Susan's Fate

gair

gair

New member
OK, I have always felt very strongly about Susan's fate ie felt it was unfair as there was very little justification for it and also feel that she is painted as a bimbo when she isn't. So this is addressing this. Also i thought that her and caspian in the movie were really cute (hopeless romantic at heart lol) and so that is in, as reasons for narnia abandonment.
I don;t think I have ever commented on anyone else's story, but if people would like to comment on mine that would make me happy. Plus suggestions for improvements. They would be very welcome.
Oh and I am following the book timescale (approximately) rather than the film. So susan is 14 at the start rather than 16 -18.

Susan is obsessed with lipstick and nylons and invitations because she is growing up. She is trying to distance herself from her quaint, wholesome and self absorbed family. She is trying to become herself. To spread her wings. And one way she sees as a way out is to be like the other girls. And to be obsessed with lipstick and nylons and invitations.

Being obsessed with lipstick and nylons and invitations is a sure-fire way of being ostracised by her siblings. They, despite evidence to the contrary, perceive her as shallow and empty headed. They do not see the guise, the glamour, the mask. Her siblings still think of themselves as the kings and queen of Narnia.

Peter sees himself as noble and just. Susan regards him as arrogant and interfering. He is proud, and persistently attempts to stand up for people who are quite capable of defending themselves. Lucy –Lucy is difficult to define. Sometimes Susan feels that her lack of pretension and vanity is itself pretentious and vain. People like Lucy. People like her smile and her kindness and her innocence. Occasionally Susan would like to think that the innocence is calculated. Lucy is nearly seventeen, will always be nearly seventeen, and is still a little girl. Susan has grown up. Little girl Lucy disturbs Susan, despite others finding it charming. Peter loves Lucy and defends her passionately. She lets him. Nowadays Susan argues fiercely with Peter and resents his attempts at chivalry. Susan probably gets on best with Edmund. They are close, or at least they used to be. Nowadays she is not so sure. He was better after their first trip to Narnia. Happier. Less spiteful. The razor intelligence used for cutting remarks became witty. Edmund was kind after their second trip. He was respectful of her heartbreak and kind of understood her having to play dumb and wet to satisfy Peter’s ego. Peter was patronising and Lucy was all lisping naivety. Now Edmund is earnest.

Susan remembers when just Lucy and Edmund went to Narnia along with cousin Eustace. Previously a dreadful child he seemed to be becoming an insufferable prig. Rather like Peter in fact, She remembers that summer, when she was fourteen and went to America with her parents. She remembers truly believing back then. Was she still upset about Caspian? Perhaps part of her, a tiny little part she never listens to, never knows she has, blames him for her lack of interest in this world’s men. They cannot compare. She went to America while Peter was being coached for some exam by Professor Kirke. But she still had faith then.

The adults thought she was the pretty one, and very grown up for her age, though no good at her school work. When she heard them saying this she wanted to grind her teeth and scream. She was grown up for her age because she had to be. She had had to be a little mother. She was grown up for her age because she had been sent off to some country house, years and years ago when she was only twelve. And all she had wanted to do was cry but she had to look after the others, because she was a girl and nearly the eldest. They might have resented it, she might have loathed it, her parents might have expected it, and she still had to do it. She was grown up for her age because she had grown up, in that old country house. She could hide being unhappy, she could practice the thousand and one lies that adults use to make life easier every day and that children learn, she could smile and nod and be meek and gracious. She, she later realizes, had learnt to be a doormat. She had accepted the role society had allocated her. She had accepted that she should be meek and docile and domestic and a nagging wife figure she realises shortly after she had emancipated herself.
She was no good at her school work because she had no reason to be. Her path was mapped out. She would marry a good, respectable man like her father, and become a good housewife, like her mother. Now she thinks and knows she won’t ever be able to find a man to love. Or be able or willing to run a home come to that. She was no good at her schoolwork because she couldn’t be. Her heart was broken. It’s hard to concentrate when your heart is a lump in your throat and a weight in your chest and there is a loss so deep you are being crushed and you feel you could cry so much you might die. It is hard to do well at your school work when whenever you close your eyes you see someone who may as well be dead. It’s hard to be good at your school work when you are grieving and there is no one who could possibly understand.

So she went off with her parents. As her mother said, she “would get far more out of a trip to America than the youngsters”. And boy did she get a lot out of it. Fourteen years old, clutching a hidden broken heart, seeing a whole new, real world. New York was virtually untouched by wartime austerity. There was no war spirit, no drab fear. The people she met were happy and bohemian. They taught her. She doesn’t have to be a wet blanket. She can be the Susan she preferred to be, with her bow, wild hair streaming and eyes gleaming, dancing in the moonlight. Obviously she can’t have a bow, but she learns that girls are allowed to be clever, are allowed to have ideas, are allowed to run around. A far cry from the doctrine of her school for young ladies. Her heart will heal but to do so she covers up Narnia. Is it better to have lost?

When she gets home she hears Lucy and Edmund talking about their trip to Narnia and their voyage on the Dawn Treader. She listens with interest. It’s been three years in Narnia. She imagines Caspian as sixteen. She pictures his face, the same clever dark eyes staring into hers so that she feels she is falling, in a face that is slightly more angular, perhaps with a wisp of a beard. She remembers his hands, long fingered and gentle despite their calluses. She can almost taste his lips when Lucy says , piping naivety and joy “I think he is going to marry Ramandu’s daughter”. Something snaps shut inside her. She bites her lip hard “What wonderful imaginations you and Edmund have. It must have been truly dreadful at Aunt Alberta’s for you to carry on that story we made up.” And she stalks out of the room.

.
 
grr it wouldn;t let me fit the whole thing in one post

When she gets to her room she falls onto the bed and wails. Her breath rasps as she lies there, chest heaving with dry, choking sobs until she can breathe again. She no longer cares. She is logical. She rationalises. Caspian has had three years, assuming he felt the same way of course. Maybe he doesn’t. He may not love this daughter of Ramandu, but he is king. He has to marry and produce an heir. It is the right thing to do. But to swallow this bitter pill there has to be a sacrifice. And she sacrifices Narnia. She manages to convince herself, or nearly manages to convince herself that it was a game. A game that four unhappy, lonely children played in an isolated house when they were evacuated. A place where they could hope and dream and everything was clear cut and simple.

The others are convinced that she firmly believes Narnia was a silly game and that she has rejected it completely. It makes her sad sometimes, to think that they were so easily duped. Not necessarily by her spurning of Narnia, afterall, she convinced herself, but that they were taken in by her obessession with lipstick and nylons and invitations. Sometimes trivia allows an escape.

After going to America, after hearing about Caspian, after sealing off Narnia Susan looks around with new eyes. She sees herself. She is beautiful. Tall, slim and dark haired like Edmund but with clear grey blue eyes she is turning heads already and she is only fourteen.. She realises she is intelligent and vows to apply herself. She realises that she does not have to support her siblings in a maternal way. She can criticise, be criticised and she is strong.

She is strong enough to recreate herself. She looks around and sees other girls. They like lipstick and nylons and invitations to parties. She thinks about it, and realises she quite likes them too. It can be fun to be a girl. Her brothers and sister watch as she appears to transform into a giggling airhead.

But in the classroom she is anything but. She discovers just how clever she really is, and for the first time in years applies herself. What she learnt in Narnia so long ago slips back, disguised. Her political prowess lends itself to debate and argument. And now her memory is not full of the old dream and its associated hopes and disappointments she can fill her mind with facts and figures. She rediscovers her aptitude for mathematics. She vaguely remembers playing dumb so as not to shame Peter. She must have played dumb so often she believed it.

While her siblings reminisce Susan is a chameleon. Switching from a twittering girl obsessed with lipstick and nylons and invitations to motivated intellectual is fun. Sometimes there is a part of her that feels sad that they regard her departure from their Narnia idyll as betrayal, that they see her as a despicable creature. Peter seems to regard her as a fallen woman. “Whore” he hisses at her after she returns home during the holidays from a late night tea with powdered milk drinking session, discussing Voltaire in the dark. She is not even certain he knows what the word means; he, like Lucy seems never to have grown up. An innocent boy still, always young, on the cusp of adulthood.

In 1945,when the battle was lost and won, Peter goes to Cambridge. He is studying politics. Susan dryly notes that if he ever gained a position of power he would make Mussolini look liberal. This is met with extreme disproval, although Edmund later confides that he knows what she means. It is all too easy to imagine Peter carving out a golden idyll with a sword. There is something trembling off the tip of Susan’s tongue about a High King Peter but before she can fully form the thought a scornful laugh bursts out, “He fancies himself as king still. Silly little boy” She claps her hand to her mouth and runs from the room, but not before she has seen Edmund’s eyes glitter with something like dislike. It is hurt.

That Christmas Susan announces, over the approximation of a Christmas pudding that rationing has permitted, that she has a scholarship to Homerton to study maths. She says it calmly and laughs when Peter splutters and Lucy says in a bewildered voice “But you are pretty, not clever. How can you be pretty and clever?”. She catches Edmund’s eye and they share a grin until they remember that she is a traitor.

Susan has a wonderful time at Cambridge. The cool precision and logic of the numbers please her, despite further alienating her fantasising siblings. At Cambridge she can openly learn, and she can argue until dawn about religion and sexism and politics. One day in the bizarrely named May week, at the height of summer, when there are people basking on the Backs in the glorious June sun, she meets Polly Plummer. She gets on well with the old bluestocking, and after the talk on women’s rights they sit and talk books, and bemoan a woman’s literary treatment; tomboy or mother, or vain and foolish. They are chatting away when Susan’s friend Jonathan: handsome, camp, incorrigible and clever, calls “Hey Sue”. Susan looks up. “Yes you, Susan Pevensie. Love the hat by the way. You said you were coming to the ball with me. Get ready woman.” Susan makes her apologies, and the old lady smiles indulgently at youth having so much fun and vigour. The she smiles and whispers “Aslan is on the move”. Susan just looks at her. The smile switches off, and Polly Plummer walks away, leaving Susan alone on the crowded Christ’s Pieces.

But Susan has a wonderful time at Cambridge. She can be giggly and girly to her heart’s desire, and with her friends mocks and enjoys the obsession with lipstick and nylons and invitations. Only Edmund spots her tongue in cheek behaviour. Lucy sees her as an airhead, she is still bemused as to how she got into Cambridge, but what hurts her most is Susan’s rejection of Narnia. She fears for her immortal soul. Peter continues in his self righteous way. He too fears for her immortal soul, and attempts to convert her, to bring her back to the fold. However, he is so patronising it further alienates her.

“I say old thing” he says one Wednesday afternoon. He has just come out of church. Susan has not gone willingly to church since she was fourteen her reluctance further convincing her family of her frippery and foolishness, and dozes through the obligatory Sunday service. “I say old thing” he says. “You are being most awfully silly. You must see how Narnia is real. You must remember how fabulous it was to be queen, ruling from Cair Paravel along with Edmund, Lu and I. And we went back. Don’t you remember Prince Caspian? And Aslan of course. He is the most important thing there. It is most frightfully important for you to believe”. Susan laughs and shakes back her shining black curls. “Fancy you still remembering those games we played when we were evacuated. The talking lion and all of us kings and queens so as to be fair. But it was a game. A silly game long ago”. But as she says this Caspian flashes into her mind so sharply she staggers. She breathes in, regaining her composure. “Now if you don’t mind Peter, I have to buy some gin. I have a party tonight.” Something in her makes her add “and some nylons. Mine are laddered to bits” She walks off. As she passes the side of the church the lion in the stain glass window is getting closer and closer to her and there is a roaring like a million million people crying out. As the lion reaches her everything goes blessedly back and she passes out. She later realises that was the last time she saw Peter alive.

The day of the train crash – 7th October 1949 – was normal until lunchtime. Then someone came to find her and say could she come to the chaplain’s office. She went and there was a policeman looking apologetic. A railway accident he said. Her family he said. Could she identify them? She went with him. They went to a sunny green bank. All the colours were so bright. It smelt of rust in the rain and salt, and there were flies. The bodies had been taken out of the wreckage of the two trains. One going into London, one going out of London, derailing as it came into the station far too quickly. She took this in, staring at her family lying on the by the track. She didn’t cry. Her mother, her father, her older brother and her little sister were lying there, like they were asleep. Edmund had been decapitated by a piece of metal. She thought she saw it in the embankment. She touched it. She didn’t cry. A youngish man in a dog-collar offered his condolences and handed her a pamphlet. She took it, and clutched it in the car all the way back to London. She got on the train back to Cambridge and opened it. She began to read. It was strangely familiar, resonating even without her dimly remembered catechism. She began to scream. “You sick b*st*rd” she yelled to sharp looks “You sick sick b*st*rd” And she began to cry. Eight years too late Susan Pevensie sat and cried for her broken heart
 
Think how awful it would have been if Peter or Edmund had gone in for lipstick and nylons.... :p
 
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