EXCLUSION FROM SALVATION: THE FATE OF SUSAN

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds

And binding with briars my joys & desires.

                                                        Blake: The Garden of Love

 

With his concept The Anxiety of Influence, the American critic Harold Bloom applied Freudian Oedipal theory to literature.  Each new generation of writers asserts itself by attacking its predecessor: driven by the fear – hence the title of the theory – of not matching up to what has gone before.  Phillip Pullman’s professed hatred of the Narnia sequence is a classic example of the theory Bloom is outlining.  His Dark Materials and Narnia: there just ain’t room for the both of us.  Pullman’s famous demolition essay of 1998, The Darkside of  Narnia, is long on accusation and short on evidence – inevitable, perhaps, when you are writing under word constraints and have to do as much damage as you can under the limitations imposed  – but one particular example Pullman does cite is the exclusion of Susan from Paradise in The Last Battle.

            For Pullman, “there’s the turning away of Susan from the Stable (which stands for salvation)” for her interest in nylons, lipsticks and growing up. So, Susan is excluded because she’s growing up: which process includes an interest in sex.  Lewis is anti- growing up – have we strayed here for a moment into Peter Pan? – and is also anti-sex.

            Such a reading is of a piece with Pullman’s interpretation elsewhere of the Garden of Eden story: eating the forbidden fruit is a necessary act for self-development.  We see, also – in the background – the view that the Church stifles natural sexual impulses expressed by Blake in ‘A Little Girl Lost’ – “Love! sweet Love was thought a crime”; in ‘Sunflower’ –  “the pale virgin shrouded in snow”; or  in ‘The Garden of Love.’.

 Lewis’ view of what you are admiring if you accept Satan’s perspective on things is fully expressed in A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, and he took the stance  of traditional Christianity towards extramarital sex.  But although Pullman makes them so, neither of these issues, it seems to me, is primarily relevant in the case of Susan.

            Susan is turned away from the Stable?  Where, exactly, does the text say this?   In The Last Battle, Aslan stands at the door of the Stable and all created beings are brought face to face with him.  Those who look on him, and love him, pass through.  Those who look at him and hate him, veer off into the darkness.  Susan isn’t one of them: Lewis, had he wanted to, misses a golden opportunity – perhaps I should say a dark one –  to sermonize on what happens to you if you grow up  and discover sex.  Neither does Lewis dwell upon the fate of those who have rejected Aslan..  Unlike Pullman – who in The Amber Spyglass meditates upon the afterlife possibly beyond the boredom threshold of even the death-obsessed ancient Egyptians had they had the opportunity to read him – Lewis closes the issue in a sentence: “I don’t know what happened to them.”  It is perhaps worth stating here that although Pullman sees Lewis as “life hating” and  The Last Battle  as asserting that “death is better than life”  the main celebration in Christianity is not that somebody died, but that somebody rose from the dead.  The Last Battle reflects this emphasis on resurrection.

Why isn’t Susan there in the darkness?  Well, for a start, Susan isn’t dead.  Narnia has come to an end, but that isn’t to say that our world has.  Susan is still alive on Earth..  Ultimately all worlds may merge: but only on the basis of their differing timescales.  

            Why isn’t Susan with the others on the train that crashes?  Eustace points it out by quoting her: “‘Funny you’re still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”   Susan is not with the others because she is an apostate from Narnia.  In that apostasy, the nylons and lipstick are a symptom rather than a cause.    The roots of Susan’s spiritual malaise are shown as far back as Prince Caspian.   Lucy is the first of the children to see Aslan again; Susan is the last.  We are given a sense of her resistance to her conscience.  As Aslan puts it, “‘You have listened to fears, child.’”   This isn’t about puberty; it’s about the seed that falls on stony ground, and perhaps also about the camel going through the eye of a needle.

In Mere Christianity Lewis points out that Christianity – real Christianity, that is to say: rather than Gnostic-style distortions of it – approves of matter.  God likes matter, having created it.  God approved of the human body enough to become incarnate.  The adult Susan in The Horse and His Boy is depicted as a beautiful and healthily-sexed woman.  Matter becomes a problem only when you worship it: ie the materialist view of life.  Insofar as Susan is one of the rich – her wealth being in her looks, which she seeks to accentuate – then it is difficult for her to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 

All this is perhaps best shown in Lewis’ short story The Shoddy Lands.  The narrator briefly gets inside the mindset of a girl who takes advertisements at face value.  He sees the world through her materialist eyes, and hears the voice she either doesn’t hear, or ignores: “‘Child, let me in before the night comes.’”  It is in this sort of area, I think, that we should look for the explanation of Susan’s problems.

 

During his life, Lewis was given to robust responses to his enemies.   Now that he is no longer in a position to do so, his defence must generally rest upon his fellow Christians or his admirers.  In this instance, however, Lewis himself can have the last word: from Letters to Children, published in 1957.  A boy called Martin had written to him asking what happened to Susan.  This was Lewis’ reply:

            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…    Her own way.