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NONFICTION

The Problem with Susan: An Autobiography

Like Susan Pevensie, I must confess a fondness for lipstick. I love the colors, the shimmers, the creamy textures, even if I do sometimes buy the wrong brands that break my lips out in rashes. I love the experiments, of seeing which shades will turn me into a sultry Calormene princess or a forest dryad or Snow White herself—a character I have recently realized Susan would have recognized, had the Pevensies been real-life children rather than typed and printed ones. I love reds the best. They look nice with my dark hair and make me feel like a post-war socialite, like I’m missing pin-curls and kitten heels and a brisk walk down brick roads on the way to tea. I can’t fault Susan for her love of the stuff; it’s a young woman’s Turkish Delight.

When I was a child, I wore lip glosses—sticky and gooey and flavored like candies. When I got older, I wore Burt’s Bees lip shimmer, beeswax with persimmon and peony tints and pearlescent shimmer, and the only weight was soothing mint.

But now I wear lipstick, cheap and plastic, to feel strong with sharp cupid’s bows. And my lips slide into summer smiles of half-moons with the weight of pomegranates and fish scales, and it sticks to my teeth.

***

As a girl I was always drawn to Susan. She was kind, clever, brave—and mature. In the picture books I read as a child she was beautiful, with long dark hair like mine. She had a little sister, like I did. She had adventures with a figure stunningly like the Christ I was learning about in Sunday school. But most importantly, when I really began my obsession with The Chronicles of Narnia, she was my age.

I highlighted every word she spoke, every deed she did, every time she was mentioned. Even now, limned in garish pink in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s twelfth chapter, reads the strangely specific line, “Susan had a slight blister on one heel.”* I studied the illustrations of her by Pauline Baynes and Deborah Maze, sketched her out myself in the margins of school notes. I dreamed about going on Narnian adventures with her, about having such a fascinating character as my friend at an age when I often felt I had none.

But despite this, I still didn’t understand her enough, know her enough. While she was as tenderhearted as I wanted to be, she also hurt her younger sister, as I often hurt mine. While brave, she was also prone to disbelief. She and Lucy were the Marys at Aslan’s tomb. I knew Susan was important, but try as I might, I couldn’t understand why, couldn’t understand her. I kept reading the books, voraciously, not just for sweeter tastes of Narnia, but also to learn my friend.

So I was left shaken when I learned in Prince Caspian that she would never return.

And even more so in The Last Battle when I learned it was all her fault.

***

Anyone who is a Lewis scholar—or is moderately interested in The Chronicles of Narnia—or has read through the end of The Last Battle—knows about “the Susan Problem.” We’ve felt crushed, and even angered, by the fact that Lewis cuts Susan from the final book—from Narnian heaven. This problem with Susan goes beyond Lewisian circles: figures like Philip Pullman to J.K. Rowling have condemned Lewis for disowning Susan. The claim is that Lewis is sexist and ageist—not just because the character he chooses to single out for apostasy is a girl, but because she is a woman, because she is “interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”**

Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe we’re missing something in our search for the answer to the Susan Problem. Maybe we’re overlooking Susan herself.

***

Sometimes I feel like Susan, in my growing-up: I have a desire for femininity, a distraction by worldly things, a forgetting of imagination and the childlike faith of my youth. I get so caught up in my head that I forget to feel. My Bible reading is too Thomistic, too concerned with the knowing that I miss the doing by faith.

I miss the old days, where I didn’t need to understand everything: I was innocent and faith-full enough to just do it. And I miss the forest; I miss the forest for the trees—for the creeks, for the dragonflies, for the sunlight. While becoming like Susan, I’ve become like Eustace: I haven’t been reading the right kind of books. I read too much theory, too much scholarship, too much criticism; no more books about dragons and avoiding dragonish thoughts. And so when I enter the woods, I don’t know what to do. I look at trees, and they seem so quiet. I want to be like Lucy, to ask the trees to wake up, and help me wake. I need the faith to see the trees walk again. I’m so afraid that I’ve focused too much on Susan’s shadows of materiality and practicality that I’ve missed the shadows of birches and beeches dancing in front of me.

***

In practical terms, Susan was Lewis’ only option for an apostate. In the first three books, Lewis had already set Susan up as the least imaginative of the Pevensies, and thus the more likely to stray, for in Narnia, imagination is the equivalent of faith. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she innocently doubts Lucy’s discovery of a world within the spare room wardrobe, as do her brothers, before eventually coming to faith alongside them with a stumble through the wardrobe. Though she doubted, she received faith by sight, and later, by knowing the numinous.

But while Susan is the kind, tender-hearted older sister, sharing in delight and communion with Aslan, Lewis gives us hints about where her character could go, tempted by selfishness and comfort. Even after Aslan’s spring and Father Christmas’ warming gifts, as the three loyal Pevensies and the Beavers go to meet the Great Lion, we’re told “Susan had a blister on one heel.” And we have to wonder if, even in this world of fantasy, Susan had been complaining about something as mundane as a blister.

***

Unlike Susan, I am not much into nylons. I don’t know who is. I might like a pair with seams up the back for the vintage look, but not enough to shell out the money for them. But I have become interested in other aspects of fashion. I’m much more likely these days to purchase a new dress than to buy books.

I wonder if Susan, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, sometimes stripped off her nylons to go wade through lonely creekbeds. If the pinching toes of her pumps made her long for leather sandals and silk slippers, finely wrought by dwarves or dryads. If some days she left off curling her hair in neat pin curls and instead left it loose, remembering the slide of ivory bodkins and the smell of oak moss twisted in plaits.

***

In Prince Caspian, Susan is the grousy and doubtful sibling, a foil to Lucy: Lewis needed to contrast Lucy’s continued belief with the others’ return to doubt. He could not have all three siblings doubt her again with the same motives and methods. Edmund, probably remembering the effects of his traitorous doubt the first time around and his redemption, knows Aslan is near, and re-sees Aslan first. Peter wants to believe, but is so intent on being a good leader that he cannot see. Trumpkin, the atheist, simply refuses to believe; and Susan vaguely wants to believe Aslan has returned, but is once again more concerned with her own comfort. This doesn’t just create an interesting spiritual pedagogy for Lewis, but also keeps the characters from repeating the same cycle of doubt and mockery to faith by sight. Even though Susan’s faith is restored, Lewis has still set her up as the disbeliever in this novel for the sake of showing different levels of doubt and faith and returns to belief. Susan’s disbelief in Prince Caspian doesn’t show Lewis’ sexism, but an aspect of his theological intent.

***

Unlike Susan, I was never one for parties. Never invited to any in high school, and never friends with partiers in college. My first “college party” was a co-worker’s fortieth birthday, and I drank ginger ale. A student summed it up perfectly: my parties still have cupcakes and a purpose. But I have attended my university’s charity masquerade ball. It’s the masquerading I love—the opportunity to pretend I’m the princess I always wished I could be.

And I do wish I could attend more social events. The problem, I keep telling myself, is that I’m simply too awkward for things like that. I don’t go to parties because I can’t fit in, my mind is settled on far-off lands, and I can’t focus on this one. I don’t have princes vying for my hand because I’m just too strange.

But even I must admit I’m a terrible liar: I can’t even convince myself. I like being weird because it gives me an identity; I craft my strangeness. I’m pretentious. And it’s left me in identity limbo, trapped within the wardrobe, between the outside and inside worlds, modern and medieval.

But because I’ve made that limbo, I bring my loneliness, my isolation, on myself. I don’t like parties because I don’t know where to fit in: I want to maintain my childlikeness, but I put away childish things in the effort to find a full-time job, to be a young professional. I don’t find princes because I’m scared, scared I won’t be like Susan: I’m scared there won’t be princes starting wars for me, scared I won’t live up to those princes’ standards. And I’m scared of being caught in the same net as Susan, of betrayal by my own version of a Rabadash. Scared Rabadash will be the only prince in my story; scared all the others will remain unnamed shadows on the last pages of my novel, unsubstantiated, briefly mentioned, never engaged, never developed. Never real. And yet I’m scared that if I do find princes here, I’ll have to give up the ones I only see in my dreams.

I wonder if the parties for which Susan received invitations were that much different than my masquerade ball. If they were raves at Soho nightclubs where jazz bands played long into the night or grand fêtes at wealthy minor lords’ or business magnates’ flats and mansions. Did she care for nothing but party invitations because they made her forget—or perhaps, remember? Because the jazz and champagne and young men in crisp tuxedos let her mind drift to other worlds while firmly planted in England? Did she crave these parties because it meant she had a name again, was a well-known and desirable young woman again? Did she feel she was again being pursued by the kings of the countries beyond the sea? Or did they too remain unnamed shadows? Did she constantly look over her shoulder for Rabadash, dogging her every step? Did the parties and clothes, the balls and gowns, make her feel like a princess—like a queen?

***

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Susan becomes the adult character, the one mature and pretty enough to go off to America—mostly because Lewis needed to get Lucy and Edmund away from the two siblings who were “too old” for Narnia. Susan is now the beautiful one—a fact that causes bitterness in Lucy. The feminist critique is that this plot point pits women against each other for the sake of beauty, a sexist idealization of women beyond their humanity. But Susan’s beauty isn’t the issue in this scene: she’s not reduced to her beauty or condemned for it. Lucy is the one who wants to reduce herself to her physical beauty, to potential aesthetic objectivity—a desire the narrator condemns, a contention between sisters seen as temptation, as sin. Lewis doesn’t condone the depiction of women’s bodies as objects of desire; he condemns the relentless pursuit of artificial beauty, especially at the expense of another woman. But because of Susan’s beauty, she becomes the mature Pevensie, and it takes her further from the immediate narrative and thus into a potential falling away—from the plot of the story and from the faith.

In The Horse and His Boy, Susan’s beauty is emphasized again—and this time, her desirability and rejection of Prince Rabadash lead to a war between Narnia and the Calormenes. Susan’s role as the mature one—this time, as the sister old enough to marry—isn’t condemned, but is a plot device. While Prince Corin criticizes her maturity as the reason for her absence from battle, she isn’t grown-up for the sake of pedagogy or criticism, but for the sake of the plot.

***

At this point, after Susan’s development from tenderhearted child to marriageable beauty, she was the only character whose apostasy would make sense. She was the right age—twenty-one, by Lewis’s timeline—to be seduced away by the lusts of the flesh and the eyes and, most understandably, the pride of life.

Peter had been the High King who fought wolves, witches, giants, monsters, tyrants—memorable feats for a twelve-year-old. Besides being a king, a battle-leader, and a seafarer, Edmund had been a traitor: how could he ever forget such a betrayal, and his personal redemption by the Lion? And Lucy of all characters could never turn apostate: she had discovered Narnia, discovered faith, had been Aslan’s closest human companion. Most importantly, Lucy had been our eyes into Narnia—Lewis couldn’t abandon his favorite lead. The other friends of Narnia were all so new to readers that their potential for apostasy wouldn’t have meant much. And so, as Lewis wrote The Last Battle, he must have realized no other character had been so subtly, perhaps even unintentionally, prepared to lose their faith, to grow too old for Narnia.

***

The Susan problem is more than mere sociology: it’s philosophy. And critics miss it every time. They condemn Lewis’ narrative choice in keeping Susan out of heaven as sexist and ageist: Susan is too womanly and too old, both traits they claim Lewis despised. While they point to arguable examples of sexism and ageism, both within The Chronicles and in Lewis’s other writings and personal life, these criticisms are too shallow for understanding The Last Battle and the problem with Susan.

The Chronicles are quite famously “Christian books,” and while Lewis hated the label allegory, there are clear spiritual parallels. So why do so many critics grab at the lowest hanging fruits of sexism and ageism in their desire to critique? Why do they refuse to look at the Susan problem as something spiritual, in a book so blatantly Christian?

Ironically, these critics are succumbing to the same problem as Susan: perhaps that’s why they’re so quick to rush in and defend her against Lewis. They’re so focused on the womanly, adult side of Susan’s character that they can’t see the spiritual problem. They criticize Lewis of ageism, focusing on Susan’s adulthood—like Susan. And they are so focused on her womanhood that they fail to see that “the Susan Problem” has nothing to do with age or femininity, but with her inability to focus on the spiritual reality of Narnia—falling into that same spiritual blindness themselves.

Critics misrepresent Lewis’s intentions toward Susan because they themselves are Susan. They are too focused on her character as woman, as female and mature—perhaps because their own feminine or matured sensibilities have been offended. Like Susan, they’re distracted by her physical nature, forgetting and rejecting the spiritual fundamentals of faith in Narnia, led astray by their own feminist lipsticks and ageist nylons and critical party invitations. In their doubt, they’ve barred themselves from entering Aslan’s country and seeing the world of spirituality and morality, and fall into their own Narnian apostasy.

***

Doubting Thomas is often given the reputation of second-worst disciple. How could a true disciple not believe Christ had risen? How could he reject the testimony of his friends? Didn’t he remember Christ’s promises of resurrection? “Unless I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25 KJ21). Why couldn’t he believe without sight? Even Christ rebuked his disbelief.

My pastor once said Thomas didn’t doubt because of his lack of faith, but because of the depth of his grief. Thomas had the most love for Jesus, the most hope in him as Messiah, earthly King, conqueror of Rome; he had more hopes to be dashed at his death than the others, more dreams of peace and victory to be crushed with the clang of a heavy metal hammer on thick iron nails, at the thud of a stone rolled into place, at the washing away of the world of sand he had built his belief on.

***

No one could deny Lucy was the most faithful of the Pevensies, not a Doubting Thomas at all. But her faith came naturally: she saw the nail prints—saw the lamppost, met the Faun, followed the Lion. She had no choice but to believe: she was the discoverer; her burden was that of being believed. Her faith had been sight, by narrative necessity.

But Susan had to work for it. She was a child of doubt, a child of Eve, twice-over—four times, if she were dragged into remembering the moments she had hung back from saving Tumnus or following the White Stag into the woods beyond the lamppost. She was forced into belief as she was forced into a new world. She met the Lion, watched him bleed, saw him in his glory, joined in his triumphant romp. And it was all taken away, after years of joyous reign, back through a forest of trees that pricked her skin as she passed between them, back through the wardrobe to a rainy English day. The world she had finally built up faith in was ripped away.

And then it happened again. Back to a strange new world she barely remembered, overgrown apple trees and crumbled stone halls of a place she felt she should know, a golden chess knight with ruby eyes …. She remembered along with the rest of them, followed them reluctantly down musty steps into darkness, felt the twang of her bow, the loss of her horn.

But despite the memories, despite the joy of being home, she still couldn’t see him. Lucy saw him, of course—Lucy always saw him. She was his favorite. Never mind the fact that Susan had been there, too, had seen him rise to life again in the gold morning sun, felt his Lion’s breath, his kiss of reassurance, the nails in his hands. She could feel the shadow of jealousy on her heart as she marched behind the others, watched Lucy lead as she always did, felt her shoe rub against that old familiar blister on her left heel. And the shadow she had seen ahead, the one in the vague shape of a Lion, began to flicker, began to fade. In all her attempts to be like Susan, did Lucy never stop to think Susan might sometimes wish to be like her?

And she was forced into belief again, this time in fear—fear that he would see her jealousy as well as her doubt. And again she felt his breath. And she joined in the romp of Aslan’s deliverance, again. And again her faith was bulwarked, was made to shoot up into a sturdy mustard tree and dance with the other dryads.

And again, all she had hoped for was taken away, with the promise that she’d never get it back. Again, again, always again.

Perhaps Susan’s apostasy did not stem from a lack of faith, but from the depth of grief—the grief of having her world stolen twice-over.

***

I’ve felt my world stripped away, too. I entered Narnia, enter Narnia, as a way of surviving in this one. I dream of castles and dragon-shaped ships and unicorns, fauns and gentle lions, linen shifts and oakmossed plaits, dreams that continue even when I am awake; it is never finished. I dreamed them to escape my parents’ divorce and the loss of everything I had known, to escape the shouts I heard as I tried to sleep and the tiredness I felt from nights awake. I dream them still to hide from the fear of growing up, of taxes I must pay, and mortgages I may one day have, and princes I may not. I cannot put away childish things.

But even as I try to cling to the old ways and old days, I lose hope. I see the pain of this world and turn to see the back wall of my closet, still hard plaster, and see that the trees still don’t dance. I can only enter Narnia in my dreams, in memories, and I am losing hope while growing up. I am losing faith while growing bitter, and I am beginning to know what Susan felt.

***

Why does anyone have to lose their faith at all? Why must anyone turn apostate?

Because doubt is something that plagues everyone, especially the believer.

Because Lewis’s entire series is about childlike faith, and he needed a warning for those tempted to turn away from it for the pleasures of adult philosophies, personalities, externalities.

And because that doubt was autobiographical.

In the form of Susan, Lewis was writing out the story of his own apostasy: the death of his mother and the peaceful world he had known, his distraction by worldly things and knowledge, his false maturity, and later, his conversion. He was writing out the doubt and distraction we’re all capable of.

Lewis left open the possibility for Susan’s return. He wrote that Susan was written out of the story not because, as he said, “I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting into Aslan’s country,” but because “I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write.”*** He had already written it, in Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim’s Regress. The apostasy of Susan mirrors his own life—one of a falling from faith after a loss, of his mother, of her Narnia. They both had a desire for maturity, for an intellectual purity and sovereignty that led to vanity. And they both later survived a tragedy—he with the loss of his friends in the Great War and she with the loss of her family in a train crash.

Lewis’s tragedies brought him to Oxford, and to MacDonald and Tolkien and Dyson, and to a sidecar on the way to the zoo, and to an eventual return to joy. He gives Susan that same hope: while she no longer considers herself a Friend of Narnia, she does not die in the railway accident; and Lewis hints that the tragedy, the loss of family, may bring her to her own surprise by joy. While she is no longer a Friend of Narnia, we hope she may still be a friend of ours. She may even grow old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

This is his gift to readers—his gift to me, too, though it has taken me fifteen years to understand it: this discovery that we are all a little bit Susan. And as I mature, as I struggle with my own Susan-problems of vanity and pride and distraction and grow old enough for fairy tales again, I am able to help Lewis shape this unwritten chronicle of Narnia.

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*C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: MacMillan, 1950).

**C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 1956).

***C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy (HarperOne, 2009).

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Kathryn Thompson is a writer and artist from West Virginia. She received an MA in English from Marshall University, but now teaches art at the Christian school she attended as a child. She has been published in The Ukrainian Quarterly and has written and illustrated three books for ForestLore Press.

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Photo Credit: Puffin PS132 (1968), The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis, Jeremy Crawshaw, CC BY 2.0 Deed, via Flickr.com.