Does Susan go to the "New Narnia"?/Whatever happened to Susan?

Jadis-the-White said:
Well you tell me what he was goning to re-edit, and his fear or the women sex Aslan is a man Jadis is a woman.
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I think the problem we are having is that we cannot comprehend what you are saying. Use punctuation to end and break up sentences. Place one thought in each sentence.
 
Let's get off calling Lewis a misogynist and get back to what was his plans for the CON. Lewis was in contact with his publishers just days before his death about the status of the series. Now he might have felt he was just about to die and just wanted to deal with some estate issues of the series, but most of my research is that Lewis was either looking at an updated edition or an additional book to the series. When Lewis retired from Cambridge in the Summer of 1963 it looks to me that his desire was to continue to write.
 
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"thats why the male sex is stronger"

In what ways do you see evidence that the male sex was stronger in the series? Fighting? This was the fifties when women were not front line soldiers. They were solely in auxiliary roles such as cook, nurse, telephone operator, etc. Lewis was writing based on his time.

MrBob
 
Jadis-the-White said:
What do you see? the Minas, Incia, nostramas, the bible code, or the native indians of your land and dont forget they where there long before you. What do you see or are you the one who tells people to follow a comet?
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Jadis, to answer your question, because I only just saw it, I meant that I had noticed a trend in America where people resort to personal attacks to silence debate on controversial issues. For instance, people will basically respond to any argument about some important social or political matter with a statement that the other person is automatically a bigot or an uneducated person simply because that person happens to hold a certain opinion. I see that dishonest silencing of reasonable debate as a sad decay of the First Amendment to our Constitution.

That being said, I think further discussion of this point (if you wish to debate or clarify it further) could take this thread off topic. If you have any more questions for me, please feel free to PM me and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible with answers, or if you would like to debate some general principles expressed in my posts, you can start another thread or take this part of the conversation over to the Avoidance of Hijacking thread. Thank you.
 
TimmyofOz said:
Let's get off calling Lewis a misogynist and get back to what was his plans for the CON. Lewis was in contact with his publishers just days before his death about the status of the series. Now he might have felt he was just about to die and just wanted to deal with some estate issues of the series, but most of my research is that Lewis was either looking at an updated edition or an additional book to the series. When Lewis retired from Cambridge in the Summer of 1963 it looks to me that his desire was to continue to write.
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Lewis always wrote and in the old fashioned way with a quill and ink, he wrote over 50 thousand letters alone, he was writting since the age of five with his brother the Boxwood stories. Lewis three days before he died he said he was going to re-edit all 7 books, maybe to give more background info on the calormenes, the green lady ect. Lewis wrote the LLW as a one off he did not intend to make it a series but he ended up with one and tried to tie them together. :)
 
SunshineRose said:
Jadis, to answer your question, because I only just saw it, I meant that I had noticed a trend in America where people resort to personal attacks to silence debate on controversial issues. For instance, people will basically respond to any argument about some important social or political matter with a statement that the other person is automatically a bigot or an uneducated person simply because that person happens to hold a certain opinion. I see that dishonest silencing of reasonable debate as a sad decay of the First Amendment to our Constitution.

That being said, I think further discussion of this point (if you wish to debate or clarify it further) could take this thread off topic. If you have any more questions for me, please feel free to PM me and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible with answers, or if you would like to debate some general principles expressed in my posts, you can start another thread or take this part of the conversation over to the Avoidance of Hijacking thread. Thank you.
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This thread was not started by me, it was moved over by PotW and is about evil in Narnia if other issues have crept into it then I was only replying back to them as you say freedom of speach is one of your amendments. :)
 
PrinceOfTheWest said:
Because surely the only alternative to incomprehensible, run-on posts is to write like Shakespeare...
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I have just read McDolands Lilith, it is just a romantic novel but even he suggests that even a fallen angel can be saved for after all god created them which is why I think Aslan did not kill Jadis, evil as she was she was still created by his father.
 
Well his books in the series did seem to feed off each other in that he wrote the first 3 or 4 books even before the first was ever published. He and his friend Roger Lancelyn Green would send there time working on 3 books at a time then finally Lewis would publish one. He wasn't like publish a book, then seeing if the public liked it, then write a new one in responce to public demand. I never heard of anyone redoning their own books, especally in fiction. In non-fiction there may be an updated version. There were slight difference between the English and American versions, like the wolves had different names in LWW. The biggest loose end was Susan, and from his 1957 letter he was wanting to address it. It is not likely that in a new edition of LB he would have told how Susan had died with the rest to the other children and made it to Narnia after all, when the earlier edition had an completely different account. My point is that so often when we talk about the CON canon we act like the series was definitely finish. But if Lewis hadn't have died at just before his 65th birthday, he may have written another book on Susan, which is the subject of this thread. So sharing feelings about Susan and if she could have had a change of heart, especially since she was only about 19 at the time of the train accident does in no way do disservice to Lewis and Narnia Canon.
 
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Jadis-the-White said:
Its a well knowen fact Lewis was afrid of the other sex, and thats why the male role in his books where stronger yes digory ect but who was the female?
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You're betraying the "depth" of your Lewis "scholarship" here, JtW. If you know so many things about Lewis, why are you repeating the completely false "Lewis was a misogynist" lie that was created out of nothing by his enemies? If he was such a misogynist, why did he care for decades for Mrs. Moore, crotchety and demanding mother of his Army comrade Paddy Moore, even when his friends and his brother thought him mad for doing so? If he was such a misogynist, why was the protagonist of his last and greatest novel, Till We Have Faces, the Queen Orual? If he so feared and detested the feminine, why did one critic - one who herself hated Lewis - dogmatically maintain that Faces had to have been written by a woman, because no man could have such a deep and subtle understanding of the feminine psyche?

Might Lewis have had trouble understanding and relating to women because of the circumstances of his upbringing (e.g. losing his mother at a young age, being sent to all-male boarding schools, etc.)? Probably - but then, I had some struggles in my upbringing that affected how I related to my mother and women in general. Did it hinder my ability to love and appreciate women? You'll have to ask my wife and four grown daughters about that. But everyone struggles in life; the issue is whether those struggles define them. The idea that Lewis was defined by those factors to the point that he hated and feared women doesn't square with how he lived or what he wrote. The falsehood that Lewis was a misogynist was created and spread by those who brought their prejudices to his life and work, and selected what they thought would support their lies while rejecting that which didn't - which was most of his life.
 
I was able to find the 1957 letter:

Dear Martin,

The books don't tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan's country in the end--in her own way. I think that whatever she had seen in Narnia she could (if she was the sort that wanted to) persuade herself, as she grew up, that it was "all nonsense".

Congratulations on your good marks. I wish I was good at Maths! Love to all,
Yours,
C.S. Lewis

Letters to Children, Letter of 22 January 1957
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I does seem to say that the question of Susan was open.
 
Jadis-the-White said:
I have just read McDolands Lilith, it is just a romantic novel but even he suggests that even a fallen angel can be saved for after all god created them which is why I think Aslan did not kill Jadis, evil as she was she was still created by his father.
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If you'd read it carefully, you would have picked up on the fact that the dreamers in the house of beds is a metaphor for death. The fact that Lilith elected to join them at the end of the story implies precisely the opposite of your contention: i.e. that she chose death over empty physical immortality.

Lewis - and Christian orthodoxy - maintains that nothing is created ontologically evil. All that is created is good; but beings with free will - i.e. beings that can love - can choose not to love. I do it all the time. That's my dark, rebellious will in action. God didn't create that; I do it myself every time I choose a will other than His. Does that make me "evil"? Yes, it does - but I'm not ontologically evil. I'm created as an imagebearer of God, though damaged by sin.

What you're doing here, JtW, is called "eisegesis". You've got your pet theory in place, and you interpret everything Lewis (or anyone else) wrote in light of that theory. You're bringing your interpretation to the work and viewing the work through that interpretation. Small surprise that no matter where you turn or what you read, you should see what you expect to see. It's like looking at everything through tinted glasses - of course everything looks pink if your glasses are rose. You're certainly free to do that, but don't expect the rest of us to see the same things you do, because we're not wearing the glasses.
 
PoTW said:
What you're doing here, JtW, is called "eisegesis". You've got your pet theory in place, and you interpret everything Lewis (or anyone else) wrote in light of that theory. You're bringing your interpretation to the work and viewing the work through that interpretation. Small surprise that no matter where you turn or what you read, you should see what you expect to see. It's like looking at everything through tinted glasses - of course everything looks pink if your glasses are rose. You're certainly free to do that, but don't expect the rest of us to see the same things you do, because we're not wearing the glasses.
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Yes, exactly. That said, I think we can be done with the discussion of Lewis' supposed fear of women and, really, the discussion of Lilith as well. This is a thread about Susan, as Timmy has pointed out. And thank you, Timmy, for putting that letter in. I had read that before, and I remembered it when I saw it there.
 
TimmyofOz said:
Well his books in the series did seem to feed off each other in that he wrote the first 3 or 4 books even before the first was ever published. He and his friend Roger Lancelyn Green would send there time working on 3 books at a time then finally Lewis would publish one. He wasn't like publish a book, then seeing if the public liked it, then write a new one in responce to public demand. I never heard of anyone redoning their own books, especally in fiction. In non-fiction there may be an updated version. There were slight difference between the English and American versions, like the wolves had different names in LWW. The biggest loose end was Susan, and from his 1957 letter he was wanting to address it. It is not likely that in a new edition of LB he would have told how Susan had died with the rest to the other children and made it to Narnia after all, when the earlier edition had an completely different account. My point is that so often when we talk about the CON canon we act like the series was definitely finish. But if Lewis hadn't have died at just before his 65th birthday, he may have written another book on Susan, which is the subject of this thread. So sharing feelings about Susan and if she could have had a change of heart, especially since she was only about 19 at the time of the train accident does in no way do disservice to Lewis and Narnia Canon.
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Tolkien himself was at a loss to what Lewis did to Susan and even we can't understand why he did it but he was a genius and must have knowen what he was writting. In HHB Lasaraleen was also like susan so Susan was not the only one in Narnia to think like that. Anyway Susan was an adult in Narnia and refused to marry Rabadash it wasn't untill she came back to our world and had to relive her teenage years again she thought about boys, gossip, lipstick ect. In Narnia HHB she did not go in to battle with Edmund and Lucy Peter was of fighting the giants, maybe thats why she was not in the LB as she too lost faith in Narnia. And why did Aslan tell them they where to old for Narnia Peter and Susan although Peter was in LB and not Susan. Just to ask what is Narnia Conon? :)
 
PrinceOfTheWest said:
If you'd read it carefully, you would have picked up on the fact that the dreamers in the house of beds is a metaphor for death. The fact that Lilith elected to join them at the end of the story implies precisely the opposite of your contention: i.e. that she chose death over empty physical immortality.

Lewis - and Christian orthodoxy - maintains that nothing is created ontologically evil. All that is created is good; but beings with free will - i.e. beings that can love - can choose not to love. I do it all the time. That's my dark, rebellious will in action. God didn't create that; I do it myself every time I choose a will other than His. Does that make me "evil"? Yes, it does - but I'm not ontologically evil. I'm created as an imagebearer of God, though damaged by sin.

What you're doing here, JtW, is called "eisegesis". You've got your pet theory in place, and you interpret everything Lewis (or anyone else) wrote in light of that theory. You're bringing your interpretation to the work and viewing the work through that interpretation. Small surprise that no matter where you turn or what you read, you should see what you expect to see. It's like looking at everything through tinted glasses - of course everything looks pink if your glasses are rose. You're certainly free to do that, but don't expect the rest of us to see the same things you do, because we're not wearing the glasses.
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Yes PotW I did read it carefuly and the house of dreamers is death and run by Adam and Eve, the fact is Lilith was not there at the fall and escaped death that was bestoled to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve lost their immortatily by eating the apple of knowlage and as punishment by god.And why would Adam or the raven help her? What I conclude is that they where jelous of her immortaly and robbed her of it. And may I ask what is the rest of us mean to who do you refare to, and I don't wear glasses where as you wear blinkers. :)
 
inkspot said:
Yes, exactly. That said, I think we can be done with the discussion of Lewis' supposed fear of women and, really, the discussion of Lilith as well. This is a thread about Susan, as Timmy has pointed out. And thank you, Timmy, for putting that letter in. I had read that before, and I remembered it when I saw it there.
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Inkspot I put a letter in as well and no one commented on it, it was what Lewis described his 7 books where about, and he was scared of the oppised sex as he thought Eve was evil and the fall of man why do you think he put one word Lilith in his book LWW? as it was suposed to be a one off book with no follow ups why did he put her in, he could have made up any name but he didnt. I have replied to Timmy and if this thread is about Susan ok lets go. Lets talk about Susan. :)
 
Thank you. If you would like, by all means start a thread about George MacDonald; I read his one about Lilith and one other, and frankly I did not understand them.

And sorry, I did not see that you had also posted the letter. I would have commented had I noticed.

JtW said:
Tolkien himself was at a loss to what Lewis did to Susan and even we can't understand why he did it but he was a genius and must have knowen what he was writting.
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I think that all the books that deal with Susan foreshadow that she may turn away from Narnia. When she first arrives there in LWW, she is the one who advises going home as soon as they realize something has happened to Tumnus, and at the end of LWW, she is the one who advises they follow the What Stag no further when they have lost him in Lantern Waste. In PC she is the last to be able to see Aslan on the "faith walk," and admits to Lucy that she did believe her sister could see him but that she, herself, simply did not want to believe it and go the hard way the lion was calling them to go.

It was in CSL's mind all along, I believe, to have her be the one, if there was one, who "fell away" from Narnia. Because of the Christian themes, I believe she represents the sort of person Jesus taught about who receives the Good News with gladness, but doesn't put down deep roots in it. It was not random that she is left out; I think it was an invitation for us to decide what we would do in her shoes. Turn back to Aslan or forge ahead, alone?
 
inkspot said:
Thank you. If you would like, by all means start a thread about George MacDonald; I read his one about Lilith and one other, and frankly I did not understand them.

And sorry, I did not see that you had also posted the letter. I would have commented had I noticed.


I think that all the books that deal with Susan foreshadow that she may turn away from Narnia. When she first arrives there in LWW, she is the one who advises going home as soon as they realize something has happened to Tumnus, and at the end of LWW, she is the one who advises they follow the What Stag no further when they have lost him in Lantern Waste. In PC she is the last to be able to see Aslan on the "faith walk," and admits to Lucy that she did believe her sister could see him but that she, herself, simply did not want to believe it and go the hard way the lion was calling them to go.

It was in CSL's mind all along, I believe, to have her be the one, if there was one, who "fell away" from Narnia. Because of the Christian themes, I believe she represents the sort of person Jesus taught about who receives the Good News with gladness, but doesn't put down deep roots in it. It was not random that she is left out; I think it was an invitation for us to decide what we would do in her shoes. Turn back to Aslan or forge ahead, alone?
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I am sorry but I only read McDolands Lilith as PotW brought it up in an other post and as I said it was just a romantic novel woven around the Adam, Eve and Lilith story. Susan was from our world not Narnia she was a teenager at the time but stayed in it till she was a young woman. When Susan left as a woman by following the White Stag as they all did and where told about it by Mr Tumans do you not see what Lewis was saying White Witch, White Stag follow them and you will be lead astray. :)
 
You makes some good points about the weaknesses of Susan. But Lewis always for the conversion story. Stating with Edmund and Scrubb in the CON, the young Calormen in the LB, Jan and Mark in That Hideous Strength, and his own conversion and that of his wife. I feel that Lewis wouldn't be able to help himself to want to turn Susan from the Dark Side, sorry my pun.

JTW- Narnia Canon is the official story line of the Chronicles of Narnia based on the 7 books of Narnia.
 
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