If your knickers are still in a twist about Susan Penvensie’s not getting to Aslan’s Country at the end of Last Battle, Read all about what really happened with Susan, the Narnia Queen that dismissed her royal status as childish fancy. In this article we learn how she grew up to outshine her brothers, sister, Eustace, really, even Aslan.
The short course is that Susan becomes the perfect liberal East Coast cause fighter, because, of course, that is what the Great Lion wants for all of us.
The best part? Susan as prophylactic smuggler because it’s the heroic thing to do for college co-eds…
Forgive me for wondering, though, if the author, quite despite herself, didn’t actually portray what did happen to Susan and that this was exactly what C. S. Lewis was pointing to in his lipstick and stockings aside as her spiritual ruin, namely, egotism, power concerns, and worldliness before character.
Unlike this writer, for whom Susan is a wish fulfillment fantasy in retro fan fiction (“How I Would Have Lived the Heroic Way in the Civil Rights Era”), Elizabeth Baird-Hardy understands the death of the oldest and least wise Pevensie sister. Listen to her comments on this subject here.
The curious thing for me, after listening to The Last Battle last week, is how charitable Lewis is to Susan when he was bound or obliged as an artist to make the point that the blindness of the dwarves in that story, literal and nominalist blindness, is a quality in materialist human beings as well. Especially of the young and worldly.
The author of this ‘I Know Susan Better’ piece only confirms Lewis’ point because she neglects the chapters following the few paragraphs about Susan about the true nature of the world.
John said, “The short course is that Susan becomes the perfect liberal East Coast cause fighter, because, of course, that is what the Great Lion wants for all of us.”
That’s amazing, because Dumbledore apparently wants the same thing for us all too! At least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten from one prominent Potter organization.
Agreed, John. Seems that Lewis was pointing to the distraction from Christ that worldliness provides. As Lewis saw it in his time, lipstick and nylons were the distractions that could pull some away. Doesn’t mean they are gone for good, just side-tracked for a time.
And Rowling is pointing to the concerns of her time for inclusiveness and tolerance…writing is not in a vacuum…