Posted by: @col-klink

People tend to glibly interpret Susan's loss of interest in Narnia at the end of The Last Battle and her ensuing absence from the Real Narnia as C, S, Lewis saying that growing up is a bad thing, for women anyway. 

I guess my follow-up question to this would be, if you believe that Polly's presence refutes the common accusation as to what Lewis is assumed to be implying with this passage, then what is he implying with it?

It's a very short, almost throw away passage in the book, which serves no structural purpose within the narrative (i.e. there is no reason why Susan can't be present in the story, or needs to not be present) and has almost no thematic relevance to the message of the book as a whole, and yet Lewis still decided to include it for presumably some reason.

You've sort of hinted at a suggestion of an answer at the end there, but I was wondering if you could maybe offer a more affirmative conclusion to your premise. What point is Lewis trying to make (if not the one he's commonly accused of), why choose Susan to make that point (and not any of the other 7 main human characters) and why include it in the story at all, only to not then really do much with it from a dramatic exploration point-of-view.

I find that latter part to be the most baffling - it's one of the single biggest bits of character development that occurs for any character in the entire series, and yet it all plays out "off screen" and is then briefly mentioned in a largely forgettable throw away piece of dialogue right at the end. If you are going to do it, why not do something with it? Always felt kind of pointless and wasted to me.

(Side note - not sure why my first paragraph is showing up in bold)

Posted by: @icarus

It's a very short, almost throw away passage in the book, which serves no structural purpose within the narrative (i.e. there is no reason why Susan can't be present in the story, or needs to not be present) and has almost no thematic relevance to the message of the book as a whole, and yet Lewis still decided to include it for presumably some reason.

I actually think the fact that there's no reason why is actually the reason why. 

Without Susan's absence, the ending of The Last Battle would be so amazingly happy, with all the good guys throughout the series living in paradise for eternity, that it might feel fake. Giving one of the heroes from previous installments this tragic fate-well, I guess I shouldn't say tragic since Susan's fate is more ambiguous than that-balances that out a bit. At the same time, C. S. Lewis did want the ending to be really euphoric on the whole, so he couldn't really develop it much. 

I know you're looking for a more message-y reason and I have some theories on that but it's suppertime and I have a TV show I want to binge so...later.  

Posted by: @col-klink

Do people just stop reading after Jill's diagnosis of Susan? Because while she thinks Susan's problem is that she's too keen on growing up, Polly sees it as her not wanting to grow up. And Polly has a much better record for being right from The Magician's Nephew than Jill has from The Silver Chair. (Of course, Jill is right much more often in The Last Battle and even in The Silver Chair she had her moments and Polly did set the plot of The Magician's Nephew in motion by doing something foolish. But I think my point still stands.)

I reckon you've hit on a really good point here, Col Klink, and now you mention it, I'm also surprised that critics don't seem to notice this. Polly is one of the most consistently sensible and level-headed of Lewis's main (Earthly) characters even as a child, and we see enough of her as a mature adult in The Last Battle to get the clear impression that she's grown into a wise, thoughtful, trustworthy older woman. When she talks about "the silliest time of one's life", that's a period she has lived through herself, and presumably observed plenty of her peers living through, as well as the younger generations in their turn. It's quite sobering to realise that she is the only female member of the Friends of Narnia who is in fact older than Susan.

It's also a good point you make that Polly refers to "the silliest time of one's life, not a girl's life or a woman's life." There's nothing in the Chronicles to suggest that girls and women are more prone to silliness and vanity than boys and men. In fact, there are plenty of examples of male characters behaving in similarly foolish ways. (Probably the best example is Uncle Andrew, who is incredibly selfish, excessively concerned about his appearance, and who, significantly, achieves a level of self-delusion that almost rivals Susan's. She apparently convinces herself that Narnia wasn't real after several years have passed since her last visit; Uncle Andrew convinces himself that the Lion isn't singing, and the Talking Beasts aren't speaking, while he is right there in the midst of them.)

I suspect the biggest reason why there's such controversy about the so-called "Problem of Susan" in the first place is that Lewis, as a male author who spent much of his life in a mostly male environment, who only married late in life and who never had children of his own, had the gall (gasp, shock, horror) to do this to a young female character. Would there be anywhere near as much hoo-ha about it all if, for whatever reasons, he'd decided to write Peter out of the final book?

Back on topic — I do think it's significant that, after Eustace's initial description of Susan's attitude to Narnia, the only two characters who comment on this are both female themselves: Jill and Polly. Jill is a few years younger than Susan (five, according to Lewis's later timeline), but Polly, as we've been saying, is much older and can naturally be expected to have a deeper perspective on what it means to be truly "grown-up" — or not.

Seriously, you're right: so many critics seem to read this passage as saying that Susan's great transgression is that she has "grown up", implying (and sometimes stating) that Lewis had terrible prejudices against adult women. I've never seen one such critic remark on the fact that the one older adult woman in this scene — Polly — points out that Susan hasn't grown up at all, and gives a pretty sharp analysis of someone who is deliberately miring herself in a sort of perpetual self-centred adolescence.

Why don't more critics pay attention to this? I wonder if it's because they've already got the foregone conclusion formed clearly in their minds — Lewis was terribly sexist and couldn't stand the thought of girls growing up into women — so the only information they take in is that which supports this conclusion? There's more than enough evidence, after all, that at least some critics of the "Problem of Susan" haven't actually read The Last Battle, or at least haven't paid very much attention to it at all. (Witness Philip Pullman declaring that Susan was "sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys.")

Rather than rambling on further, I'll just give a link here to Devin Brown's absolutely brilliant discussion "Are the Chronicles of Narnia Sexist and Racist?", which is reprinted here on NarniaWeb and is where I got the above Pullman quote from! There's a fair bit in there that's relevant to this topic.

So I wanted to write about what Icarus was asking. If I don't think the moral of Susan's story in The Last Battle is that growing up is bad, what do I think it is? Well...I actually would say that the moral is that growing up is bad. But not in the way I've read others interpret the moral. I'd summarize the moral as being that growing up entails specific temptations that aren't necessarily as strong at other points of one's life. Let me explain further. (I know I'm probably not going to change the mind of anyone who really dislikes this part of the book. I'm just trying to explain why I think it's more complex than its most ardent detractors allow.) 

While it's fair enough to say Susan's story doesn't tie in to rest of The Last Battle thematically, it does tie in to sort of the meta story around The Chronicles of Narnia. Remember C. S. Lewis's dedication to the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (I know dedications aren't really part of the books' bodies but, come on, you know you love that dedication!) 

My dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it, I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.

Often when kids get older, they drift away from stories like the Narnia books, and they often drift back to them when they get even older. Sometimes that's just natural. It's normal for our tastes to change as we mature and after a certain period of time has passed, it's usual to get a renewed interest in things we used to like a long time ago if only for nostalgia's sake. But sometimes it's not a natural change of tastes. Sometimes as kids become teenagers or young adults, they're inclined to adopt a condescending dismissive tone towards things they liked a few years ago-or even still like but are embarrassed to admit they like. I feel what Eustace quotes Susan as saying about Narnia kind of exemplifies that. I don't necessarily mean that as a dig on teens and young adults. A lot of it is probably due to societal pressure. It can be scary to be on the verge of adulthood and you feel the need to prove you're not some immature, naive little kid. But one of the great things about being an actual mature adult is that you don't need to prove yourself that way. If someone asks you what's your favorite book, you can say it's one of the Narnia books though sadly you may still have to prove your self-awareness by prefacing it with, "funnily enough," or "this may sound silly." But if the person you're talking to is also a mature adult, they'll respond by saying, "Oh? That's interesting that you'd favor a book series for which you're not necessarily the target audience. Tell me why." And if they're a mature adult who has good taste, they'll say, "Why wouldn't those books be your favorites? Narnia is awesome!"  

Of course, what I'm talking about is probably less true of our modern culture than it was of Lewis's culture and Susan's. With superhero movies and other examples of science fiction and fantasy that used to be considered "kids' stuff" making millions of dollars, they've gained respect and adults can feel more comfortable talking about their love for and interest in them. I've seen signs that our culture may be shifting back in the other direction though. Apparently, there's a whole reddit group called Read Another Book that's dedicated to complaining about people who when discussing modern politics, compare it to the Harry Potter stories and nothing else. Of course, that counterculture is reacting against the "nerd culture" that back in the day was reacting against the same "grownup" culture to which Lewis was reacting against.... what was I talking about again? Oh, yes, The Last Battle. 

Since The Last Battle was the last Narnia books and probably the most adult one, it makes sense to me for Lewis to acknowledge that a lot of his readers would be inclined to turn their backs on Narnia and for him to maybe warn them that that kind of posturing can mean missing out on some great stuff. 

Interesting discussion, which I did think long and hard about. An author, Neil Gaiman, wrote in his 2004 Fragile Things, wrote one of his short stories, The Problem of Susan, his own take on this particular scene. From my point of view, I simply saw that Susan had become part of the debutante scene as she grew older. 

In my last post, I acquiesced that Susan's story doesn't fit in with the general themes of The Last Battle, but Doris T. Meyers in her book, C. S. Lewis in Context, makes an interesting case that it does. Of course, nobody has to agree with her but here's the relevant quote.

By showing Tirian and his friends fighting for Narnia as if there were no afterlife, Lewis teaches the importance of the here and now. By showing that much of what they did was futile and doomed to failure, he teaches that the here and now is only a shadow of the real. It is only through taking the old Narnia seriously that one can attain the new Narnia. The old Narnia is a shadow, but it is a real shadow, and the way to reach it is through heroism rather than cynicism...The dwarfs missed the new Narnia. They adopted 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity' as their motto, but instead of making them realize the need to accept and enjoy as Qoholeth teaches (Eccl 9:7,8), it set them to distrusting everything about life...Similarly, Queen Susan is 'no longer a friend of Narnia' because she refuses to take seriously the real shadow of Narnia and the joy it affords.

EDIT: You could say all the stuff with Experiment House doesn't connect thematically to The Silver Chair either, but I enjoy it anyway. And while Susan's loss of interest in Narnia in The Last Battle isn't fun to read in the same way, it serves to make her and the books more interesting to me. 

I've often wondered how much of a part the Pevensie's parents played in Susan's downfall. In VDT it's mentioned that they took Susan to America with them because although she was no good at schoolwork she was otherwise very 'grown up' for her age and they thought she would get more out of America than Edmund or Lucy. In a sense Susan is being rewarded for doing poorly at school and I can't help but wonder if her parents, her mother especially, had a role in encouraging her excessive interest in fashion and socialising. Even decades after the '40's it wasn't uncommon for parents to think girls' schooling much less important than boys'

I don’t think that Polly made a permanent judgement of Susan. It was just an observation of Susan’s conduct at that time, which was in her life when she didn’t act very maturely. Polly wished that Susan would change her attitude about Narnia.  They both had actually been there, and one wonders why Susan chose the artificial things of our world over Narnia.  It seems that her own immaturity took over her own life at least temporarily.