The Narnian - Calormene Problem

And other questions while reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my children

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

One of the pleasures of fatherhood has been reading books I loved as a child to my own children. It is perhaps the best test of a story’s timelessness — whether a tale that enraptured me in the age before personal computers can cast the same thrall over children steeped in iPads and apps and streaming media. 

As a writer, I am attentive to craft as I revisit these stories. Do the sentences hold up? Will the scenes that I remember as beautiful or frightening still land that way, or will they feel saccharine? As a former academic, I also read with an ear for gender conventions, race, and sexual normativity — not because I feel overly censorious, myself, but because the power of literature turns on its integrity. As I read, I’m thinking about the controversy over sanitized editions of Roald Dahl — how bland a story can feel if its sharp edges are sanded over, yet how cringe-worthy some words or character types that were perfectly acceptable a generation ago seem to me now. For instance, A Cricket in Times Square is charming in nearly all the ways that I remember, but I recognize that Sai Fong is a caricature much like Apu, of The Simpsons. Are Asian American fathers reading that book aloud to their children? If not, then why am I? 

My daughters have recently discovered a podcast called Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest that works directly against the notion of safe spaces and trigger warnings. The host, Adam Gidwitz, reconstructs the original versions of fairy tales, reveling in the gore and the horror that has been filtered over the years. And this is partly what keeps my daughters spellbound as they binge-listen to the show, scattering craft supplies across their bedroom. 

One of those series with a fair bit of gore and some truly terrifying characters is C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. I read the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, to my oldest daughter when she was 4 years old. And though she listened raptly to the very end, she found the witch’s character so haunting that she refused to let me continue the series. It was not until this year, when she turned 11, that she agreed to let me start at the beginning and read straight through. Her younger siblings, now 7 and 4, follow her lead. And so we are presently halfway through the final book, The Last Battle. 

Lewis’s sentences hold up well. He has a wonderful ear and knows when to draw out a scene and when to keep things moving. His characters are surprising, and his chapters are master classes in suspense. “Oh, come on!” my daughter groans every time I wrap up for the night. Sometimes we have to read a page or two of the next chapter because Lewis has so expertly left us yearning for more. 

But there are moments when Lewis’s stories feel less wonderful to me, the way some jokes from my youth no longer seem funny. I am not sure if any of these concerns rise to a level that I’d consider harmful to my children. But some aspects of The Chronicles have not aged well for me, and I’m writing about them today, as E.M. Forster would say, to decide what I really think by seeing what I have to say.

Monarchy 

Anyone who knows me well is aware that I am no fan of royalty. My only thought during the hoopla surrounding the marriage of Harry, Prince of Wales, to Meghan Markle, was the price tag: nearly $43 million. How many hungry people could have been fed with those resources? And so part of me looks askance at monarchy as the default government in Lewis’s Narnia. Perhaps this is just the baggage that comes with the fantasy genre — the return to a pre-industrial age before chivalry had died. If you’re creating a world of magic, with archers and swordsmen and sorceresses, none of that meshes terribly well with democracy. (Why is democracy often so boring from a narrative standpoint?)

But monarchy is also the paradigm for Christianity, which makes the story unavoidably patriarchal. Aslan, the Christ-like lion, is the undisputed ruler of Narnia.¹ The next-highest in command is Peter, the eldest of the Pevensie siblings, followed by his sister Susan, their brother Edmund, and the youngest, Lucy. One might say that a general equality prevails among the siblings. There are four thrones at the palace in Cair Paravel, after all. But Peter, the eldest son, is the High King. It’s a variation on God the Father, Christ the head of the church, and man as the head of the home — a structure that even many Christians now reject. 

It’s also possible that Lewis was thinking less about historical models for government and more about a power structure that would make sense to children. No matter how much we might wish to empower our children, most of us know that parenting is more like a benevolent monarchy than it is like a democracy. And so Aslan might be more like a stand-in for Dad and Mom, the authority figure that makes sure everything turns out all right. And if I squint a little at the “thees” and “thous” in the dialogue, knowing that there was nothing more innocent or pure about the Middle Ages, part of me knows that it’s just a story, and my children are taking it less literally than I. My eldest, for instance, loves the fact that Susan is an archer. This reminds her of Artemis, as Lewis surely intended. In fact, I gave her an adult bow for her birthday this spring, and it’s hard to imagine, while watching her take target practice, that she feels anything but empowered.

Gender

But as a father of two daughters and a son, I think about gender quite a lot. I don’t want to raise my son on the masculine tropes that shaped me. I want my daughters to know that every avenue is open to them. These are the explicit messages in our household, but I know that stories can carry subliminal weight. Sometimes it’s what is implied, not what is said outright, that sticks with us. 

And so I am aware that Lewis’s two greatest villains are women. Jadis, the powerful queen who follows Digory and Polly from the world of Charn, where they inadvertently awake her, back to England and eventually into Narnia, is reminiscent of the biblical Jezebel. Aslan’s power is benevolent, but Jadis is, literally, an ice queen. She casts a spell on Narnia so it will always be winter and never Christmas. She flaunts her power and revels in cruelty. She is, naturally, childless. In fact, you might say that Jadis embodies many of the misogynistic tropes about women who resist the conventions of motherhood.

The same is true of the Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair. Also known as the Queen of the Underland, she has the power to change into a great serpent. It is in this form that she kills a Narnian Queen (known only in the book as King Caspian’s wife or Ramandu’s daughter) and enchants the dead queen’s son, Prince Rilian, with a magical bite, absconding with him back to her underworld kingdom. Rilian languishes under her spell for many years, until two English children — Eustace and Polly — and a Narnian Marsh-Wiggle called Puddleglum come to his rescue. The Green Witch is a seductress who uses her beauty and hypnotic spells to keep Rilian under her power. And in the pivotal scene, when he finally resists her charms, she transforms back into a terrifying snake, which allows Rilian to slay her without regret. If Jadis is the Anti-Mother, the Lady of the Green Kirtle is the Femme Fatale. And both character types undoubtedly derive from the biblical Eve, the scapegoat for original sin. 

I realize that my thinking here may be symptomatic of academic “overthinkitis,” that malady which sometimes takes close reading too far. My daughters are confident young women, and they have enough positive models in their life that I don’t think they are internalizing anything harmful about being female from these stories. Yet I’m mindful that the “good” women in The Chronicles of Narnia are not always terribly powerful. Their goodness often derives from conventional attributes, like kindness and nurture, a fact illustrated best by the magical gifts that Susan and Lucy receive from Father Christmas in the first book. Susan’s gift is a hunting horn that, when sounded, can summon help from anywhere in Narnia — even from another world. Lucy’s gift is a cordial that can heal any wound. By contrast, their brother Peter receives a sword and a shield. Need I say more?

Race

I’m sure someone has written a peer-reviewed article about this that I’ve not had time to dig up, but the most troubling subtext in The Chronicles of Narnia assigns moral attributes to human cultures. The geography of Narnia is fuzzy, but it seems to parallel Europe and the Middle East. Narnians and Archenlanders are vaguely Scandinavian (“To Narnia and the North!”), and the most significant Others, the Calormenes, have darker features. If Aslan is a Christian avatar, the Calormene god Tash unmistakably represents Islam. 

There are only two Calormene characters who are fully realized: the impetuous Prince Rabadash and Aravis, a Calormene girl who effectively emigrates to Narnia in The Horse and His Boy. Aravis turns out to be alright because she gives up her air of superiority in the end, but Rabadash’s pride is his downfall. Rabadash is betrothed, or very nearly betrothed, to Queen Susan, who comes to the Calormene capital, Tashbaan, to visit him. When she gets cold feet and flees by sea with her entourage, Rabadash summons an army and races across a desert, hoping he can reach the Narnian capital, Cair Paravel, before she does and therefore thwart her escape. Rabadash is eventually defeated and, for his refusal to repent of his pride, Aslan turns him into a donkey. 

The Calormene leader, The Tisroc, seems to be modeled loosely after an Arabian emperor. Calormen is a place of rich foods, flowery language, and rigid social caste. In one memorable scene The Tisroc, Rabadash, and a senior advisor withdraw to a quiet room to discuss whether or not to wage war on Narnia. The senior advisor grovels before the ruler while Rabadash kicks him in the buttocks. And so beneath the surface of an advanced civilization, seemingly unrivaled in cuisine and art, there bubbles a kind of primal violence. As I read these scenes to my children, I could not help remembering the Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 attack, which was merely a newer version of the prejudice that Europeans felt toward the Arab world during the 1950s and 1960s, near the end of Lewis’s life. And if you think I’m sounding a little too woke, try reading The Last Battle aloud to your own children. Left alone with your own thoughts, you might read right over the scene where the Dwarves repeatedly fling the epithet “Darkies” at the Calormene soldiers. But reading that word out loud in the presence of children is a very different matter. And is it really a coincidence that the most corrupt character in The Last Battle is an ape and that his name is Shift?

I think it’s these overtones, more than monarchy and traditional gender types, that make me wonder if I’ll ever revisit the series with my kids. There is no mistaking Lewis’s suggestion that northern cultures are wholesome and southern peoples are morally bereft. It’s a thoroughly Eurocentric view: that North should point up on a world map and South should point down. This is the view that allowed Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, in 1782, to define “American” as a “European, or the descendant of [a] European…melted into a new race of men.” It is a view that has no place for people of color except as the Other. 

Why do I hesitate to call Lewis’s books racist? I suppose it feels too easy to do so, too close to the Roald Dahl edits (which I vehemently oppose) or the Florida book bans (equally abhorrent). Perhaps it’s my sentimental attachment to the series and the pleasure I’ve felt reading all seven books aloud to my children. I want to say that there is much sweetness and light in The Chronicles of Narnia, that the hints about skin tone and moral character are perceptible only to the trained eye and therefore might be missed entirely by my children. But then I remember Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story,” how she describes being steeped in British literature as a child and internalizing that culture without being explicitly taught it:

“All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to… What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.”

That last sentence brings me back to A Cricket in Times Square. If Asian American fathers aren’t reading that book aloud to their children because of Sai Fong’s character, then why am I? If my children were half Arabian, would I be reading The Chronicles aloud to them? Would I be just as content to explain away Lewis’s subtleties? If any family without a northern European heritage would have to say, of The Chronicles, much what Adichie says about the British books she read as a child, then isn’t that a rather large asterisk to place next to such a beloved children’s series? 

It seems irresponsible in our current climate to *not* resolve such questions definitively either by rushing to Lewis’s defense or by clamoring for his removal from the YA canon. But I find myself somewhere in the moderate middle. I’m glad that my childhood memories of reading C.S. Lewis have merged with my children’s formative memories, that it was possible to turn back the clock and revive my own youth in that way. I now have a bevy of inside jokes with my kids about characters like Reepicheep, the valiant mouse, and Roonwit, the rhyming owl. And I sometimes greet my eldest daughter at breakfast the way Tirian, the last king of Narnia, greets a noble centaur — with “Hail!” rather than “Hello!” 

And yet, and yet…

Joshua Doležal writes

The Recovering Academic

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1. There is, also, the Emperor-over-the-sea, who is presumably Aslan’s father, but he is never seen.