some angry thoughts on book!Susan versus movie!Susan

[edenfalling]

(This post has been slightly edited for clarity of phrasing, and to add a couple additional qualifiers in the end notes. I want to be precise about what arguments I am and am not making.)

I don't want to harsh on people's squee, which is why I am writing my own post here on my journal instead of appending these thoughts to anything on Tumblr. But. Because Tumblr is aware that I am into Narnia and related stuff, and also into awesome women (and also because sometimes people I follow reblog things), I see a lot of movie-centric "Susan Pevensie fuck yeah!!!" style posts. Mostly I just shrug and pass them by, because the Narnia films are not my canon, and also not really my thing in general for various and sundry reasons, and people like what they like and that's cool. But tonight I saw a post that contrasted book!Susan to movie!Susan and implicitly declared the former a terrible character in comparison.

And I just.

NO.

Book!Susan is not movie!Susan. This is true. She does not participate in any battles. She does not have a body count. She is called "Gentle" because she genuinely does not like fighting; she doesn't have a killer instinct. She does, according to the assessment of Polly, Jill, and Eustace, become interested in fashion and romance and turn away from Narnia... though notably her siblings (who presumably know her better) don't say anything about that and in fact Peter pulls one of the most blatant and awkward rapid subject changes I've ever read to stop the others from continuing their gossip fest. The reason she doesn't go to Aslan's Country has nothing to do with all that. It's because she ISN'T DEAD. Susan is, in fact, the one and only person who makes it out of the series alive, and Lewis himself said (extracanonically) that there was no reason she couldn't get to Aslan's Country later on, after her actual death. So no, she was not condemned to "have fun in hell" for not wanting to associate with "talking Christian animals." She was the one who listened to Aslan -- about learning to live in her own world, about leaving the Rings alone -- and thereby survived. I think that is pretty damn awesome!

As for movie!Susan... first of all, can we stop with the automatic assumption that women who eagerly join physical battles are somehow better than women who don't? I mean, would you say that men who are pacifists, who prefer to talk things over and be diplomatic, who maybe get squeamish at the sight of blood, are somehow "lesser" characters than he-man barbarian types? (If you would, what the hell is wrong with you???) There are so many more and varied ways to be awesome than just hack-and-slash with archaic weapons. Forcing all female characters to kick physical ass is no better than forcing all female characters to be stay-at-home bleeding hearts. We need every kind of woman to be represented!

Second, yes, movie!Caspian was more respectful toward movie!Susan than Rabadash was to book!Susan. (I assume making people's minds jump to Rabadash was the point of bringing up romance at all.) So what? The mess with Rabadash was plot-relevant to HHB, and was never portrayed as a good or healthy relationship. It was a potential diplomatic alliance that turned out to be a bad idea, not because Susan was stupid but because Rabadash was a really good liar. That sort of thing happens. And even if an implicit comparison to Rabadash wasn't the point, I still say, so what? My take on movie!Susan is that she was just as uninterested in Caspian as she was in that annoying boy at the train station. I think she only kissed him to make him stop looking at her like a kicked puppy -- and she only even did that when she knew she was going to escape to a completely different world and there was no chance he would turn into a creepy stalker. That is precisely as valid an interpretation of that plot thread as any "sunshine and Christmas" perspective, by the way, because they are both completely subjective.

And lastly, you know what? If the movies had continued through the rest of the series, movie!Susan would have turned away from Narnia JUST LIKE her book counterpart. The only reason her story doesn't have the ending you have misread and condemned is because the studio ran out of funding to get there. In summary, you are making a false comparison and your argument is invalid.

...

Okay, I feel better now. I still want to write about a hundred book!Susan fics showcasing her differences from movie!Susan and why those differences make her AMAZING, but it's late and I'm tired, so that will have to wait for tomorrow.

---------------

Four additional things:

1) I would like to clarify that I have nothing against movie!Susan in and of herself. I just cannot stand people holding her up as a reason to tear book!Susan down.

2) I do think the changes in her character from one medium to another are a symptom of a large-scale failure of vision on the part of the filmmakers, but I can and do say the same for the changes in Peter, the Beavers, Reepicheep, Caspian, and even Aslan himself, not to mention all the plot alterations, so it's not as if I am holding her up as an isolated example.

3) Yeah, the ending of TLB sucks, but it sucks for everyone, not just Susan. Everyone else dies! Heavenly reward or no heavenly reward, that is not any kind of happy ending I recognize.

4) I am not saying Lewis is a flawless writer. Far from it! I mean, his fuckups on physical world-building alone... *headdesk* But the filmmakers are nowhere near flawless either, and I personally find their flaws more irritating than Lewis's flaws. Other people's mileage may, obvious, vary -- which is as it should be! -- but choosing to accept the flaws in a work or creator doesn't mean you get to pretend they aren't there.

Comments

[heliopausa]

Agree very much re: gentleness, but Saturday is upon me, and I have no time to write. I'll be back! :D

[edenfalling]

I have never understood the application of the title "Gentle" to movie!Susan. In the books, the Pevensies are not crowned with titles or epithets; they presumably acquire them gradually over the years as they display certain personality traits and/or do great deeds. In the Disney film version of LWW, on the other hand, Aslan explicitly gives those titles during the coronation ceremony, at a point when the kids have done nothing to earn them! (Except Lucy, who has been valiant.) It's weird even for Peter and Edmund, but Susan's title completely contradicts the most memorable things we've seen her do in the film up to that point. Besides all that, I don't understand this desire to have every character be willing to fight "if they need to." For one thing, define "need," and for another, that's boring. Writing a genuinely pacifist character is hard! And that makes it interesting.

Anyway, I await your thoughts when you have the time and energy. :-)

[heliopausa]

Thank you! And one of the points I was going to make was exactly that. It's a big point of difference between the books and the LWW movie. In the book, these are by-names they are called, not titles bestowed by Aslan. Presumably what Aslan says you are, you are, but what you're called by people reflects what people see, the thing about them that sticks in people's minds - which is not the same as what someone is. (See Through the looking-glass and the discussion of the White Knight's Song. :) ) There was probably a great deal more to Charles the Bald or Rollo the Ganger than their nicknames suggest. (Certainly there was to Rollo - I'm a bit hazy on Charles.)

Also - called by whom? Lucy's nickname, we are told, is from "her own people" - leaving it to be supposed that it's others who call Peter, Susan and Edmund their names. (or alternatively, that others outside Narnia had a different name for Lucy? Or else - who are Lucy's "own people"?)

I think, actually, that Lewis put the names in because he wanted to underline how Edmund turned his ordeal into a strength, and because he really liked the character of Lucy - I think he gave the names to Peter and to Susan without much thought. (No, emphatically not a perfect writer.) But there the names are, so there it is - Gentle, canonically, is how she was perceived by those who gave the name. And she is gentle, "tender-hearted" - she is enormously aware of concerned for the feelings of others, and not to damage their sense of self-worth. When Lucy is shouting at Trumpkin "... don't you yet see who we are?..You are stupid” and Edmund also gets angrier and angrier, Susan is quiet and straightforward:
"No help?” said Susan. “But it has worked. And here we are.”

She sees people as as whole people, and is careful of their feelings as well as their physical well-being (again, this shows with Trumpkin - “Oh, Edmund,” said Susan. “Don't keep on at him like that.” (She does let looser with her siblings, who know perfectly well that she values them.) She wants to see the best and think the best (she didn't want to shoot the bear in case there was a chance that he might be a Talking Bear) - I suspect this is part of the Rabadash business.

I've said already that I agree with your point about the value of gentleness. I have wanted, too, to write a story which would show that in action. It's not just softness or diplomacy, it's an enormously vital force. Maybe I was doing Lewis an injustice a minute ago to say he didn't give much thought to the name - he may be (okay, probably was) using it in the slapdash way it's slung around in The Fairy Queene, but he may on the other hand give it the force of Beatrice in the seventh sphere of Paradise, where the "temperate", (gentle?) contemplative life is shown as hugely powerful ("I won't smile at you now," says Beatrice to Dante. "The power would be too much for you, like the sight of Zeus hit Semele.") I'm not meaning contemplative here to rule out action, either; I would love to write a story sorting out those thoughts and showing the importance of the Gentle, but it's still (obviously!) brewing, and probably will need to for a long time yet. :)

And yes, of course re: the remarks passed in Aslan's country by Polly, Eustace and Jill - as you rightly say, they are the ones who know her the least. Further, they don't all agree as to what's the difficulty - Eustace misses her as a person, misses her companionship in the Narnia circle - he wants her to "come and talk". Jill resents being left behind, as being not yet old enough herself for the nylons and the invitations. Polly thinks Susan is wasting time - a typical remark of the aged, whose time is running out, and often think they see opportunities which they think a younger person ought to be taking up. (Wasting time in what? Could be running the local Dramatic Society for all we know; just that Polly thinks it's silly and not grown-up.) I think those differences are important, and note it's only Jill who mentions lipstick.

But also, here's the thing - they might be dead - it doesn't mean they're right! I think it's important to take seriously the repeated call to get closer and closer to reality (Further up and farther in - or have I got it the wrong way round?). They all have a way to go, though maybe some more than others -
"I hope Tash ate the Dwarfs too," said Eustace. "Little swine."
"No, he didn't," said Lucy. "And don't be horrid."
This fits Lewis's theology, too, of course - the thing about still travelling closer to reality/God after death. So -- to my mind, Eustace, Jill and Polly are simply wrong, though (ahem!) Eustace least wrong. Peter makes a plain statement, and clearly is not going to put up with any slinging off at Susan -- and we don't even know exactly what he means by a "friend of Narnia". Myself, I'm taking it to mean that she no longer meets with the group, and that's all.

Well... still not well-sorted thoughts, and heaps more could be said - about the train accident, for one thing - but this has gone on quite long enough as it is. :)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, I doubt Lewis gave much thought to Peter and Susan's titles -- they're the most generic and gender-archetypal, after all, whereas Edmund's refers directly to his time with Jadis and Lucy's is part of her role as heroine and the one who ventures into the unknown. But that doesn't mean readers and fanfic writers can't think about them in greater depth. :-) And Lewis does portray goodness (in the person of Aslan) as a powerful and terrifying force, so presumably gentleness, which is a related concept, should also have potential for strength.

You are right that there's no guarantee Eustace, Jill, and Polly are correct in their assessment of Susan. After all, Tirian is completely confused upon entering the stable, Emeth has no idea what's going on, and the Dwarfs are completely blind to Aslan's country all around them. Clearly death alone doesn't make people all-seeing or all-knowing. I think Lewis probably WAS trying to use Susan as an example of a person who turns away from faith/belief -- her secondhand words about Narnia being a childhood game certainly fit that role -- but he spends the entirety of TLB sending horribly mixed messages that in many cases directly contradict everything he spent the prior six books saying, so Susan is simultaneously the one who turns away from Narnia and Aslan AND the only one who remains faithful and obedient, by creating a life centered on England and staying away from the Rings. It's a huge mess! And I think the best conclusion is that both sides are right on some issues and wrong on others. Susan was wrong to turn away so thoroughly from the things that shaped her as a person, but the others were also wrong to cling so tightly to Narnia and the chance of returning there someday.

Anyway, I look forward to a story from you about Susan, whenever you get your thoughts sorted out.

[branchandroot]

(If you would, what the hell is wrong with you???)

Alas, those probably /are/ the people who think that, deep down. And there is not world enough and time to name all the things that are wrong with that. *sighs* Humans, eh?

[edenfalling]

The standard western model of masculinity has such a lot of problems, and trying to hold women to that model doesn't really help anything. I mean, holding women to the standard model of femininity doesn't help either, but tossing one terrible model aside just to seize on the other terrible model is not going to get you very far in the long run. :-(

It's weird how deeply embedded those ideas get, though, even when you're consciously aware that they're toxic. Like, I have an unfinished original fic (Ashes) I was writing for NaNo a few years ago, and posting as I went. And I first had the idea for that story almost twenty years ago, but it took me forever to figure out how to approach it because I had no idea how to write a main male character who is genuinely kind, gentle, and as pacifistic as his culture would permit. There was a long period of failed outlines where I kept trying to make him more "genre-appropriate," which at one point degenerated into having him be an attempted rapist, for fuck's sake. *headdesk* Fortunately I realized I was going in the wrong direction, but it still bugs me that for a while I thought I had to.

[rthstewart]

I really feel that the whole idea that a "strong female character" must, necessarily be physically strong, is just so missing the point of female characterization. There have been some memes and gif sets that have tried to capture that. A part of it is surely that if you only have one female character in the whole thing (whatever the thing is) she ends up having to bear the strength/weight of every expectation. Sure I love my kick ass females, but I love other characters who never shoot a thing, either. There was a bit of good analysis running around of the otherwise sub par Iron Man 2 how both Pepper Potts and Natasha demonstrate different skill sets with both running into sexism and both of them taking action of very different sorts.

The characterization of Susan is can be so problematic. The Peggy Susan thing I just did showed her being pretty cavalier about killing but in the original Rat and Sword, when she does kill someone it's a BIG emotional thing, taken to preserve a far greater good. Susan's strengths are not in taking life but in seeking to avoid it and anyone who doesn't understand that that's a STRENGTH is kinda missing the point as you say and really, wuh?

[edenfalling]

Yeah, the whole thing where you get only one woman or girl in a story, and so she has to be EVERY woman or girl, is one of the main roots of the problem. I actually think that's one thing Lewis did well with the Pevensies -- Susan and Lucy, just by existing centrally in the same narrative, give each other permission to NOT be all things to all people. Susan is the gracious lady of the manor, Lucy is the valiant warrior queen, and that's okay!

I wish very much that Marvel would make a film that centers on a female character, but they have been doing very well by their supporting female characters. I think that treating each individual movie as part of a greater saga means that there are enough female characters in the MCU as a whole that they can be individuated and quirky instead of being Generic Worried Girlfried or whatever. It would be better with more female characters in each movie, but the perfect is the enemy of the good and Marvel have made some pretty good first steps.

I wonder sometimes if part of the problem is writers projecting ourselves and our own desires onto Susan -- thinking of what we would do in her situation. This is not helped by Lewis's use of gender archetypes as a characterization shorthand, since I think a lot of people read those as something to rescue Susan from, rather than read them as an accurate report of character traits she has. Which is not to say she can't also have other traits -- people are complicated! -- but that I think denying the traits we are explicitly told and shown in canon is... hmmm... problematic. Of course movie canon is different -- that version of Susan IS a fighter; it's clearly and explicitly shown on screen -- but I think people often project movie!Susan back into book canon, consciously or not, don't realize the depth of the mismatch, and thus don't take steps to adequately smooth over the cracks.

For what it's worth, I read your Avengers crossover Susan as a bit of a mix of book!Susan and movie!Susan, and also as deeply affected by living in a war zone for a couple years. That will harden most people.

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

The reason she doesn't go to Aslan's Country has nothing to do with all that. It's because she ISN'T DEAD. Susan is, in fact, the one and only person who makes it out of the series alive, and Lewis himself said (extracanonically) that there was no reason she couldn't get to Aslan's Country later on, after her actual death. So no, she was not condemned to "have fun in hell" for not wanting to associate with "talking Christian animals." She was the one who listened to Aslan -- about learning to live in her own world, about leaving the Rings alone -- and thereby survived.

YES. The best part about Susan's story arc... she stays, and likely to make a difference because she lives.

(To be fair, I don't think the post was calling Susan a terrible character, so much as criticizing how Lewis ended up presenting her - that's what the "is a great archer, but is present in none of the battles" seems like to me - vs. the film presentation, i.e. "feminine but not revealing clothing".)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, as I was saying to Heliopause over on DW, I think Lewis probably meant to use Susan as an example of the person who loses faith/turns away -- that's what the secondhand reports of her treating Narnia as an imaginary children's game are about -- but in practice, if you take into account the things Aslan says in all six previous books, Susan is also and simultaneously the only one who keeps faith, by obeying the instructions to "come close to [her] own world" and not use the Rings. Lewis was not big on continuity, and in this case his inconsistency fatally undermines any attempt to condemn Susan's actions.

I think you are right that the poster meant to attack Lewis rather than book!Susan, but the basic premises of their argument are flawed. Even aside from the way that the poster attacks the books for an ending that is only absent from the films because the films ran out of funding to reach that point, there is nothing wrong with being an archer but staying out of battles! To make an analogy, when I was a kid, I was a really good swimmer. I passed all my local YMCA's classes and got to the point where they said I had to be on the swim team if I wanted to keep swimming. And I had NO interest in competitive sports at that time -- racing would have taken all the joy out of swimming for me. Just being a good swimmer didn't mean I needed to race, or that I was a bad person/swimmer for not wanting to join the swim team. Similarly, one can enjoy archery and be good at it without ever wanting to use that skill to hurt people, or without being suited for the particular pressures of a battle.

In my case, I was able to become an assistant teacher instead of joining the swim team. In Susan's case, she apparently shoots for pleasure -- and occasionally goes hunting -- but stays out of battles. These are not wrong or weak choices, simply ones that don't fit a traditional (heavily "masculine") narrative of competition and power. And honestly, I really like that about book!Susan... particularly because Lucy's presence in the narrative shows that women can be warriors, thus making Susan's choice a CHOICE rather than something she was forced into by gender stereotypes.

Obviously people's mileage varies, and that's okay! But I like having many and varied female characters, including ones who don't have a body count and never intend to acquire one. *wry*

[rosaxx50.livejournal.com]

Oh, I definitely agree with you that it's fine that Susan didn't like to battle (and therefore wasn't part of the battle). I just meant that I thought the post had different intentions than attacking Susan herself.

[edenfalling]

You are right that the poster's intended argument seems to be that Lewis is a bad writer, in the sense of "wrote harmful things" rather than "is unskilled." The problem is that the poster's listed points boil down to, "I like female characters who get into physical fights and kill stuff! People shouldn't write female characters who stay out of battles," using Susan as the go-to example, thus implying that book!Susan is inferior to her movie counterpart. And that's stupid. Obviously people shouldn't ONLY write female characters who stay out of battles, but the reverse is equally true... and in fact Lewis did write female characters who fight in battles. Susan simply isn't one of them, and shouldn't need to be.

I disregard the points about Susan's subplot in TLB because the poster misinterpreted it -- the reason Susan doesn't get back to Narnia is because NONE of the Pevensies are allowed back to Narnia; the reason she doesn't go to Aslan's country is because she doesn't die -- and because, as previously stated, the only reason the movies didn't also do that plot is that they ran out of funding to get there, thus making the comparison inherently flawed.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

...but in practice, if you take into account the things Aslan says in all six previous books, Susan is also and simultaneously the only one who keeps faith, by obeying the instructions to "come close to [her] own world" and not use the Rings.

Huh. Hadn't looked at it that way.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

I like to think she honoured diplomacy and reckoned the best fight was one where the fight doesn't actually happen, everybody involved gets what they need, and there's no blood watering the fields. (War is wasteful.)

[edenfalling]

That is true both from a practical standpoint -- wars are hideously wasteful of lives, money, time, land, etc. -- and from the moral/emotional standpoint of a person who just flat-out dislikes fighting and hurting people. :-)

[edenfalling]

I'm fairly sure that isn't the reading Lewis meant, but it's undeniably there in the text he wrote. Occasionally his utter failure at maintaining inter-book continuity and consistency of style/theme can be a good thing. *wry*