Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

 

Quite so. We'd be told to discuss such matters in the Ditto Town Hall, but I'm not quite sure how we would do that, either, when it could be a whole topic of discussion within English Literature, all on its own.

 

I should have added that right up until WW1 Great Britain, Australia was still called The Colonies, despite our 1901 Federation, and Australians the Colonials

so my mistake about Colney Hatch, not being Colony Hatch might be more forgivable. Especially when people like Jadis who stole jewellery, hijacked a hansom cab and refused to pay the bill, could have been sentenced to hang, or ended up being transported to Botany Bay, another name for New South Wales, right up until 22nd May, 1840, or worse, still, to Van Diemen's Land, to where transportation didn't finish until 1853.  

And Western Australia, the last Australian colony to stop importing convicts, didn't cease from doing so until 1868. But Jadis's rampage in London occurred in 1900, according to the timeline that Lewis later wrote up. (Which also pretty much accords with the statement at the start of MN that the story takes place when "the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road" — The Treasure Seekers was published in 1899. It doesn't exactly accord with the description in LWW of Digory, now the Professor, as "a very old man with shaggy white hair", since Digory, as a 12-year-old boy in 1900, would be only 52 in 1940, but Lewis really wasn't good with dates and other such technical details, as we've all noted before.) So no matter what fates might have awaited Jadis in London that day if she hadn't been transported to what was to become Narnia, transportation to Australia wouldn't have been an option.  

I'm still looking for the exact references in the book, but Uncle Andrew seems to have fallen for her.

It's towards the end of the chapter "The Beginning of Uncle Andrew's Troubles":

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. Now that the Witch was no longer in the same room with him he was quickly forgetting how she had frightened him and thinking more and more of her wonderful beauty. He kept on saying to himself, "A dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman. A superb creature." He had also somehow managed to forget that it was the children who had got hold of this "superb creature": he felt as if he himself by his Magic had called her out of unknown worlds.

"Andrew, my boy," he said to himself as he looked in the glass, "you're a devilish well preserved fellow for your age. A distinguished-looking man, sir."

You see, the foolish old man was actually beginning to imagine the Witch would fall in love with him. The two drinks probably had something to do with it, and so had his best clothes. But he was, in any case, as vain as a peacock; that was why he had become a Magician.

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

Later he would call her "A dem fine woman", another rather idiomatic way of talking for so-called middle-class people at the time. A rather silly way of talking about her, too. 

I suspect (and I'm sure you do too) that it's actually a euphemistic spelling of a word that was considered too rude to say or put into print in respectable society in the Victorian era. You know, if you're also a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, the one that Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore would never use. Well, hardly ever...  

However, now that we have seen Jadis in Queen Victoria's London, for the rest of the film it would be mainly the originally creepy Uncle Andrew, who would become the more comical character, especially his change of attitude to Jadis, herself. And I bet the filmmakers could make more fun of him than of Jadis, herself.  

That's a really good point and one I hadn't really thought about — Uncle Andrew starts out as a very sinister character, when we first meet him in his study and he tricks Polly into taking a yellow ring, then blackmails Digory into going after her, along with all the creepiness of his account of how he came to be experimenting with Magic in the first place. But once we get to compare him with Jadis, the real and far more powerful and dangerous magician, he quickly becomes a figure of fun, and his actions are mostly comical for the rest of the story, especially once the Talking Beasts in Narnia decide to capture him and make a pet of him.

As Lewis says earlier in the same chapter I quoted above, comparing Uncle Andrew and Jadis: "One good thing about seeing the two together was that you would never again be afraid of Uncle Andrew, any more than you'd be afraid of a worm after you had met a rattlesnake or afraid of a cow after you had met a mad bull." And the rest of the story bears that out.

On that note, though, I did think earlier of another point that could be made about this scene in London where Jadis, terrifying as she is, becomes a comical figure for a short time. There's a quote attributed to Martin Luther: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." (I've searched for it online and found it in several Christian articles and blogs, but I cannot find a single one that gives any reference for it, which, as a trained historian, I for one find exceedingly annoying. )

The point is, anyway, that — well, Jadis is not literally meant to be Satan, but she is certainly one of the greatest agents of evil in the Chronicles of Narnia, and I would argue that this scene where she becomes a laughing-stock is a good reminder that evil, however terrifying and dangerous and destructive it is, is not the ultimate power in the universe, and it does not have the final word. Whatever the film version of MN does with Jadis, I hope that message will come across.

To ever so slightly steer the conversation back on track then, If everyone is in broad agreement that the scene as written in the book is played for laughs, I guess my two follow-up questions / concerns would be as follows:

• Even if the comical nature of the scene(s) just about avoids undercutting the dramatic tension of the overall story on the pages of a children's book, will that still translate well to a feature film which is (presumably) intended to have some degree of broader adult appeal - i.e. would the cinematic adaptation process necessitate that the scene be played with more serious tension and sinister threat.
• Is the "fish out of water" comedy trope of having a villainous fantasy character playing it super-serious in a world that is more bemused rather than terrified of them, not massively overworn at this point? In many ways i feel like audiences are even starting to wane on Marvel's over-reliance on this sort of irreverent comedic shtick which undercuts any development of serious stakes in their films.

Bear in mind though, I'm frequently critical of the Walden's films tendency to favour "scenes of mild peril" over the more interesting and whimsical elements of the book, therefore I wouldn't want it to go too far down that route either.

More just working through different thoughts and ideas at this point.

Maybe I should have put what I was trying to say this way.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would advocate focusing on the tense and exciting aspects of the scene since they're part of the plot. If the scene weren't funny at all, it could still conceivably work in its own way even if it didn't capture everything about the book's version. On the other hand, if the scene ended up being simply funny and viewers weren't worried at all, it would really be jarring since the rest of the story is played for drama (albeit drama with plenty of comic relief.) Also, like I said or tried to say, if viewers don't empathize with Digory and Polly's desperation to get Jadis out of their world, they might resent them for (unintentionally) bringing her to Narnia, especially if those viewers know the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

But...I'm really not convinced we need to choose between those options. I don't have a list or anything but I'm sure there have been action scenes in movies that were also very funny. It is true though what Icarus wrote. I have heard people online saying they'd like less self-aware humor from their films and more sincerity. (Not sure I'd describe the humor in this scene that way though.)

@Courtenay: But Jadis's rampage in London occurred in 1900, according to the timeline that Lewis later wrote up. (Which also pretty much accords with the statement at the start of MN that the story takes place when "the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road" —The Treasure Seekerswas published in 1899. It doesn't exactly accord with the description in LWW of Digory, now the Professor, as "a very old man with shaggy white hair", since Digory, as a 12-year-old boy in 1900, would be only 52 in 1940, but Lewis really wasn't good with dates and other such technical details, as we've all noted before.) So no matter what fates might have awaited Jadis in London that day if she hadn't been transported to what was to become Narnia, transportation to Australia wouldn't have been an option.

Interestingly, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, was passed by the Imperial Parliament & received Royal assent on 9th July, 1900 (Wilcox, 2014, The Struggle for Unity p. 136). About the same time as Jadis in London & the subsequent birth of Narnia, it would seem. No, we wouldn't want Jadis in Australia, either then or at any other time, when it seems that Charn, to which Polly & Digory wanted to return Jadis, was a much worse place to live in, than the notorious "Botany Bay" or Port Arthur. As for Digory being 52 in 1940, such were stressful world events up to that year, that the Professor might well age prematurely by current standards. C.S. Lewis, himself, was born in 1898, & Digory would be, therefore, a decade older.

@Col Klink: If the scene weren't funny at all, it could still conceivably work in its own way even if it didn't capture everything about the book's version. On the other hand, if the scene ended up being simply funny and viewers weren't worried at all, it would really be jarring since the rest of the story is played for drama (albeit drama with plenty of comic relief.) 

It isn't only the action or what is said that would make for humour. In those days in London, women wore those neck to waist buttoned-up dresses with hambone sleeves, & people in only extreme poverty went barefoot, as Jadis was depicted by Pauline Baynes. Aunt Letty called Jadis a "dangerous lunatic", quite bluntly. It would be as much about Jadis' attire as her claims, that the working-class men laughed at her, calling her the Empress of "Colney Hatch", a real-life mental hospital, in London, and it was Jadis' awareness of their ridicule which set off her outburst when she broke off the iron bar on the lamppost (p. 89.)

"Scum! You shall pay dearly for this when I have conquered your world. Not one stone of your city will be left. I will make it as Charn, as Felinda, as Sorlois, as Bramandin"

I consider that Jadis' visit to London is not in itself comical. A very large and strong woman suddenly arriving in someone's home, and making demands on them , and then rampaging through London, robbing and abusing people, is not funny.

What makes it funny, however, is the response from the family, the jewellery shop owner, and the poorer people on the street. They do not accept her as someone to fear and obey. They see her as a figure of fun, someone to taunt publicly. They sneer at her and mock her. Even though she uses force and violence, they have no respect for her. Clearly she belongs in the looney bin. It's an entertainment.

EDIT: Oh yes, and Digory's aunt thinks she is a woman of bad character who is drunk!
We readers can see that if Jadis had been able to use her magic powers, it would have been devastating. So we are alarmed at first, but soon Lewis is reassuring us that he won't let her destroy our world. He shows her up and turns her into a joke.

I think the key to making this scene work in a film is keeping it focused on Digory. From his point of view, this isn’t funny—it’s a disaster. He’s the one who brought Jadis into London, and every second she’s there, the danger feels more real.  What if she finds his mother? That thought alone should drive the tension and make it feel urgent.

At the same time, one of the things Lewis intentionally does in The Magician’s Nephew is gradually undercut its villains. Uncle Andrew starts out as this mysterious, manipulative figure but eventually becomes more pathetic than scary. Jadis, too—she’s introduced as an all-powerful destroyer of worlds, but in London, she’s just another problem for the police to deal with. Of course, she gets her power back in Narnia, but this shift in how intimidating she feels is part of what makes the book interesting.

I wouldn’t want to lose that entirely, but I do think the humor in this scene might not translate the same way on screen. It’s hilarious in the book (and in Focus on the Family's audio drama) because of how Lewis writes it—the contrast between Jadis and the everyday Londoners who just see her as a street performer or troublemaker. But in a movie, that kind of humor could easily feel too broad or undercut the stakes as you've all discussed.

So perhaps playing up Digory wanting to protect his mother might be the way to go and reinforce that relationship which drives the second half of the book.

@impending-doom well put. While some fear or admire her, or jeer instead, it is Digory's concern that matters most.

...Later he would call her "A dem fine woman", another rather idiomatic way of talking for so-called middle-class people at the time.A rather silly way of talking about her, too. 

@Courtenay: I suspect (and I'm sure you do too) that it's actually a euphemistic spelling of a word that was considered too rude to say or put into print in respectable society in the Victorian era.

I wouldn't be surprised at all, if that was really also the point of the foul-sounding "Deplorable Word", when Aunt Letty said Jadis was drunk and a dangerous lunatic at large. An English Professor's gently satirical swipe at Victorian attempts to educate middle- & upper-class people to sound "genteel"? Jadis was trying to "blast" Aunt Letty, and the word, "blast", itself, in the 1950's was still considered a swear word in itself, which my own Dad used frequently, unfortunately, as did other men, no doubt, even when they were in business or the public service & didn't work in "blast" furnaces in steelworks, at Newcastle, Port Kembla or in mining at Broken Hill.

@coracle: I consider that Jadis' visit to London is not in itself comical. A very large and strong woman suddenly arriving in someone's home, and making demands on them , and then rampaging through London, robbing and abusing people, is not funny. 

Quite so. British people have been tried, found guilty, sentenced & hung for doing lesser crimes, not only in Victorian London, especially when Jadis assaulted police officers. 

@impending doom: I think the key to making this scene work in a film is keeping it focused on Digory. From his point of view, this isn’t funny—it’s a disaster. He’s the one who brought Jadis into London, and every second she’s there, the danger feels more real.  What if she finds his mother? That thought alone should drive the tension and make it feel urgent.

Yes, you are right. It is whilst Digory is waiting for Jadis' return that Aunt Letty gets a visitor bearing fruit for his mother. It is then he hears of "the land of youth".

Posted by: @courtenay

It doesn't exactly accord with the description in LWW of Digory, now the Professor, as "a very old man with shaggy white hair", since Digory, as a 12-year-old boy in 1900, would be only 52 in 1940, but Lewis really wasn't good with dates and other such technical details, as we've all noted before.)

Regarding Digory/Professor Kirk's age - it is quite plausible that a man of 52 years of age could have looked like a "a very old man with shaggy white hair" to a young children.  Besides, when you consider the generation he was in, many of his peers would have perished in WW1 and it was not uncommon in those days for people to live not too much longer - Lewis himself even didn't live much longer - dying just before his 65th birthday.  I think 52 doesn't sound that old now, because many people live longer than that.

Back to the topic of this thread though... I was considering even amongst the crowd of people gathered there, there are some who are not treating lightly the threat that Jadis still poses (even without her powers) - the Cabby, the policemen and the man from the jewelry shop do not appear to be considering her a small threat.  Also, it isn't until after she states that she is an Empress that the other people on the street really mock and laugh at her - when they see the spectacle before their eyes.  Of course - as we read, this only infuriates her and makes her more unpredictable as she lashes out and hits the policemen.  On looking more into the scene, I still think a balanced approach of humor as well as the unpredictability and danger Jadis poses should and very well could be portrayed.  The crowd remind me of many other onlookers who stop and look at other such spectacles in similar fashion (not usually with witch/queens from other worlds though! ) and may see a humorous side - and when you read her boasts like that, it's hardly surprising that they mock her.  Afterall - yes, she appears dangerous, but she certainly does not appear regal and royal in the fashion of their reigning monarch at the time, Queen Victoria.  A sense of unpredictability, danger and humor I think all need to be portrayed in this scene.

@Pete: Afterall - yes, she appears dangerous, but she certainly does not appear regal and royal in the fashion of their reigning monarch at the time, Queen Victoria.

But on a MSN slide show, called "Interpreting the themes in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'", I found on slide 17, along with the well-known picture of the Queen of Hearts, this comment:

'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' includes some very unwholesome characters, none more so than the Queen of Hearts. One of the playing card characters, she is the tyrannical and deranged ruler of Wonderland with a sadistic penchant for beheadings. Carroll never revealed the inspiration for the Queen of Hearts, but some suggest Queen Victoria—the sitting monarch in the author's day—as a model.

I've even heard that Queen Victoria's son, Prince Leopold, an Oxford friend of Lewis Carroll, who is sometimes confused by careless journalists with C.S. Lewis, actually went along with that satire, when she was known to be a rather tyrannical mother, who ruled her children with an iron will. But though, as a Constitutional Monarch, Queen Victoria's power as monarch was far more limited than that of Jadis, in charge of Charn, I can understand, only too well, Digory's fear of Jadis meeting his sick mother.

Queen Victoria was known to drop in to have tea ("wif a wee drap o' Scotch) with her Balmoral tenants. I can't see Jadis as a lampooning caricature of any particular Royal person, though there must have been a few around that would fit the bill, from 1837 to well into the 20th century. 

Posted by: @pete
Afterall - yes, she appears dangerous, but she certainly does not appear regal and royal in the fashion of their reigning monarch at the time, Queen Victoria.

The queen I always think of in relation to MN Jadis is Boadicea / Boudica who led a failed uprising against the Roman occupation of Britain in AD 60-61.

There is a statue of her riding a Chariot with her two daughters, right outside the Houses of Parliament.

It's been there since 1902, so I would have to wager that even in 1901 people would have been reasonably familiar with the visual iconography of that moment.

@icarus: The queen I always think of in relation to MN Jadis is Boadicea / Boudica who led a failed uprising against the Roman occupation of Britain in AD 60-61.

But Boadicea, (the spelling I learned as a child, or Boudicca, the more fashionable spelling of today), was Britain's very first national heroine, whose story could have inspired the by 1902 deceased Queen Victoria, and maybe the British heroines & suffragettes of that era. Hence her statue outside the Houses of Parliament, for standing up to Emperor Claudius' all-conquering Roman Army led by one of their better generals, Agricola (or farmer, translated from Latin). Whatever her supreme Celtic deity was - and I've read that she was backed by the Druids at Anglesey - I don't believe that she was anything like Jadis, when the Romans took over after the death of her husband, Prasutagus, the King of the Iceni, a Celtic tribe that lived in Norfolk, & like most pre-Christian Celtic tribes, had no writing that we know about. Unlike Jadis, Boudicca didn't survive her defeat, and what we know of her is through the lens of Tacitus or Suetonius, and the Anglesey Druids, believed to back her, were also killed by the Romans. Vae Victis, indeed! The Emperor Claudius, himself, died, poisoned by his wife, Agrippina, but was made a Roman God (the pumpkinification of Claudius, Robert Graves wrote in I, Claudius), like his predecessor, Caesar Augustus, & patriotic Romans were thus expected to show respect to any images or statues they saw of either of them, if in public, even if like both Jews & Christians, they refused to bow down to graven images. 

I see the widowed Queen Boudicca as being someone more like Joan of Arc, or maybe Che Guevara, whoever he was supposed to be, & more like Bar Kochba, whom maybe Zealot Jews of the time mistook for the much longed-for Messiah, rather than the pacific hero, Jesus Christ, whose crucifixion on Good Friday will be celebrated next month. Bar Kochba was a national military leader, who led an equally futile revolt against the Emperor Hadrian, in 132 A.D, dying in battle against the Romans. Both defeats were part of the Romanised colonisation of their lands. Roman Britannica stretched north, even beyond Hadrian's Wall, as far as the Antonine Wall, near Falkirk in Scotland. Whilst Jerusalem, itself, was also rebuilt as a Roman colony, renamed Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to the Roman God, Jupiter (or Zeus), replacing Herod's Temple, when Hadrian saw his ancestral God, Jupiter, as having overcome the " God of the Jews", who were therefore banned from the old Jerusalem, until the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 636 AD. Though strangely, native Jewish people remained in the general area, as well as in the diaspora, including the Biblical Samaritans, who remained relatively untouched by all the turmoil, their descendants still living in today's West Bank, to the North of Jerusalem. 

But back to the subject, Jadis' visit to London. In MN, first published in 1955, Jadis would kill her own sister for domination, rather than admit defeat, using the forbidden Deplorable Word, destroying all life in her own world, apart from herself. It was she, in lonely splendour, who stood in the Hall of Statues when Digory & Polly came visiting. When Aslan in Chapter 15 of the book, warns of the possibility of someone in our own world, finding out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word, it is a good reason not to take too lightly, the likes of Jadis, and MN's story about her. Though this scene has its comical moments, it also highlights the dangerous selfishness of Uncle Andrew, in his unethical worship of "progress" and money, not even considering the welfare of his own sister, let alone what he did to Polly at the beginning of the story, and what a poor avuncular example he was to Digory, himself.  

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

But Boadicea... was Britain's very first national heroine....

Sure, I just meant more in terms of "fearsome warrior queen riding a chariot"  😆 

Posted by: @icarus

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

But Boadicea... was Britain's very first national heroine....

Sure, I just meant more in terms of "fearsome warrior queen riding a chariot"  😆 

I was just looking up the statue of "Boadicea and her Daughters", remembering it from when I lived nearer London — here it is on Wikipedia.

I wasn't aware that although it wasn't placed where it is now until 1902, after Queen Victoria's death, sculptor Thomas Thornycroft actually worked on it from 1856 till his death in 1885. (The delay in installing it was because although Thornycroft completed the full-size model of it before he died, there wasn't enough funding at the time for it to be cast in bronze!) Victoria and her husband Albert (d. 1861) commissioned the statue in the first place, after approving an equestrian statue of Victoria herself that Thornycroft had made for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Magician's Nephew is officially set in 1900, the year before Victoria's death. So while this particular statue of Boadicea (the Roman spelling of her Celtic name, Boudica) wasn't yet on public display at that time, the model of it had been completed quite some time before and I would guess there was some public awareness of it. The symbolism of Boudica / Boadicea as a warrior queen was made much of during the Victorian era anyway, so it's an image that would have been in the general public consciousness even before this statue was installed. Many people drew parallels between her and Victoria, not least because the Celtic name Boudica also means "victory" or "victorious one"!!

I hadn't stopped to think of Jadis on the hansom cab being a sort of grotesque parallel of Boudica as well, though. I wonder if Lewis had that in mind? He wasn't a Londoner and I don't know how often (if ever) he may have seen that statue, though I assume he would have known about the legend of Boudica in general. But whether she was specifically in his thought when he wrote the Jadis scene, or whether it's just a coincidence, we'll probably never know, as I don't think there are any comments about it from him on record.

Anyway, now that we've FINALLY had confirmation that the first Netflix Narnia film is The Magician's Nephew, it's now less than two years till we find out for sure what Gerwig and Co. are going to do with this scene...