crosspost: on the problem of Susan [Dec 2013]

[anghraine]

An anon on Tumblr asked:

I don't understand, what are your feelings on the problem of Susan? I take it most people are angry, or at least disappointed, about the implications of her ultimate fate. You don't think it was problematic?

Of course it is. It comes out of virtually nowhere and is very, very gendered. What I dislike is the constant, uncritical parroting of things like this, which is virtually the only thing I ever see about her:

“There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.” (JK Rowling)

1) As much as I dislike the entire construction of Susan’s apostasy, “lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick” is painfully simplistic and reductionist. What is actually stated is that Susan doesn’t care about anything except lipstick/nylons/parties/etc and has largely forgotten Narnia, and the years she spent as queen regnant, altogether. There is a vast difference between “because she becomes interested in lipstick” and “because she has no interest in anything else.”

2) I also think the instant equation between ‘interested in dressing up and going to parties’ and ‘sex’ is kind of gross, tbh. She probably did find sex? (Again. We all know Rabadash’s appeal wasn’t his personality.) But drawing a straight line from ‘absorbed in looking good and having fun’ to ‘sex’ without any justification (e.g., if the list had been ‘lipstick and nylons and boys’) is itself pretty sketchy? It relies, I think, on the assumption that women’s “primping” is inherently about making themselves sexually appealing (implicitly to men). She’s preoccupied with beauty and enjoying herself socially? Oh it must be about men. Bleh.

In context, I think it’s far more likely that Susan has become absorbed in Susan. Her exclusive interest in lipstick-nylons-parties is a marker of vanity, and a specifically feminine-coded superficiality.

Which, ugh. But it’s more complex than the kneejerk ‘Susan is condemned for finding sex!’ And I dislike the insistence that Susan’s fate must be some kind of empowerment—not as an interpretation, but as the only one. It’s one way to read the text, but it’s become oddly dogmatic and, well, preachy, without (IMO) a whole lot of support. I particularly dislike it when accompanied by the implication that Susan is the only one who really grew up, esp that Lucy is immature and unenlightened.

Comments

[glorious_spoon]

Oh my God, thank you for writing this; I thought I was the only one who got aggravated by the knee-jerk reactions to the 'problem of Susan'.

It IS gendered in some really problematic ways, but a lot of the critical responses I've seen are really... well, uncritical.

[lotesse]

At this point, I'm mostly just tired of "The Problem of Susan." Can we move on to a new critique? Please? Anything?

[lizbee]

Oh my God, yes.

I particularly dislike it when accompanied by the implication that Susan is the only one who really grew up, esp that Lucy is immature and unenlightened.

I strongly dislike Great Feminist Icon Susan Pevensie -- you know, the girl who spends the better part of two books undermining and gaslighting her sister.

She's Uncle Andrew in stockings -- and yeah, the gendered nature of Susan's vanity is unfortunate, but it's like people have forgotten that Lewis has written any other vain, self-absorbed characters.

[meneltarma]

When I wrote fanfic about Susan, I perceived her problem to be largely self-absorption and a lack of interest in her family: it is also the British Post-War Recession and lipstick and nylon (stockings were EXTREMELY hard to come by, this is not a throw-away gendered object, it's as rare as Turkish Delight) and going to parties is a (lost-to-American-readers) financially costly hobby that someone is paying for: is she working, or is that money coming from her brothers? I'd be pretty bitter if Susan went from being a competent ruler with common sense to apply life skills learned in Narnia about large-scale money management to always asking for money to borrow to ape fashion she can't afford in a time of scarcity. I read these lines, in the historical context of it being postwar Britain, that Susan becomes insecure, and she also seems to lose her gentleness -- she turns away from her family and begins putting down the attempts of her siblings to make their two lives cohere together sensibly by refuting Narnia existed at all. (It has to be bad for her mental health.)

There's a lot of things to critique about Susan, but it's also Word Of God (heh, as it were) that Aslan is not self-contradicting and "once a king or queen, always a king or queen" applies to post-The Last Battle Susan and she makes her way back to Narnia in her own fashion, and her seeming betrayal of Narnia is more complex and deep than it appears. I can't cite the letter off the top of my head, but CS Lewis wrote it to a child complaining it wasn't fair Susan didn't get to go to True Narnia, and his reply was, "she gets there! Just not at the same time as everyone else.", so... she gets there! Maybe we should consider that is also Lewis' intention for Susan-- there is a completely different journey, both in time, and in space, for someone whose value has always quite shallowly been that she is beautiful, and what it means to assert self-worth in a culture that only values women for their looks. (He examines that much better in Till We Have Faces; he was a much better writer, then.)