professorsparklepants:

Not to mention the fact that Susan’s beauty and femininity are things that Lewis praised earlier on in the series. In the epilogue to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Queen Susan’s major accomplishments are listed as being gentle, having really fucking long hair, and being beautiful enough that princes from every kingdom in the ‘verse want to marry her. Not a single one of those things is not traditionally feminine.

The authorial intent behind this, of course, is that materialistic people who ignore their faith don’t get to go to heaven. But what this really comes across as is that girls are not allowed to grow up and become women and be mature. Because parties and nylons and lipstick are all things that Susan, who is at least eighteen in The Last Battle, should be doing, as a young feminine woman in her age group. And Lewis frames this femininity like it’s the reason Susan has forgotten Narnia and become what we can only assume is Lewis’ perception of a shallow young woman.

The Problem of Susan is that, when everyone dies in the last book and travels to Aslan’s country, Susan is not with them. And while this could be explained as Susan had moved on from being attached to Narnia, or Susan didn’t want to disobey Aslan’s orders and dig up the rings, or Susan had just not gone to the friends of Narnia meeting and didn’t know what was going on, it wasn’t.

Isn’t there a problem with this idea though when you acknowledge that Lucy is also very feminine? Like yeah, she’s definitely more adventurous and curious than Susan, and doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty occasionally, but she’s described more than once as also very beautiful and feminine and loving beautiful and feminine things. She is just a more balanced individual in the way that she is portrayed.

Like you said, the authorial intent is that materialistic people that ignore their faith don’t get into heaven. You notice the exact same thing happens with the ape (the one who made Puzzle pretend to be the false Aslan) and the…dwarves, I think they were, the ones that didn’t acknowledge Aslan once they got through the door. They ignored or abused faith in different ways (the ape deceived people into worshiping a false god and the dwarves just refused to acknowledge the presence of Aslan and a couple of other things…I dunno, it’s been ages since I read that book), and so they didn’t get to go to Aslan’s Country either.

I think where you and I differ is that I see LWW Susan and TLB Susan in very different lights. The Queen Susan of the Golden Age did not reject her femininity or her beautyl quite the contrary, just like you said, she absolutely embraced it. However, they were simply a part of who she was. She was beautiful and she was gentle and she was kind, but that was not all that she was. She was also fiercely protective of her siblings and her people, and she was a good and kind ruler. But she also fiercely believed in Aslan and his goodness, and she tried to keep and uphold that goodness in all the different aspects of her life. She was beautiful and feminine while simultaneously holding great faith and being a gentle and righteous ruler.

The after coming back in Prince Caspian, being told she can never return, it must have been a crushing blow for her. She loved Narnia, put her whole heart and soul into shaping Narnia and keeping Narnia safe, only to be told she can never return…because she has gained all can from it (apparently). So she becomes angry, and lashes out. She buries her belief in nylons and parties and boys because to believe would hurt too much. And she finds it’s much easier to fill her life and head with material things, because it allows her to focus on the here and now and not the deeper spiritual connection that she has with Aslan, Narnia, and her siblings, because that hurts. It hurts to lose (or at least, she thinks she’s lost) something that wonderful. And slowly, she forgets. She starts losing that faith, because she’s filled her life with material things for so long that they become her life. She has substituted earthly, material things for that deeper connection that she once had, and she is so deep in denial at this point that she turns away from her brothers and sister when they need her, when they want her to come with them. Lewis never made her out to be less than any of the rest of them BECAUSE she liked lipstick and boys and throwing parties, but rather because she let those things fill up and take over her life while leaving her faith in Aslan and her siblings behind, for not balancing her life. She let herself become ONLY those things, instead of loving those things while being faithful and gentle.

That is the story of Susan Pevensie: not the story of a girl vilified for liking feminine things, but the story of a girl who buried herself so deep in the pit of material things that she forgot what it was like to feel the unconditional love of Aslan and her siblings and ignored her faith.