The Trouble of…. – Victoria – [12/12/2013]

Like so many others, I tumbled into the world of the Narnia books when I was little more than a child. My father worked in a warehouse for the department of education, and salvaged me the entire set of novels sometime when I was in grade school. Back then, it was nothing more than a good story, the allegory did not hit me over the head (and nearly ruin the story for me) until I was considerably older…

But also like so many others, I have several massive problems with the narrative, especially looking at it as an adult.

Susan.

Oh the trouble of Susan…

Susan’s fate in Narnia has always been a sore spot for me. If you look to the allegorical side of the narrative, and take is as fact that Narnia itself (especially deep Narnia) is a representation of Heaven…then Susan was cast out of heaven for the simple fact that she grew up and became a woman. She ‘fell victim’ to what every young girl goes through at some point in her life, and rather than simply waiting for her to make her way through it (if indeed there was anything to be fixed, because growing into womanhood far from makes you a ‘bad’ person) – the all-powerful figure casts her not only away from her the world in which she has always sought comfort, but robs her of her family…leaving her to deal with the fact that she has become an orphan in one swift grinding moment of shattering light and twisting metal.

Her entire fate summed up in only a few sentences that are not even uttered in her own voice, she is not even present to defend herself or her actions:

“My sister Susan…” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia”.

“She’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”

“She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

No one actually states how old Susan is, but given that she was nearly a teenager in the Wardrobe installment, my guess is she’s supposed to be around twenty, possibly older.

The truth is though, that I’ve always felt somewhat attuned to Susan. Not because she was excluded, but because she forgot. She allowed herself to forget.

You see, that ties into what has always bothered me about Narnia as a whole, always ever since I was a child…is that they were never allowed to forget. One of the articles that was shared to me recently puts it best, again, when discussing Susan:

“What it must do to you, to be a legend in the body of a young girl, to have that weight on your shoulders and have a lion tell you that you have to let it go.”

They are not allowed to forget, and yet are expected to go back to their own lives, their own world, and *remember* being adults, being royalty, being responsible for thousands of people, and then suddenly being thrust back into the bodies of children.

Can you imagine what that would do to a person? To a child? To anyone? It’s a wonder that they didn’t end up locked in an asylum (as so many have done with the various spins on Alice in Wonderland). So how is Susan to be blamed for allowing herself to forget, for allowing herself to walk away and embrace the world in which she was expected to live, to play the cards she was dealt and make a life for herself.

The trouble with Susan? Is simply that she looked at the cruelty that had been handed to her, and, consciously, or unconsciously, walked away from it.