Through the Wardrobe

When I was a child, I never thought much about who wrote the books I loved. I read for the characters, the story, the settings so different from my suburban life. Because most of my books came from library shelves, I considered the librarians as the keepers of the hallowed books. If I’d cared to think about it, I might have assumed those librarians performed magic during the hours between dark and dawn when the library was closed and dark—a special kind of magic that filled the shelves with books of different shapes, colors, sizes, and smells. After all, those books took me, magically, to faraway lands and worlds I’d never dreamed of.

I learned early that, magic or no, I might accidentally take home a book I didn’t like. While I used to be, and still am, a forgiving reader, I prefer books where the characters act like real people. Give me characters that are sensible (if misdirected) and flawed (rather than impossibly good) and I’m happy; give me the opposite, and I’m likely to roll my eyes. Fortunately, eye-rollers were rare. I didn’t mind the occasional dud when I so often found myself in the world of the likes of Anne from Anne of Green Gables and Meg from A Wrinkle in Time.

Eventually I realized the magic of books was connected directly to the author listed on the spine; to my further delight, books next to each other with the same author often meant series. A series meant that I got to spend more time with the characters I liked. I still didn’t think too much about the author who had created that series magic for me, but I fell under the spell of those who promised long hours in a world unlike my own. Boy on the cover, girl on the cover, historical setting, fantasy world, it didn’t matter to me.

And thus, I came to the Chronicles of Narnia lined up neatly on the library shelf, C. S. Lewis on the spines. Having learned my lesson on previous series, I quickly flipped to the inside page to discover the full number and order of the series. Seven—all there on the shelf. I grabbed them greedily, and began to read the first in the car ride home. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . What a funny title, I thought. But who could resist a Lion and a Witch, even if the book did seem to focus on what they were going to be wearing? Not me.

The magic I’d come to expect from reading happened almost instantly when I met the Pevensies. And I was relieved to discover a few pages in that a wardrobe is an old-fashioned name for a big wooden dresser/closet combination. Good. Just like most of the girls in Lewis’s series, I’d rather read about a dresser than fashion any day (still would). Especially a magical dresser than would take me to a winter wonderland with a wicked queen, a talking Faun named Tumnus, and a battle fought and won by children just like me.

Though I didn’t appreciate it consciously at the time, one of the things that drew me into the books was the fact that Lewis’s girls were cast in the hero role, not a supporting role. These girls didn’t stand to the side and watch while waiting to be rescued as Wendy did in Peter Pan, or as girls did in so many other books I had read. Or worse, dress as and pretend to be men in order to fight the good fight, as Eowyn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had to do. No, Lewis’s girls walked through wardrobes into other worlds, grabbed glowing rings or jumped into pools or paintings that took them someplace exciting and adventurous and potentially dangerous. These girls were like me and my friends: full of curiosity and interested in exploration. That didn’t seem strange at all to me. After all, I grew up in a world where there was ample evidence that women could do anything (dressed as women, not disguised as men), from flying a plane around the world (Amelia Earhart) to running a country (Queen Elizabeth II).

I vaguely recognized that Lewis’s girls were different from those of many of the authors I read, but I didn’t spend too much time thinking about why back then (it was the 1960s, after all, and everyone was talking about how girls were equal to boys). I just enjoyed the magic of Narnia and the authenticity of his girls. The past (as in the 1920 passage of the 19^th Amendment allowing women to vote) seemed as distant as a fairy tale to me. In Lewis, I’d discovered an author who knew not only the authentic adventure world of boys, but also of girls. At least, that’s how it felt at the time as I devoured all seven books in less than a week. I was like the children in the books, like the narrator: I didn’t believe in dressing to impress; I was curious; I wasn’t always good at listening to the rules adults set for me, which seemed arbitrary and stifling.

Another appealing aspect of the books was the fact that it was the children (girls even more than boys) who led the way and the adults who muddled about, often unsure and very often completely wrong, sometimes from vanity and intellectual snobbery, like Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, and sometimes with calculating evil, like the Narnian witches. Since I’d observed in my short life that adults didn’t always have the “right”—or even most logical, sensible, or kind—idea in mind, I liked reading about other kids who were quite willing to recognize (if silently) the inconsistency or self-deception of the adults around them. Not to mention girl characters who weren’t obsessed with following the adult advice about being “nice.” Instead, they worried about being valiant, honest, and brave. Lucy Pevensie does not concern herself with mending torn hems or cleaning her face. She sets out to free Tumnus the Talking Faun, who has been captured by the White Witch because he helped Lucy escape Narnia on her first visit.

I related to Lucy, because I knew what it felt like to notice things and have others react with outright skepticism just because I was too young to have earned any credibility (although I never noticed anything as interesting as a portal to another world in any of our closets, sadly). Lucy has a hard time convincing her older siblings that Narnia is not a sign of mental illness. I still remember feeling annoyed for her when Edmund ignores her warnings about the evil beneath the White Witch’s beauty and the danger in eating the Turkish Delight. I admired her pluck—and worried for her safety—when she and Susan try to revive Aslan after he has been tortured and killed by the White Witch and her minions, rather than sit back and wring their hands helplessly.

It was cool to find girls who were guided by a pragmatic common sense, unless curiosity or an occasional cross mood got the better of them for a moment. Too often, girls in the literature I read were concerned with whether or not they had on the prettiest dress and lecturing the boys around them about behaving well. (I love Peter Pan, but can you deny that Wendy might have had a lot more fun if she didn’t spend so much time tidying and acting the mother to John, Michael, and the Lost Boys?) In contrast to the overly proper girls in some books, who were focused on the idea of husbands and housework much earlier than I ever was, Polly had my attention the moment she convinced Digory they could explore the empty row house a few doors down by crawling through the eaves of attics in their own houses in The Magician’s Nephew. Yes, as Digory points out, they could get caught and accused of thievery. But who would want to resist the chance to have adventures with ghosts and haunted houses just because there was a little danger involved? When Polly and Digory miscalculate and end up in Digory’s uncle’s forbidden study, I held my breath, waiting to see how awful their punishment would be.

Of course, with Lewis, as in real life, the punishments were simply to be borne, secondary to the real adventure the children sensed around every unexplored corner. So when Polly reaches for the rings that Uncle Andrew meanly entices her with? Even though I, like Digory, knew she shouldn’t take it, I understood why the glow attracts her so much that she can’t resist. I’m not sure I would have resisted, either, despite my real fear that Polly would be harmed by whatever was going to happen next. I know I didn’t resist falling in with any of the adventures that began with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and ended with The Last Battle.

Returning to Lewis’s work as an adult has meant indulging in research. I have long since learned (through many college courses, some lively and some tedious) that the authors I did not concern myself with when I first began reading were the true purveyors of the magic I’ve always found in books. Not only that, but studying their lives often reveals some of the history that shaped and informed the magic worlds they created to delight their readers. Authors, it turned out, take bits and pieces of their real lives to breathe life into their characters and settings. Dickens’s all too real experience with a London poor-house, Twain’s life on the Mississippi river and his experience growing up in Missouri before and after the battle to end slavery was finally won—the authors turned out to be characters as interesting as those they created on the page. In turn, the characters they created became more real when I learned how much they shared with their creators in experience. But I had not studied Lewis’s history. Would knowing him better make me enjoy the Chronicles of Narnia more? Or less?

I confess to being apprehensive about re-reading the books. What if the magic I’d found in them as a child was ruined by the revelation of the author behind the story? What if the strong girl characters I remembered were not quite as strong as I’d thought? Fortunately, I came away more in awe of his carefully drawn girl characters than ever.

I am further impressed at how real these girls are because I have now studied the moral, social, and literary pressures that existed from the mid-1600s to the mid-1900s. It was not acceptable—in life or literature—for girls to strive for anything other than absolute perfection in manners and morals (if that sounds boring, it often was, even in literature). Boys like Tom Sawyer could avoid chores and run away to find adventure and still be considered a hero. But girls usually lost their heroic status if they dared to argue, run away, or reject the idea of sitting quietly and waiting for a male to rescue them from trouble. No matter that women waged and won a two-hundred-year war for the right to vote in America and England, and fought for and won the right to own property and businesses in their own right even if they were married; there were still strong forces that argued women were the “weaker” sex.

Authors often found their works better received when the female characters fit the ideal model of womanhood rather than the reality, which led to the depiction of female characters of any age as either completely evil or ridiculously pure, innocent, and helpless. Women were touted in advice and etiquette books as the “angels” of the house. Society expected them to be obedient, demure, and in perpetual need of protection. Authors (male and female) often bowed to the pressure and created such characters (ignoring the real women of their acquaintance, I suspect, who were not nearly so angelically delicate, despite the many etiquette and advice books trying to make them so).

Whatever history, religious leanings, or meanings Lewis held, he never let them obscure his accurate observation of the behavior of the girls in his books. That makes Lewis a little different from his contemporaries like Tolkien and American classicists like Mark Twain (who preferred to use female characters as sparingly as possible, and then only in supporting roles). Where Tolkien and Twain created strong and memorable male characters in Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Tom Sawyer, and Huck Finn, they did not cast, as Lewis did, equally strong females as protagonists. Think of it in terms of whether you can imagine one of today’s enterprising toy companies turning the characters into action figures: While Frodo, Sam, Tom, and Huck can all be easily seen as action figure worthy, can the same be said for Becky Thatcher, with her golden hair and concerns about boyfriends and kissing? Contrast that with all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia. Every girl, beginning with Lucy Pevensie opening the wardrobe and discovering Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and ending with Jill Pole discovering and protecting the fake Aslan in The Last Battle, acts, reacts, makes mistakes, and proves herself as a hero worthy of her own action figure.

In fact, Lucy and Susan already have action figures, thanks to the Disney movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . I would have dressed Lucy and Susan more practically for their action figures (hard to fight in flowing skirts), but I’d have given them the same accessories (Lucy has her healing cordial, while Susan carries her bow and arrows and her horn). For the others: Jill Pole is easiest—she’d be in Calormene armor (or maybe a Girl Guide uniform) and have a bow and arrow. Polly would carry the rings—one green and one yellow—and have a pair of gloves to protect herself from their magic. Aravis would be in armor, with a sword—and her Talking Horse Hwin, of course. The action figures of these girls would be a far cry from the first Barbie (who was created right around the same time Lewis was writing the Narnia books, as it happens).

It is only now, upon reflection on the history of women’s rights and literature of the times, that I realize how lucky I was that Lewis wrote girls who could inspire me so well. Although Lucy is a close second, Jill Pole remains my favorite action girl of Narnia. She isn’t as arrogant as Aravis, but she is as brave and strong. As a character in the later books, toward the end of the Narnian cycle, Jill can be seen as the perfection of the über-unprissy (and yet not masculine) girl character that Lewis began crafting with Lucy Pevensie. In the final book, The Last Battle, she states her mind, isn’t afraid to disobey the orders of a king to uncover the secret of the fake Aslan, and—unlike Susan Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—she wields her bow and arrows proficiently to help save Narnia in a fierce and dangerous battle. To be fair, Susan does get to use her bow in a battle (of sorts) against the Dwarf Trumpkin in Prince Caspian . But Jill’s arrows fly true and strike down many enemies in the heat of battle when the fate of Narnia is at stake.

So how did the author behind the curtain of the Chronicles of Narnia come to know the minds and hearts of girls so well? After all, his mother died when he was ten, he had no sisters, and he was sent to a boarding school shortly after his mother died, where he spent a great deal of his time in the company of boys and men. Not to mention that he didn’t marry until late in life. And yet he (much better than Tolkien in his fantasy universe) understood the character of his Narnian girls and authentically drew their faults and their strengths. Where did he learn about the power of girls?

My guess is that he observed people—all kinds of people, from girls to women and boys to men. Finely drawn characters that ring true to life are usually the result of an author who observes the world and people around him keenly. And then, instead of bowing to literary convention that preferred female characters be portrayed as stereotypically good or evil, he put real girls on the page to delight young readers of both genders.

Having read a little of his many letters, which seem to be silent on this point, I am left to wonder whether he portrayed his females authentically because it did not occur to him to do otherwise (despite the fact that his contemporary and close friend Tolkien chose otherwise), or whether he was striking a blow for the rights that he had been watching women fight for and win all of his life. It was easy for me, as a child, to overlook the earth-shattering nature of the changes that occurred in society when women began to claim the right to full citizenship. (My study of history corrected that impression of “easy,” natural change when I learned that Abigail Adams had implored her husband to give women the vote back when he was working with others to craft the new country of the United States, over a century before women finally did get the vote.) Lewis, on the other hand, was a young man in Ireland when these important battles were raging in the newspaper and in each home. How much did this battle affect his characters? Comparing the history going on around him with the events in his novels, there are many easy connections to make.

Lewis served in World War I, and his battle scenes, as well as those scenes where wearily embattled characters seek shelter and make do with little food, reflect the realities of war. But war was for men at that time, so where might he have observed women on a battlefield or suffering the realities of too little food and inadequate shelter? History reveals that WWI and WWII were periods when professional nursing was finally blossoming into a career to be respected and revered, as these women worked to save wounded soldiers from dying of infection and fever. Nurses, almost exclusively female, were at the front lines, hardy and brave. Lucy, with her healing potion, and Susan, with her motherly caution, can be seen as reflections of those strong, brave women.

Lewis grew up in an era when women were fighting for, and finally winning, the right to vote in England and America. No observant, thinking man of his era could sit back and conceive of women as soft, brainless creatures. And yet the literature of the time often hesitated to portray even the “good” female characters as anything but angels—or future angels—of the house, a Victorian-period notion that hung on long past the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Lewis was clearly an observant, thinking man; we can tell as much from his writing. While he still gives the bulk of his combat to the men and boys that people the Chronicles of Narnia, he does not sideline the girls nor saddle them with the responsibility of being mother hens who lecture about goodness and propriety and worry most about keeping their hands clean and their voices down. No, Lucy opens the wardrobe, has an adventure all on her own, and shows her older, reluctant, doubtful siblings how to follow her to save Tumnus (and eventually Narnia itself). In The Magician’s Nephew, Polly not only leads Digory on the trek through the attic, but her common sense often keeps them on a sensible course even while they both eagerly satisfy their curiosity about the new world they find themselves in (if only Digory had listened when Polly told him not to ring the bell!). The girls are as smart, curious, brave, and flawed as any of the boys.

Another historical reality in Lewis’s world was the shift of women out of the home and into the workplace to support the war effort in WWII. Rosie the Riveter was a model for women here in the U.S. who manned the factory jobs while the men were away at war. Lewis’s girls aren’t afraid to don armor and wield swords when they must do so for the cause, either.

Lastly, and most explicitly, Lewis gives a nod to England’s Girl Guides when Eustace explains to King Tirian in The Magician’s Nephew that Jill Pole’s tracking abilities come from her years as a Guide. The ability to move silently (startling friend as much as enemy) and track her route by the stars of Narnia allows Jill to lead King Tirian’s party, not just follow along in the wake of the men and boys. It seems unlikely that Lewis did this unconsciously. I suspect he made his decisions deliberately, given his life as a Cambridge scholar. After all, the boys and men (and Talking Animals) do not question Jill’s leadership or abilities just because she is a girl (when even in modern-day life that still happens—if less frequently).

It wasn’t just the good female characters who were strong, fearless, and daring, either. As a child, I did not find it strange that one of the prime villains in Narnia is female. The Witch was as believable to me as any other larger-than-life villain. After all, I’d grown up with the Disney versions of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. What was wrong with an evil Witch in a land of Talking Animals?

However, Lewis’s Witch is not merely cunning and devious—she is a bombshell beautiful giant with the strength to pull street lamps out of the ground and smack policemen with them. The actions of Jadis the Witch in The Magician’s Nephew are both breathtakingly cruel (as when she leaves her people in suspended animation and lets the castle crumble and collapse around them because they are her people to destroy or save) and astonishingly funny (as when she runs the cab and horse to the ground while being chased by police and distraught jewelers). Her physical and magical powers are more than a match for any man, in Narnia or in England.

Though the destruction of her own world reduces her powers, she is still powerful as the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In that book she is still beautiful enough to charm Edmund Pevensie (as she had Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew) and heartless enough to bring endless winter to Narnia without allowing the relief of Christmas. It takes Aslan, the great Lion-creator of Narnia himself, to vanquish her in the end, as her power is greater than any boy, king, or Talking Beast of Narnia can overcome. Although one may note that the girls, Lucy, Susan, and Polly, quickly see through to her cold black heart. They are not fooled by beauty as Edmund and Uncle Andrew are.

Sadly, there is one girl Lewis barred from his Narnia in the final volume, The Last Battle—Susan Pevensie, one of Narnia’s first defenders and its former queen, Queen Susan the Gentle. Despite her battles at the side of her younger siblings in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and at the side of Prince Caspian in Prince Caspian, Susan has turned away from Narnia, choosing to believe it was a childish game of fantasy and make-believe. Instead, to everyone’s great scorn, she has embraced “nylons and lipsticks and invitations,” as Jill Pole says in The Final Battle. Some have argued this shows Lewis’s misogyny, but after seven books where all the girls play major roles (remember—action figures with armor and weapons) and only one of the girls—the one who has denied the existence of Narnia—is left behind, I’d have to disagree.

Instead, I’d argue that Lewis was simply emphasizing his point that characters who turn away from honor and valor and duty for the frivolities of life cannot see or enter Narnia. After all, he made his disdain for fancy dress plain in every book—my favorite example occurs in The Magician’s Nephew, when the cabbie’s wife Helen, who becomes the first Queen of Narnia, is summoned into Narnia by Aslan. She appears in her apron and the narrator comments she’d have put on her good clothes had she known he’d be spirited out of her world but would have looked the worse for it. At ten, I agreed with this sentiment—and I still do, several decades later.

When I read the books as a child, I knew nothing of Lewis the author. I knew only the characters and adventures on the page. I had fought with them, taken sides in their quarrels, held my breath when they took risks that didn’t seem wise, and released sighs of relief when they came through their scrapes stronger, better, and wiser than before. When I closed the cover of The Last Battle, I had complete faith that Susan would eventually redeem herself and get to Narnia again. After all, she had been a Queen of Narnia and had been gentle and wise. She had fought bravely and won the battle once against her own desire to be “grown-up” in the way that Lewis and his characters despised. Surely she could do so again.

I have since been heartened to learn that others feel the same. Susan, after all, does not die in the train accident as the others do (thus allowing their ultimate transition from Narnia to the far eastern land of Aslan’s father, the Emperor-over-the-Sea). She lives in the “real” world, sure that Narnia was only a childhood game. Lewis makes clear in his books that there are other ways to reach Aslan’s land—sailing to the end of the Silver Sea, for example—even after Aslan has turned the land of Narnia into a great sea at the end of The Last Battle. Susan, with her lipstick and nylons and concern about invitations, is too smart to forever embrace the Victorian fallacy of the “angel in the house.” I have faith that, by the end of her life, Susan will have re-embraced the magical and vibrant world of authentic girls that Lewis created and find her way to Aslan’s land. In my perfect world, she does, at last, reclaim the courage, honor, and valor—the magic—and abandon the lipstick and nylons. After all, she’s got her own action figure, doesn’t she?

Kelly McClymer has been a reader and a writer for as long as she can remember. The world of books offered so much to her growing up that she feels lucky to have given back with her own somewhat twisted imagination-fueled novels. Her list of books for young adults includes Getting to Third Date and the fantasy trilogy The Salem Witch Tryouts, Competition’s a Witch, and She’s a Witch Girl. Her latest effort, Must Love Black, out in the fall of 2008, is what she terms “goth meets gothic on the coast of Maine.”