Into the Wardrobe

Hello All

I have just re read the Narian Chronicles again as an adult. I loved these books and read them countelss times as a child....however, reading them now as a believing and confessing Christian makes them all the more wonderful.

I just wondered...why Lewis deicided to make the 'evil' side of Narnia female. Jadis, The White Witch, The Hag and The Lady of the Green Kyrtle for example. Also, why he chose Susan (female again) to be the only Pevensie child to turn her back on Narnia.

Thanks for any input...

Interesting question .. Lewis's depiction of women comes up perennially here.. not just in the CON but in all of his fiction. I am trying to think of any evil male characters in the CON, but other than Shift, who could hardly be called a man, I am having problems (King Miraz I suppose but he was a rather peripheral character).

Remember though that Jadis and the WW were one and the same though, and some would argue - not me but some - that she was the Green Lady too. So maybe it's not a case of lots of evil female characters, but one very evil one who keeps reappearing.

To offset the point about Susan, I would say that Edmund and Eustace's early behaviour more than compensate for that.. :)

I don't think Uncle Andrew comes out squeeky clean either.

Nor do the dwarves ( assuming that the dwarves are all male - which is how Jack portrayed them and not as Tolkien's bearded lady dwarves ).

The Telemarines aren't so hot either and the Calormenes get a pretty bad press.

Oh yeah and then there's his s'fishncy Gumpas and the slavers in Dawn Treader.

I think there was something very unpleasant about Lewis' attitude to women but I don't think it shows much in the Narnia books. The most important villain or villains are female in three of the books (LWW, SC and MN) and male in four (PC, LB, MN and HHB). There isn't really an important villain in VDT but if you want to count Gumpas that makes five books with male villains. So the men win here.

There are no more female villains than male but I think it is true that the women are more fascinating and memorable. Look at MN. There are two bad characters, both equally wicked. Uncle Andrew, however, is wicked and ridiculous and thoroughly humiliated at the end while Jadis is "seven feet tall and dazzlingly beautiful", enormously strong and very brave. She is, in some ways, even more impressive in LWW. I was at college with a girl who changed her name to Jadis because she admired her so. I don't think any boys would want to change their names to Andrew or Miraz after reading the Narnia books.

I don't know quite how to explain the difference between the female and the male villains but it does not seem to show hostility to women.

Thanks, Penny,
heh, I've only read Dawn Treader a couple of dozen times, I should have picked up on it.

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Selah,
Sven

If CoN is taken in isolation the topic of this thread is would be considered offensive to postmodern feminist sensativities. But, Lewis wrote more than just the CoN. In the first two books of Lewis' Space Trilogy the persistent villain was a man, a former professor who became demonized and ultimately wound up as the unman who came to corrupt Paralandra [Venus] by seducing the good queen of the planet. In the third book titled "That Hidious Strength" the villains were also professors who happened to be men possessed by the Macrobes [demonic beings]. So it would not be cricket to suggest Lewis had it in for women just because the main antagonists in CON were mostly female.

As an interesting asside, in Lewis' theological works he advanced the radical notion that maleness was best defined as "initiative" and femaleness was best described by the word: "response". By that reckoning he concluded God's "maleness" is not a term of gender but rather God's position and standing as the ultimate initiator. Mankind is, by contrast, "female" because humans are the intelligent responders to God's overtures. Thus Lewis explained how the writers of the NT could say that in Christ there is "neither male or female" and he clarified the somewhat abstract doctrine that all believers, men and women, are correctly identified as the "bride of Christ". Again, these are not the railings of a misogynist but rather the ideas of a brilliant mind grappling with the deep things of existance, religion and philosophy.

Well its obvious that Lewis was sexist.