sharpestrose:

elidyce:

formerqueenregent:

aleccto:

_{“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’ ”}

_{“Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grow-up.”}

_{“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”}

_{“Well, let’s not talk about that now,” said Peter.}

#there is a special kind of rage that fills a girl’s heart the first time she learns about what happened to susan #and that rage stays with a girl #she carries it around #she remembers when she puts on her make up ‘aslan kicked susan out of heaven for this’ #and she looks into her reflect and whispers #’better to reign in hell than serve in heaven motherfucker’ #the only lesson c.s. lewis had to teach us was that men are intimately #threatened by women who own their own sexuality

The one I wanted to throttle was Polly. Lucy is possibly young enough not to really get it yet but Polly was a grown-ass woman and should have known better than to talk that kind of shit about a young woman wanting to stop being a child.

Susan wanted to grow up. She wanted (as mentioned in ‘The Horse And His Boy’) to fall in love and get married. She worried, she protected, she mothered. And she was the only one, the only one out of all of them, who got it right. Aslan told them they had to move on. To grow up. To find him in their own world. 

Susan was Aslan’s big fucking success. The others couldn’t do it. They couldn’t take the lessons they’d learned in Narnia into their own world. They couldn’t make a difference there – no, they all spent their time obsessing with getting back. Narnia was heaven for them and they couldn’t function anywhere else, so Aslan took them back one last time to suspend them forever in the only world they wanted.

Narnia was not Susan’s heaven. Narnia was not what Susan wanted. Eternal youth and innocence was not what Susan wanted. Susan wanted to grow. Susan wanted to grow up. Susan wanted love, and family, and her own world. Susan’s heaven was the one drawn from Earth, from a life lived to the full.

Since I was a kid, I have always thought of ‘The Last Battle’ as a very sad story because it is ultimately a story of failure. All the ‘kings and queens of Narnia’ die and are brought back to the dying magical world because they couldn’t accept what Aslan had told them over and over about growing up and moving on. They weren’t supposed to come back. It was a final act of mercy that Aslan allowed them to do so, since they couldn’t bear to live in their own world.

I think Susan would visit them someday, with her queen’s crown and her blazing red lipstick and the lines of growth and character on her face, and very gently explain to the perpetual children in Narnia that she was thankful that Aslan hadn’t taken her with the others. That she was thankful for her children and grandchildren, for boyfriends and husbands, for a life that was full and happy and productive. That she never needed Narnia to be happy. That she missed them, that she’d mourned for them, but she wouldn’t change her own choice for anything.

The other thing is that they had all already grown up once, in Narnia. In Horse and His Boy, there are references to how men try to be Susan’s lovers — and while this may not be intended in a sexual sense, it’s very much a thing that happens to adults, not children.

Whatever childhood she’d managed to cling to after being sent away from the Blitz and having to be mother to her siblings had ended. Puberty doesn’t go two directions, even if they returned to being children physically when they came back through the wardrobe. 

The fact that she wanted to move and grow again, that her version of femininity wasn’t Lucy’s or Jill’s or Polly’s, was enough to deny her paradise? Really?