Through the Wardrobe Read online

  O.R. Melling was born in Ireland, grew up in Canada with her seven sisters and two brothers, and now lives in Ireland again. She has published eight books, many of which have been translated into various languages. The four books of her Chronicles of Faerie (named in homage to C. S. Lewis) are The Hunter’s Moon, The Summer King, The Light-Bearer’s Daughter, and The Book of Dreams, published in America by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Her new mythological adventure series, The Celtic Princess, will be published by Penguin Putnam in 2011. Melling lives in a small town by the Irish Sea with her daughter Findabhair and her cat Emma. Visit her website at www.ormelling.com.

  The French writer Jean-Paul Sartre decided that to be was to do. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that to do was to be. The American singer Frank Sinatra summed it up in the immortal words, Do-be do-be do. . . . The whole question of doing and being can be especially vital to a teenager, as Zu Vincent and Kiara Koenig have discovered. They ask the burning question, inspired by C. S. Lewis: Are you a Susan or a Lucy? Think hard before you answer.

  Mind the Gap

  Are You a Susan or a Lucy?

  ZU VINCENT AND KIARA KOENIG

  One of the most delightful things about reading books is what they can tell us about ourselves. We live with a character and follow him or her through the story with our own fingers numbed by the cold they suffer and our eyes dazzled by the wonders they see. When it comes to the Pevensie girls in the Chronicles of Narnia, whom do you feel most drawn to, Susan or Lucy? The reasons for your answer might surprise you, since C. S. Lewis used these characters to explore the age-old dilemma: how to grow up without becoming “very” grown-up.

  What does this mean? The answer lies in the difference between being and doing. That is, between being who you are and doing what others expect of someone your age.

  Look at the four Pevensies. When they first enter Narnia, they’re just kids. But by the end of the story they’ve matured enough to defeat the Witch and take their places as Kings and Queens of Narnia. They don’t just appear grown-up by the end of the book, they’ve become better people, stronger and more emotionally mature.

  Yet Lewis understood that gaining this emotional maturity isn’t always easy. And in the Chronicles he used the two Pevensie girls, Lucy and Susan, to show this journey—a journey that centers on the struggle between acting grown-up and really growing up. A journey reflected in the act of reading itself.

  Do you find yourself tucking a fairy tale behind a copy of Teen Vogue to escape notice? Or hiding a novel under your backpack for fear someone will tease you because you’re “still reading those books”?

  We don’t live in a reader-friendly world. There are few quiet corners in which to curl up and open a good book. Even fewer moments when we can just be alone and think. It’s often easier to not think too deeply, to instead watch a movie, play a video game, or surf the net. And it’s hard to hear the voices of stories, which are softer than the rustle of pages, over the ring tones of incoming text messages.

  Or maybe you have someone nagging you to “get your nose out of that book” and do something. As if reading were something we needed to outgrow along with naps, stuffed animals, and imaginary friends.

  But a story, unlike cell phone minutes, is never ending. Because they are more than the sum of their plot, stories don’t lose their ability to make us laugh once we know the punch line or to spark our curiosity even after we know “whodunit.” Like the best dessert in the world, the more you have, the more you want. But unlike the Witch’s enchanted Turkish Delight, stories nourish us as we read.

  They’re gateways, and the further up and further in we go, the richer the tale, the realer the world, the more intense the experience. Stories ask us to come inside and do half the work of making them come alive if we want to feel their full magic. A magic that takes us deep into the core of what makes us human.

  Nowhere is this friendship with the reader more apparent than in the opening book of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. After all, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with the invitation: “I wrote this story for you. . . .” This invitation was originally meant for Lewis’s goddaughter, Lucy Barfield. But all readers are welcome, as long as they venture through the wardrobe door with Lucy Pevensie’s sense of curiosity and her willingness to engage with what’s inside.

  Think of Lucy’s first encounter with the Faun, Mr. Tumnus. She’s neither suspicious nor fearful. She greets him with a polite “Good evening,” and they’re soon walking together “as if they had known one another all their lives.” Good stories have the power to take us by the arm and lead us into a world so real we believe in it totally. They help us see beyond differences like horns and furry legs to shared pleasures like tea and sardines. Which is why Lewis firmly believed fairy tales weren’t just for children. To the author they were a way of better understanding ourselves. “When we read myths,” wrote Lewis in his book of essays On Stories, “we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.” But if this is true, why do so many people think fairy tales are just for kids?

  Lewis believed that those who dismiss fairy tales do so because they can’t see past the surface of the story. They get distracted by the fact that badgers can’t talk and centaurs don’t exist, and never learn to see the reality fairy tales expose. For Lewis, these are the readers who aren’t really grown-up, but who are instead trying desperately to appear grown-up by acting as others expect.

  But there is another type of person, another type of reader, who is mature enough to be grown-up and look beyond the surface to what actually matters. It is these two types of people that Susan and Lucy represent. Susan pretends to be “very” grown-up, but Lucy stays true to herself no matter her age.

  Acting grown-up means worrying exclusively about the kinds of things Susan frets over in the Chronicles, such as bedtimes or what to wear to a party. Real maturity is simply living based on what you know to be right, living as who you are at your core, right now. Maturity allows Lucy to save Narnia, because it allows her to see the magic that makes Narnia unique.

  The personality contrast between Susan and Lucy is apparent in the opening pages of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Narnian adventures begin when Lucy follows her curiosity, first by trying the wardrobe door, and then by venturing into Narnia and her tea date with Mr. Tumnus. Susan, in contrast, tries “to talk like Mother,” as Edmund points out, sending the younger kids to bed and playing peacemaker in their squabbles. When she opens the wardrobe door, it’s nothing but a wardrobe, plain and simple. For Susan, the world is what it appears to be.

  Susan isn’t a bad person. She’s just trying to act like a grown-up.

  Even though Susan isn’t an adult, she feels it’s her responsibility to behave as one in her mother’s absence. She’s trying very hard to do the right thing by keeping her younger siblings in line. Trying too hard is the point. Her idea of how adults should act is already shaped, and she wants desperately to be seen as one.

  When the Professor suggests they accept that Lucy has in fact been to Narnia, Susan can hardly believe it. As Lewis writes, “She had never believed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn’t know what to think.” In Susan’s mind being an adult means being practical and responsible, and the Professor is being neither. When he answers her question, “But what are we to do?” by telling her to mind her own business, she decides that perhaps he’s not quite right in the head.

  There are benefits to Susan’s practical nature: when all four Pevensies finally venture through the wardrobe and into the “always winter and never Christmas” landscape of the Lantern Waste, Susan suggests that they take some of the coats in the wardrobe to keep warm. As she logically points out, it’s not as if they will even “take them out of the wardrobe.”

  Lewis doesn’t want us to hate Susan. Through her, he wants us to understand the risks of relying on appearances and getting too comfortable with judging based on expectations.

  These risks in
clude an inability to see past the surface. Like many of us, Susan later falls for a pretty face, only to discover the monster underneath. In The Horse and His Boy, she’s smitten with Prince Rabadash because he performed “marvelous feats” on the tourney field and “meekly and courteously” conducted himself during his visit to Cair Paravel.

  Others are not so convinced. Edmund points out Rabadash’s failings, telling Susan, “It was a wonder to me that ever you could find it in your heart to show him so much favor.” In truth, Rabadash is both arrogant and deceitful, concerned only with his own greater glory. Even losing soundly on the battlefield can’t teach him maturity.

  The danger of relying on appearances becomes even more apparent if we compare Rabadash to Puddleglum (the Marsh-wiggle from The Silver Chair). At first glance Puddleglum doesn’t seem like the heroic type. He’s gangly and gray, not tall and handsome. He lives in a salt marsh wigwam, not a palace. He’s always certain that the worst will happen, that they’ll all be killed, eaten, or lost forever.

  Yet unlike the dastardly Rabadash, he’s brave in spite of his fears, not to mention loyal and resourceful. Puddleglum shows us that even in the worst of times, we can make things better by making new friends, going on new adventures, by believing that risking failure is better than not trying at all. But he’s the kind of character someone concerned with appearances would overlook completely. He’s certainly someone Susan would never fall for in a million trips to Narnia.

  He’s someone Lucy would take to in a heartbeat.

  Lucy’s insight into the world around her is different than Susan’s. We see this in Prince Caspian as the Pevensies struggle through the overgrown forest between Cair Paravel and the Stone Table. They argue over which path to take, and Lucy, certain she has seen Aslan, tries to convince the others to go upstream. Susan argues that going downstream makes more sense. She reasons that they can find their way from the river. Besides, she isn’t at all convinced that Lucy has actually seen Aslan. She even implies that Lucy imagined him.

  Susan is once again trying to be the practical grown-up. Her goal is to get out of the woods so they can join Caspian and defeat Miraz. Lucy isn’t worried about escaping the woods. She’s too busy wishing the trees would wake up. In fact, all of the Pevensies except Lucy are focused on finding the shortest route and on the logistics of defeating Miraz’s army.

  But Narnia cannot be kept alive by swords alone. We’ve already learned this lesson in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe through Aslan’s self-sacrifice and his thawing of the animals. As much as Peter’s battlefield defeat of the Witch, these acts were necessary in order to restore Narnia and melt the ice of the Witch’s winter forever.

  In his stories, Lewis reminds us that while evil must be defeated, that is just the first step. Real healing means restoring what was lost. This is Lucy’s role. She connects to Narnia in its truest version: the Narnia of the Nymphs and the Dryads, of the river god and Mermaids. More than Peter’s sword fight with Miraz, it’s Lucy’s desire for Caspian’s Narnia to reawaken to its own magic that restores the land to full glory.

  But restoration comes at a price. Often, it means risking going it alone, following a path only you know is the right one. As Aslan tells Lucy, “Go and wake the others and tell them to follow. If they will not, then you at least must follow me alone.” At that moment Narnia’s fate lies in Lucy’s ability to either convince her companions of the truth or move forward on her own.

  Those of us who have to defend our interest in fairy tales recognize Lucy’s dilemma. How can we possibly convince those practical “grown-ups” that fairy tales are not childish, but as necessary as good food? How do we prove to them that we’re not wasting our time in imaginary worlds, but instead discovering what makes life worth living?

  And there’s a danger for us here too. Will we lose our ability to see the truth, to be ourselves, when we’re face to face with what others think? Naturally, as we grow up, we try new things and get wrapped up in friends, looks, and flirtations. But living by what others expect of us can lead to a false sense of maturity.

  On the London underground they say to “mind the gap,” to be wary of the space between the train and the station platform. While the gap on the underground is a physical hazard, we can stumble on spiritual hazards too. Like Lucy, each of us experiences stages in our life’s journey when we’re certain of who we are and the direction we need to go. Our goals are our own, and we move through the world with confidence and an open heart, we “mind the gap” and step over what threatens to trip us. But between these stages are those moments of change and fear when our inner wisdom fails and we risk becoming like Susan, who, even though she was once a Queen of Narnia, has fallen into this spiritual gap. She may act “older” but she’s not necessarily wiser. Perhaps the most telling comment about her is Prince Corin’s. In The Horse and His Boy, Corin tells his brother, “She’s not like Lucy, you know. . . . Queen Susan is more like an ordinary grown up lady.”

  Trapped by her need to appear grown-up, she’s lost sight of Narnia. “Fancy your still thinking of all those funny games we used to play when we were children,” she says to her siblings when they try to keep their memories of Narnia alive in England.

  In contrast, Lewis reminds us through Lucy that holding on to what you love isn’t a game, and staying true to ourselves is at the heart of maturity. Remember in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lucy reads the Magician’s Book of Spells and almost succumbs? She’s searching the book for the Monopods’ visibility spell when she’s lured by the incantation to make its reader beautiful “beyond the lot of mortals.”

  But as the book shows Lucy herself transformed, it also shows her the consequences. First she’s adored, then her beauty causes full-scale war in Narnia. Even in the real world, her beauty makes her so important that “no one cared anything about Susan now.” The spell tempts Lucy to become someone other than herself, someone everyone will notice.

  Lucy wants to say the spell even knowing the evil it will cause. But Aslan helps her resist. As a result, Lucy reads further and finds “the spell to make hidden things visible.” She says the spell and Aslan appears. To her surprise he reminds her that she herself has the power to make things happen, just as she is. “ ‘I’ve been here all the time,’ said he. ‘But you have just made me visible.’ ”

  Lucy is able to stay true to herself throughout the Chronicles of Narnia. Susan has a different fate. In the final book, The Last Battle, while Lucy still drinks “everything in more deeply than the others,” Susan is “no longer a friend of Narnia.”

  When you’re no longer a friend of Narnia, the Narnian adventures will seem silly and simple. You’ll stop believing in Talking Animals and “living” trees, anything that doesn’t appear in the grown-up world. And you’ll forget that the important magic of Narnia is its ability to teach us about the good and evil in human nature. But even then, some small voice may remind you of what you once loved—the magic of possibility.

  Perhaps you’ll see this magic in the way fall leaves whirl themselves into miniature tornados of gold, cinnabar, and crimson, reminding you that even in the cold there is beauty. Or maybe you’ll meet someone new who bounces from one moment to the next like a Monopod, as if their calves and their emotions were built on springs.

  “The value of myth,” Lewis argues in his review of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in On Stories, is “that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the ‘veil of familiarity.’ ”

  To understand what he means, think of how good food tastes when you’ve been reading a tale in which the characters go hungry. Or of how much you appreciate your bed when the characters are sleeping on stone in the rain, huddled under damp, smelly wool cloaks. “By dipping [everyday things] in myth,” Lewis says, “we see them more clearly.”

  To see clearly, story takes us back to a time when the whole world spoke to us. When the constellations were our palm readers and even the
stones could warn us of the coming of our fate. Today’s science describes the stars as novas, supernovas, and galaxies, and locates them by their relative distance from our solar system. But this practical information brings us only so close to true understanding.

  “In our world . . . a star is a huge ball of flaming gas,” Eustace tells the “retired star” Ramandu in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

  Stories do not just describe the world, they teach us what it really is. And, like Lucy and Susan, what we’re really made of.

  In the end, the world is more than an objective description of its continents, weather patterns, and animal populations, just as each of us is more than our height, weight, and hair color. If we get distracted by the surface, we can forget this truth. Lucy learns this in the hallway of the Magician’s house in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—by getting a reminder that, often, what scares us is quite harmless.

  When the “wicked little bearded face” jumps out and scowls at her, she “force[s] herself to stop and look at it.” Because she makes herself really look, she discovers it’s “just a little mirror . . . with hair on the top of it and a beard hanging down from it.” Though the hair and beard fit as if they were part of her, she’s able to see the illusion for what it is and continue her journey.

  It’s like Halloween. Once you recognize who’s under the costume it’s not scary at all. At the same time, the mirror is a warning. If we let ourselves become someone we’re not, if we let others choose how we dress and act and what we believe, then one day we’ll look in the mirror and hate our own face.