Lewis wanted his books to accomplish – community and conversation.
I did not expect to get to the end of this essay in tears. Gorgeously done, and thank you.
ages ago I printed out this as an addendum to the series
https://honorh.livejournal.com/226358.html
@60 Very good point about Mark Studdock, especially since he’s developed in such detail as a character. But you could argue that Lewis’ fiction is full of shallow male characters, including Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew (“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. At this moment Uncle Andrew was beginning to be silly in a very grown-up way.”). He’s “dabbled in” magic but “always left all the dangers (as far as one can) to other people” and he spent all his own money and his sister’s “never doing any work, and running up large bills for brandy and cigars.” Another example of a shallow masculine character, in the Space Trilogy, would be Dick Devine/Lord Feverstone.
Other works by Lewis frequently demonstrate his attitude toward what he saw as a feminine obsession with adornment, social status and one’s own appearance. (If you can read “The Shoddy Lands” without being turned off of Lewis for good you’ll forgive him anything. This story is the fully developed form of an outlook that appears as side comments and minor points in all but Lewis’ latest works–Till We Have Faces redeems him for a lot.)
I never liked the whole ending of The Last Battle mostly because it’s all too easy and idyllic, but certainly because of what happens to Susan. Lewis never seems to ask whether Susan takes the turn she does because in our world and in Narnia, her greatest rewards come from others’ perception of her physical beauty. Who does not want to build on and preserve their greatest advantage? In Voyage of the Dawn Treader we see how much Lucy envies Susan for her good looks. As Queen Susan she has little to do but be kind and sort through all her suitors. Susan’s brothers may have thought she was getting off easy in both worlds. If she’d wanted to cut off that long hair and turn into an Amazon, would anyone have taken her seriously? (Note that being taken seriously is Jane Studdock’s primary motivating desire in That Hideous Strength. Lewis at least seems to get that right about women.)
In The C.S. Lewis Hoax, Katherine Lindskoog mentions a eighth Narnia book written by an unnamed nun called The Centaur’s Cavern which tells Susan’s story. Lindskoog says that Lewis’ estate refused to grant publication rights for the book. Ever since I heard about it I’ve been dying to read it. If it has ever become available anywhere, I’d love to know where!
It is a persistent lie the world–from the pit of hell, originally–likes to push upon us all. That sex is bad. That sex is sin. That the fall was about sex, or that Susan’s absence was about sex.
It’s all nonsense and shallow foolishness itself to see it all that way. It doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny, but still it poisons and infects, twisting sex and turning those who cherish sex (as all should, even the celibate!) against God. It is the lie behind the “sexual revolution” and more. It is believed among both many of the most pagan and many of the most religious and many of us in between. We are deceived when we believe that God or religion or Christianity or church is anti-sex, that sex is the “forbidden fruit”, that it is begrudgingly allowed to married heterosexuals and only for procreation. Have they not read Genesis? Ephesians? Song of Solomon? Do we know our Bibles at all? Do we use our minds? Sex surrounds us in nature, it is written beautifully throughout our very genes. It is the good creation of a good Creator. It is for reproduction, yes, but also as a picture of the intimacy and vulnerability and love and trust between Christ and the Church. It is good, good, good.
And Lewis knew this all well. Those who interpret Susan’s falling away from Narnia as a condemnation of her sexuality are not thinking clearly, and certainly not reading carefully. They have listened the lie of hell and in perpetual fear it is true they rebel against anything that could even be misinterpreted to be anti-sex. And that grieves me.
I count myself among those who saw Susan’s folly as shallowness and worldliness and being “too grown up”, not anything to do with sexuality. I too was surprised to hear others thought she was denied heaven due to her desire for sex. But only surprised a moment, then i remembered the lie about sex that pervades the world and it was all too clear how this was so often badly misinterpreted by those i would have expected clearer thinking and more careful reading from.
An excellent post, Mr Mikalatos! I have always had – I won’t say “headcanon” because I don’t believe in it, the canon is the canon – but ideas about ways Susan might find her way back, if not to Narnia (for Narnia is over), then to Aslan.
When I was decades younger someone told me about his fanfic “The Last Queen of Narnia”, in which some Talking Mice come to Susan and ask for her help with – I don’t remember what – but it involved going to the Wood Between the Worlds. Beyond that, I don’t recall much. But I thought it a tremendously clever idea.
Thank you for this. It’s lovely. And I love that Lewis told a fan to try writing the story of Susan. To me, that proves he truly understands the partnership of writer and reader, that he doesn’t try to claim that a character/world is all his and only his now that he has shared it with us. I don’t think many authors are like that.
We read and discussed Susan’s ending at my church book club. You did not mention the scene, in Caspian I think, where Lucy sees Aslan and tries to get them to follow him on a harder path, but the others disagree and vote and end up taking what seems the easier path; but in fact, causes a long delay during which others, who are needing them, get hurt. Susan ends up admitting she’d also seen Aslan but didn’t want to go what seemed a harder way. Yes, Susan was lovely and gentle and wanted to be/liked to show that she was grown up, but she was never as wise as Lucy.
And note, that Susan calls Narnia, a “game” they played when they were young. So she doesn’t believe anymore. Even so, we all believed Susan would find her way back and thought that perhaps her whole family being killed might be the catalyst that sends her searching and finding Aslan/God again.
@78: it is precisely that Christian worldview that I think problematic. That the created world is irrevocably tainted like dirty ill-fitting clothes that need to be thrown off as soon as possible and replaced by the much better ones somewhere else of which they are a shoddy imitation. And it is a vie that seems to me to be fundamental to Lewis’s theology of Narnia (in contrast, I think, to the Tolkienian one which seems to suggest that for the Elves at least a mended and Unmarred Arda, with the Lands beneath the Wave lifted up again, may be their ultimate destination).
@109 – I’m Catholic (as Tolkien was) and what you are describing IS a little more akin to gnostiicism/Manicheaism and some flavors of Protestantism (the idea that we are snow covered dung, as opposed to truly transformed). And they believed in ultimately eschewing our bodies/leaving them behind.
But that’s not really the Catholic belief (and I don’t think it was Lewis’s but it has been a very long time since I’ve read him). I’m also not sure how what I described is different anyway – there is a belief that the world (and people) is utlimately good, albeit corrupted/marred, but also pointing to something even better and that will eventually be remade/restored (bodies included). I don’t think anybody said it was ‘shoddy’ or not to be enjoyed (even if perhaps, simply by nature of comparison one might say that for hyperbolic affect). At the same time, there is still a recognition that they are not the end all/be all of meaning. But I’m also sleep deprived right now and probably not in the best place to be expressing the finer points of theology! At any rate, I quite like this world :) But I also try not to allow myself to become too inwardly focused that I start thinking about only what it can get me, as opposed to what I can do for others, loving/serving, etc. To me that’s kind off what worldliness is. At any rate it’s more than just ‘ew, the world is bad and we should just tolerate it for as long as we have to’.
@96 – obviously there could be other things going on with your exSIL and her relationship with your family, but the way you describe it you don’t sound very progressive. I have some limited/less extreme experience of separating myself from certain faith communities due to the scales falling off and it is very isolating (and does also come with a lot of anger). You just seem really quick to write her off, as if her being judgemental was okay when she was one of you, but not any longer.
@106
”Those who interpret Susan’s falling away from Narnia as a condemnation of her sexuality are not thinking clearly, and certainly not reading carefully.”
If you are trying to convince people who hold a different view than yours to change their minds, calling them poor thinkers and careless readers is not a promising start.
This is very nicely written! Thank you, Facebook suggestions, for pointing me here!
We know Aslan looked deeply into the souls of all the creatures of Narnia before deciding who got into Aslan’s Country. Puzzle the Donkey gets in, despite helping Shift. Emeth has worshiped Tash all his life, but he gets in. Even one of the dwarfs who shot the horses makes the cut. It always made sense to me that Aslan would be able to see past a person’s deeds or outward manner to some essential part of their soul before making a decision.
I really have a problem with the idea Susan’s interest in sexuality would make her unfit. I do believe that her sexuality is the issue, with her interest in dating as a proxy for that. The good folks in the stories meet someone (often facilitated by Aslan) and marry them – they don’t shop around. Or they don’t marry at all, and get taken to Aslan’s Country before they have a chance to get interested. Overt sexuality is associated with evil, as personified by the Lady of the Green Kirtle, or Jadis’ hypnotic attractiveness, or Lucy’s desire to use the Magician’s Book to make herself prettier. I suppose one could think that Aslan’s given Susan more time to get right with him by not bringing about her death at the same time as the others, but it still seemed harsh to me when I read it as a kid and even more so now.
I loved the extra scene because, like everyone else, I was troubled by Susan’s situation. I took her abiding “sin” to be distraction from the spiritual and replacement of God with materialism. But the greatest joy of reading your article is to discover that there are so many Friends of Narnia in the world, who “met” Asian and the Pevensies and cherish the memory.
I liked this article’s take (I’ve enjoyed all of Matt’s articles in this series) I also like the addition to the story that makes it a bit more obvious that Susan can come back and that neither Lewis nor Aslan was irrevocably throwing Susan under the bus (although I kind of get the point that Lewis could have made it a bit more obvious by including something in the actual book). I’ve read the Neil Gaimon short story which felt like he had a bit of a bias going (I recognize that my own bias has some part in that feeling).
Here’s another fanfic short story I came across that I feel stays pretty close to Lewis’ characters and his theology. I was kind of expecting someone else to bring it up but since no one did, here’s the link in case anyone is interested.
The Queen’s return to Narnia
Linden, I do think people misread the actual passage about Susan, and I’m not sure it’s reasonable to bring in other passages about female sexuality from the Chronicles.
However, I do think that if people’s nerves are raw about how female sexuality is portrayed, it’s not just Lewis’s fault, there’s a widespread issue in the culture.
I don’t think there are any positive portrayals of male sexuality in the Chronicles, and (if I remember correctly) at least one negative in The Horse and His Boy.
One thing about Lewis- he hated the idea of Hell. He thought it was the most difficult problem in Christianity: punishing a person forever. He brought up that there might be a way out of it in ‘The Great Divorce” and “That Hideous Strength”, but the most he could do was imagine some kind of disintegration.
He could not believe in universal salvation like George McDonald, as he thought it went against scripture. As we see with Emeth, he was not an exclusivist either- you have to say he dodged with Susan, basically saying it’s a mystery, and don’t think about it.
Lovely rewritten scene with Aslan and Lucy….I wept as many other here mentioned they did. Maybe we are all recalling moments in our own lives fraught with the worldly focus or a loved one not certain of their choice to Love God or the world more. Either way, this writing is brilliant and a much more generous explanation of the problem of Susan to ponder over. Thank you for your soaking up of C.S. Lewis here and again for the beautiful and careful writing.
This is really interesting and a context which I can see clearly now you have pointed it out. I love the extra piece you have added to the story. It fits in as though Lewis wrote it.
My problem with Susan’s ‘sin’ being sexuality, or rather carnality, is that it doesn’t fit with children’s literature at the time. I find it unlikely that Lewis would even consider putting in even a slightest hint towards that and if he did, the publisher would almost certainly remove it. Thanks to the people above who have quoted the actual dialogue, I am very strongly minded to say that Susan’s sin is a combination of shallowness (only interested in surface things) and more importantly her denial that Narnia ever existed at all – she has turned her back on Aslan/Christ and therefore may not enter Heaven until she turns back to him.
a-j, that’s the real point. Susan hasn’t been shut out, rejected or denied. She has of her own free will turned away from Aslan and Narnia, seduced by the worldly pleasures and flattery offered to exceptionally beautiful young women. She can at any time turn back to Narnia and Aslan will welcome her. The choices are entirely in her own hands. Her life is hers to make or mar. What more can one ask in the way of character agency?
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Damn pollen in spring.
@116 – Two portrayals of male sexuality in Voyage of the Dawn Treader spring to mind: Lord Bern “loved a girl of the islands … So I married and have lived here ever since.” And later, Caspian himself, on meeting Ramandu’s daughter, mentions Sleeping Beauty: perhaps kissing the princess might awaken the sleepers? When told that here he can’t kiss the princess until he’s woken the sleepers he replies, “Then in the name of Aslan, show me how to set about that work at once.” I don’t imagine he could put anything more explicit than that into a children’s book in the 1950s.
I always had a suspicion that Susan was based on a real person, and that during the writing of the series Lewis became quite disenchanted with that person, and that’s the real reason she was left out. But he still needed to come up with an in-universe explanation for it, which might or might not closely reflect the actual “shortcomings” of that person.
Matt, your essays are fantastic and more than a few have made me emotional — but this is the first to make me cry. When I was young, the Chronicles felt like perfect books. Growing up meant discovering their imperfections: I can see now where Lewis’s imagination was limited by his biases, and where my own beliefs and values take a different path. But thanks in part to this re-read, I’ve come to see those imperfections as gifts. Questions like the problem of Susan continue to generate discussion long after most of the books I loved as a child have been forgotten. Whether Lewis would approve or not (and his letters suggest that perhaps he would), the fact that so many writers have created work to wrestle with the questions in his books is a testament to the power they still hold. (Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series is a particular favorite of mine here.) And while The Last Battle is the Narnia book I revisit the least, I find it interesting that it seems to be the book that’s inspired the most responses from other writers, from Gaiman’s story to Lev Grossman’s “The Magician’s Land” to all the works mentioned in the comments… and of course, your graceful (and grace-filled) addition here. So while I’ll always feel sad for Susan, I’m grateful to you and the commenters for turning the Problem of Susan into the Challenge of Susan — a challenge to thoughtfully examine the books we love, to reckon with the sometimes-conflicting ways they make us feel, and to carry what we discover into our own lives and work.
@120
comment 123 cites two examples from the Narnia books. Children’s books of the time may not have discussed sexuality openly. Doesn’t means it’s not there.
Thank you for this.
This was so good & so necessary. Needs to be shouted around the world.
Susan will come back.
Susan is not abandoned.
Once a queen in Narnia, always a queen in Narnia.
…Maybe this is from me missing subtext of Narnia when I was younger and read this…But I find myself recalling on the last lines of the book, how the lives of Lucy, Peter, and Edmund would be of ever-happier and greater adventures in Narnia, now that they had gotten in that train accident and was transferred to Narnia.
If death, brought the three of them to Narnia, would not someday, the same happen to Dear Susan?
For that matter, if the rest of the chapters of their time in Narnia to be happier then the last, would not a reunion with Susan be involved with one of those chapters?
That was my reaction to “The problem of Susan” That she didn’t get caught in the tragedy of the train crash, but while the current Susan had wandered away from Narnia, considering it ‘make believe’ I saw little reason for her not to inevitably end up there.
Especially considering the way Susan, and Peter end up ‘never returning’ to Narnia after…The second book in the series, in order of publication? I think that’s the order I read them in…But I use that, as a point to say if that difference exists between Susan and Peter and Lucy and Edmund, and yet Peter shows up in Narnia at the end?
It doesn’t add up, that Susan stays out of Narnia. And it rather sounds like that conclusion, at least, was meant to lead us to the answer that she does return.
I think the focus on Susan’s interest in lipstick, being an adult, and the subtext of sex are not the reasons that she’s no longer a “friend of Narnia.” Eustace’s statement about her belief in Narnia are the most damming (pun intended):
“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”
Susan has either unintentionally forgotten the reality of Narnia, or is willfully denying that she spent an entire lifetime there. In both cases, how can you return there if either are true?
Your scene with Lucy and Aslan was beautiful!
Like others, I never saw Susan as being barred because she became interested in boys and clothes. After all, Polly, Aravis, Queen Helen and Jill all show an interest in fashion – but also in other things – and Queen Helen is called into Narnia to be its queen BECAUSE she is married. I always saw Susan as having rejected Narnia and having turned into the sneering sort of person that Eustace was at the start of VDT.
My headcanon has Susan as an elderly widow (she married one of Harold Scrubb’s employees, who she met at a work do) going on a cruise in the South Pacific. The motion of the ship brings back memories of the Splendour Hyaline, and she also has to counsel a young woman who finds her fiance is not what he seemed to be, much like her own experiences with Rabadash. This makes her accept that Narnia was real after all, and she is now ready to return. On the island of Niutelema (New Telemar), she finds a cave carved with mysterious images of a lion and steps through…
The thing I object to about Rowling’s description of Susan is that she herself has a perfect analogue of Susan in her own books, and it’s not Lavender Brown or Parvati Patil — it’s Percy Weasley. My interpretation of Susan’s falling away is that she chose worldly ambition over Narnia; that nylons, lipstick, and invitations were the symbols not of female sexuality, but of female ambition. Prior to the Women’s Movement, a young woman could best get ahead in the world by prettying herself up, getting invited to the right parties and events, meeting and attracting an ambitious young go-getter, and marrying him to rise with him to the top. Sexist? Of course, but that’s the way the world worked back then. Thus, Susan’s turning from her family and Narnia somewhat parallels Percy’s abandoning his family and their values to get ahead in the world. (Although Percy’s abandonment of his family was more forceful and direct, and he did end up redeemed by the end of the seventh book.
Your addition with Aslan and Lucy hit too close to home. Only been given enough grace to say a word or two into someone’s life and never see them again. Never knowing how the tale ends and just… left in a place to pray with tears. Lucy has the blessing to be in Heaven, to go further up and in.
While here… the tears will do until the Joy can come.
I am glad someone can express such a state and glad to see such comments understand it.
Thank you
I don’t have a problem with Susan. Maybe I’m the only one.
She’s been to Narnia, and told she can’t come back and needs to find Aslan in her own world. She’s growing up and thinking about her future in England. Maybe getting married and having her own family? How’s she supposed to explain her adventures in Narnia to someone who has never been there? It’s easier to explain as a silly childhood game.
Who says she’s not a friend of Narnia? Peter. Her older brother. Maybe she can’t understand why Peter doesn’t also put aside Narnia and focus on his future in the real world. Siblings can often bring out the worst in each other and know just the right buttons to push. The description of Susan feels like an ongoing augment between siblings to me.
The result is she’s not with the others when the train accident occurs. She still has her life to live in the “real” world. How that will end. We don’t know. It’s not part of the Narnia stories. We don’t get to know the rest of her story.
As for nobody grieving over her, she’s not dead. They are all caught up in discovering where they are and what this new world is. They aren’t thinking about anything except what is in front of them. Not out of callousness, but just out of immediacy. Perhaps once they have gotten over the wonder of it all, they will spare a thought for Susan left behind. Or perhaps they won’t think of it until she joins them after her earthly journey is done and they have a happy reunion in Heaven together.
I have always been puzzled by the statement that Susan was cast out for discovering sex; it’s made explicit that she lost her belief. The others offer theories about “wanting to be too grown up” to explain why, but Aslan says nothing on the subject .
Interested by the suggestion Susan’s story is actually Lewis’s, since he lost his faith in adolescence.
I’m inclined to agree that it was badly done since Lewis clearly didn’t intend us to think she was finally lost. Lewis did want us to take the choice seriously, though, and believed you could choose to reject God, and apostasy is an obvious issue for The Last Battle. You don’t even have to be a Christian to see his point. Suppose you are a campaigning atheist and your closest friend becomes a born-again Christian? You have to face the fact that he has chosen to reject the basis of your relationship. The possibility that those close to us will go a different path is something we have to face. But in the case of Susan it comes rather out of the blue and doesn’t ring true.
Almost every reader (who likes Narnia) seems to imagine some resolution for themselves (if seldom as beautiful as the one suggested ), and a good editor should have suggested to Lewis he could at least drop a hint. Lewis seems to have thought that Susan’s journey would be a “grown up novel”. The sudden loss of her whole family would surely jolt her out of her superficial social life pretty hard. However, as has often been noted, the rings made by Uncle Andrew are still there and would presumably have gone to Susan, so we can imagine Susan’s journey in more magical terms.
@pinlighter: Now that’s an idea I think I’ll adopt for my own head cannon!
I was always upset that the others treated her as the mom stand-in, the responsible one, for several books, and then got angry because she was less oriented to child wonderment. But then, as a child I the end of the very first book put a very bad taste in my mouth; these children had grown up in Narnia, had built lives with major adult responsibilities, and now all of a sudden they are shunted out of their world and back into children’s bodies?!? To a world at war where they have no power and very few ties? What would have happened if Good Queen Susan the Gentle had already accepted someone’s suit in Narnia? If she was a mother in truth by the time the siblings went off looking for their magical stag? Maybe Aslan would wave that away by saying if she was truly a mother and wife, she wouldn’t have *wanted* to ride out anywhere, but that’s BS and that ending was some major fridge horror to me.
I think that’s one reason I really liked the Fairyland series by Catherynne Valente; the first book is in many ways a howl against the Narnia cycle and how it uses its heroes and heroines.
I don’t see Susan as forgetting or not believing Narnia happened, just compartmentalising it. We meet her aged 12, on the cusp of puberty and already, by desire or expectation, playing a maternal role. She enters Narnia and spends 15 years there before returning to exactly where she started. Then a year later after a much briefer period in Narnia she is told by Aslan she can never return because she is too old. In that context considering Narnia to have been a childish experience makes perfect sense and I’m surprised her siblings are so dismissive of it, as two by two they are also barred.
Susan describing their Narnian adventures as “games when we were children” has more than a ring of truth about it. When the four enter Narnia and they are immediately expected to win and rule it. How can they? Harry grows through having school and Dumbledoor for learning and support , Lyra is rebelling against an adult Steam Punk Oxford, but the Pevensie’s have no point of reference bar themselves. Peter and Edmond ,13 and 10 are soon commanding armies, talking tactics, leading and are able to instinctively do so because the know that Peter Pan could. When the children become Kings and Queens their role models are not Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from 1940’s Brittan but what they remember of the Tudors from their sanitised school text books. Which may explain the awful, stilted dialog at the end of LWW. In the wrap up of that book and in THAHB only Susan, the most mature when they enter Narnia, is serious about courtship and marriage. The boys never consider it, though even Lucy is starting think they may be something to the idea. While in Narnia they grow physically mature, emotionally they are not, for everything the quartet do is shaped and limited by what they were on entering Narnia, they literally cannot think outside the box.
Perhaps the problem is not Susan, but what the land of Narnia is there to symbolize, being both an Eden for innocents and a place in need of rescue and guidance. It is not Narnia that a mature Susan will need to get back to, but Aslan’s Country. We do not know exactly what Aslan told Peter and Susan, though it’s not what Peter was expecting. We can get a pretty good idea through from what Aslan tells Lucy at the end of Dawn Treader. There is a way from Earth to Aslan’s Country, and that she should seek Aslan in her own world, but by another name. What is the use then in being a ‘Friend of Narnia’ to Susan or indeed any of the Pevensie’s? Aslan has told them to find their own way, yet they keep harking back to Narnia. Lewis further complicates matters by bringing old and conveniently dead characters into Narnia (Eden) and Alsan’s Country (Heaven) to complete the Final Battle. Once Narnia is closed for business no-one, human or otherwise can ever enter Aslan’s Country from there.
Which leaves Susan from the end of PC to TLB searching in, for want of a better word, the real world. Believing in Narnia, a place she has no access to does no more good for her quest than believing in a physical Adam and Eve Eden, she cannot affect it, it cannot help her, so it becomes an allegory, part of a childhood she cannot return to. What she can do is start back along the path she made as a Narnian Queen, her courtly dresses and long hair replaced by lipstick and nylons, but this time around she will have human interaction and a modern 1950s world for better or worse to guide and inspire her.
Susan is going to be fine. She just has her own road to travel and it happens to be different from her siblings. And I believe she will do a lot of good for a lot of people on her way back to being Queen Susan the Gentle. Once a queen in Narnia, always a queen!
Late comment on this subject, something of a small bugaboo of mine. Let me find the passage.
Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. 5 Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. 6 But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. 7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. 8 But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
This passage I think summarizes what the Narniad is about-the pevensies are the seeds-Susan represents the bolded passage.
Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. 5 Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. 6 But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. 7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. 8 But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
Susan’s problem is not the nylon, boys or lipstick, these things simply represent her real problem. That is her worldly interests and concerns have choked out her relationship with God. This was so clear to me even on the first read. When I later learned there is something of a minor online discourse on the subject, I was shocked.
Oh wow, I love this so so much.
Loved your story about Susan so much. It fits in so well with the original story :)
@77. It’s a bit complicated. What you were told at Sunday School is by no means the only Christian view, and was not, as far as I know, the one held by Lewis. Also, remember that the end of the Narnian world doesn’t happen simultaneously with the end of ours.
Thank you! This is an amazing article! Helps to love Narnia even more! :)
I think Susan sacrificed herself / was sacrificed by Lewis so the others could stay behind… in the books she was spseudo-mum. In childhood, childlike and innocent in the responsibility of adulthood.
Ultimate sacrifice because she dost know and not her do they.
She is Wendy from Peter Pan. She chose to grow up for the good of others. She didn’t want to leave Narnia. They made her leave, through childish recklessnesses. I guess she’s the real contrast.
gaiman cas
gaiman casts Susan to the great whore on the back of the above Beast, a temptress of the great lion.
I cried for susan. But I accepted her fate. I was terrified of growing up because I understood adult life to be full of responsibility an hardship. I’d seen my parents after all. I wasn’t surprised that people were cruel about her
But it also brings free will. Something Susan didn’t have before. Sh followed the will of others.
She had to grow up hard when everyone else died. A sacrifice for love. Being made more tragic by the siblings spurning her
As a child before the internet (and identifying primarily with Lucy) it did not occur to me that there was a problem per se for Susan. It was confusing enough that the end of the story is that everyone who showed up for the fight died (and also their parents): WHAT.
As an adult I am aware that, by the rules understood by Lewis, if God permits some tragedy, it is not because he could not prevent it or because he did not care about how much it would hurt or because the person deserved it (like everybody was telling Job). It is because he has a specific plan to bring something very good and very beautiful out of it in the end that will have made it seem very worthwhile to the person who was hurt. For a tragedy of this scale (the loss to Susan, and to others whom we don’t consider), I would expect a fanfic that results in the salvation of nearly every minor terrible character that we have seen in England and also a few others for good measure: not only the reversion and ordinary-sainthood of Susan (to the extent that free will can be anticipated and still be free, we can anticipate this because all the friends of Narnia would necessarily intercede for her from heaven, not grieving but desiring her to share their joy; every possible effort will be made), but the awful boarding school adults, the worst of relatives, crossover walkon-characters from other series and short stories, and the woman you’ve never heard of who appears later in The Grest Divorce, all caught up in separate ways in a butterfly-tempest inversion of “for want of a nail” (many nails) that would take years to understand. Everyone, myself included, is thinking too small.
My read on Susan is, she is C. S. Lewis’s swipe at atheists. In his imagining, atheists are quite aware of the existence of God, but choose not to believe out of willful obtuseness. It doesn’t occur to him that atheists might be exposed to (let me check my notes) ZERO direct evidence of any God and so are not persuaded of any God’s existence. In Lewis’s mind, that is somehow equivalent to spending years in a place where one’s every sense and experience is overflowing with the clear evidence of a God.
I think Lewis could have pulled the same thing with any of the boys – like maybe if Peter decided he was more into the world of machines and finance – but since Lewis opted to do this to Susan, and make her particular sin an overattachment to “girly” things, I’m going to call Lewis a sexist creep. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’m working with what Lewis gave us; if he didn’t want us to suspect the was a sexist creep, he could have written Susan differently.
Others have noticed that Lewis has a fetish for characters paying a steep price for disobedience; for example, if a character is told not to drink from a given pond, and they do, you can bet they will erupt in flames and comically run in circles until they at last expire. No explanation for why drinking from that pond was a bad idea, no clues to the characters that there is anything dangerous about the pond; all that matters is that they didn’t obey and therefore they have earned a Wile E. Coyote death. Dude had issues.
Wow. I always got what Lewis meant about Susan. He was speaking of that part we all have as children – to see the invisible, to believe in magic and to hear the voice of God. Sadly, as we get older, the world invites us to turn that off in order to focus on what we can see and hear in other words, to “grow up.” Like Lewis’ dedication to Lucy Barfield, he says first she will be too old for fairy tales but then one day she will be old enough for fairy tales once again. I never believed Susan was lost forever – only that she was overly focused on this world and I always believed that when she was old, she would once again go back to Narnia, particularly because she had such closeness with Aslan when she was a child and those experiences were part of the formation of who she was, deep down.
This is such a perfect summation of the pain and beauty we’ve all struggled with. It brought me to tears. Thank you.
Beautiful written post, and nice fanfic about Lucy’s interaction with Susan. Biblically speaking, however, Peter, Lucy, Edmund, et al will be excitedly rejoicing with jubilation in Narnia at Susan’s eventual destruction in the “real world”.
“They will not be sorry for the damned; it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them; but on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises.” – Jonathan Edwards