C.S. Lewis died in 1963. The Last Battle was published in 1956. That’s SEVEN YEARS in which he could have shown SOME concession to angry fans that Susan’s exit was crappy and rectified that. And that’s 52 years ago, even now I think we’ve seen neither hair nor hide of any evidence outside of one letter.
Jesus Christ, do people have any chill? He didn’t write the book that finished Susan’s story. Big whoop. It was his decision. He didn’t owe it to anyone to finish Susan’s story. I hate this present-day mentality that somehow authors (and artists and actors) are required to please their audience. C.S. Lewis wrote to share his stories that take place in a magical world called Narnia and his story ended with Susan alone in England. He didn’t owe it to us to explain or expand Susan’s situation. It’s his story, therefore, his right to end things where he’d wanted it to. I’m sorry to anyone who’s upset about Susan’s story being left unfinished but, seriously, not everything in the world can go your way. It was C.S. Lewis’s decision and that’s that, there’s nothing more that can be done except for us to imagine Susan’s ending, whether it’s tragic or happy.
I CAN blame him, actually. For doing that stupid subplot in the first place. You’d think a guy with his story would be a bit more… what’s the word? Not terrible, to a character like Susan. Or is the sort of Redemption Lewis felt he had only applicable if you’re a dude?
Susan’s story is not about sexism. It’s literally about faith. Lewis was a Christian man who’d lost his faith during his youth and had had to return to his faith with the constant push of his friends (one major supporter being J.R.R. Tolkien). The most probable reason as to why Susan was the one to lose faith in Narnia was because she was the one that least believed in Narnia in the first place.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, she was adamant in not believing Lucy about Narnia. In Prince Caspian, after basically belittling Lucy for believing so strongly that she saw Aslan, and then being proven wrong by actually seeing Aslan, Susan apologizes to Lucy and says, “And I really believed it was him tonight, when you woke us up. I mean, deep down inside. Or I could have, if I’d let myself” (I’m using my digital book so I can’t give you the exact page but it’s in the middle of chapter 11).
“If I’d let myself”. Susan is refusing to believe what everyone else is saying is true. Lucy had been right time and time again about Narnia’s existence and yet Susan still refused to believe Lucy. And none of it is about the fact that Susan is a girl, it’s just her personality. She likes to be reasonable, rational, and practical. Faith isn’t reasonable, rational, or practical. Faith requires someone to just believe without thinking too much into it. Lucy doesn’t ask questions or analyze situations, she just… believes.
And, honestly, if you want to argue the whole “Susan is a woman, which is why she was excluded” thing, then you’d have to ignore the fact that Polly was an old woman in The Last Battle and had never given indication that she had lost faith in Narnia. Jill, Aravis, and Lucy were all (and I hate using this term but it’s actually appropriate this once) strong, female leads. Lewis treated all four well, just as he did Susan, the only difference was that Susan was the one that decided to “forget” about Narnia.
And the redemption arc? Susan had nothing to redeem herself over. She wasn’t Edmund – a cruel little beast of a child who said nasty things just because he knew it would hurt people. He sold out his family to the White Witch just to be spiteful. Susan was kind and compassionate throughout the entire series, from beginning to end; she was gentle. The only problem with Susan was that she was too practical. She wanted to act like a grown-up – or at least what she believed a grown-up should act like. She didn’t have anything to redeem herself from. Losing faith isn’t something that needed redemption. She just needed to accept Narnia as reality and stop trying to act like the grown-ups that were also trying to be grown-ups. Lewis has a quote about wanting to be grown-up that’s pretty long but I feel like it describes the Susan wanting to be an adult situation pretty well.
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
To Susan, Narnia was childish and deserved to be pushed aside; Narnia was supposedly just a fairy tale that should have been put away a long time ago and been replaced by something more practical (best example being the dictionary that Susan is making a word game of in the first movie).
Susan has flaws but I truly love her character, yet I also don’t blame Lewis for the Susan ending. As a Christian, I understand that Susan was an example. Lewis says that he didn’t mean for the Narnia books to become a Christian allegory but either way that’s what happened. Susan was the character that lost faith – just like Lewis had. From what I can tell from his writings and letters, Susan seems to be closest in personality to Lewis, which is possibly why he chose her to be the character to lose faith.
Lewis has a quote – “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way” – that I feel perfectly wraps up the problem of Susan. Aslan needed Susan to experience the lows of life so that she could finally and whole-heartely believe in Narnia and Aslan. And if the Susan-is-Lewis theory is correct, then Susan will join her family in Aslan’s Country, it’s only a matter of when.
This ended up being longer than I expected it to be but as someone who looks up to C.S. Lewis, I find it unfair to just point the sexism finger at him when there’s just so much more to it. The man was a Christian apologetic from the early-twentieth centruy; his writing had more depth and meaning than the novels that have been published in the last two decades.
Off of that point, not only did Susan lose faith, but she very clearly valued material items over her connection with Narnia and Aslan. I know many people look to J.K. Rowling’s quote about how Susan was excluded from Narnia because she found sex, but that’s not true AT ALL. The problem with Susan was not that she was feminine or liked nylons and lipstick and invitations. The problem with Susan was that she valued them more than her experiences in Narnia. I remember reading one blog’s analysis of this (can’t remember which one) that said Susan’s love for these material items could almost be equated with Edmund’s love for Turkish Delight in LWW. They both represent the same idea: placing material success over kindness and family. It’s not wrong to like sweets and pretty things. What’s wrong is having your whole person revolve around them. So, Susan’s story (albeit unfinished) is ultimately about how we should remain humble and kind, and that growing up does not mean you have to lose your relationship with God (or in Susan’s case, Aslan). Please don’t say C.S. Lewis was sexist when he was anything but. As for the long period of time between the publication of LB and his death, it could have been that he couldn’t find the inspiration to finish Susan’s story or purposefully wished to leave it open ended so that his readers could fill in the blanks themselves.
Also, as a side note, I am not saying that this makes Susan an evil or bad person. When I first read the books, I saw a lot of myself in Susan and still look up to her as a character and a person. However, her tale is cautionary, and it helps me become closer with my own faith when reading her story.
I think there was another post on this subject that compared Susan’s desire to appear “grown up” with Mark Studdock’s desire to be part of the “inner circle” in That Hideous Strength, and her love of lipstick and nylons with Screwtape’s advice that something as simple as cards can be used to lead a man astray.
The point being that Susan’s faults which lead to her losing her faith are not something Lewis is pining solely on women, or blaming on femininity, just because he happened to given them to a female character in this instance. Rather, this is an idea that he returned to again and again in his writing, that things which are not objectively evil in themselves can nonetheless come between us and God if we let them.
Let’s do some math.
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