I was thinking this morning about a lot of things, but the thing that my brain fixed on was how there are certain things that I was exposed to as a child that are still in my life today as a taller bean (growing up is optional, growing older isn’t) and how over the course of this span of years, how my perception of the work and the author has changed or grown. It really got me thinking about the books that made me, or rather, the books that had and have the most influence on me.
I have to start with the Chronicles of Narnia because those were some of the earliest books I read and they’ve had a lasting effect on my life. I blew through this series for the first time at the tender age of four. Since then, no one has ever been able to keep me from checking pretty much every single wardrobe I have ever come across for a passage to Narnia. Even still as a grown bean, I can’t help the impulse to check.
My parents had to pry me out of our linen closet over and over, because I’d hide in there and read with my flashlight, because it was quiet and safe and maybe just maybe I’d fall through to a different place to go have so many grand adventures. I was a weird, too smart, undiagnosed ASD girl in the eighties-nineties and books were so much safer than the real world.
As much as I dearly love some of the characters and the storylines, there’s one part that I cannot understand and as I grew older, could not forgive. You might have heard of it. It’s generally known as The Problem of Susan.
Susan who was a Queen and grew up to be a celebrated beauty and diplomat, in addition to her fabulous skils as a markswoman and archer. Susan who was known as the Gentle, who always tried her best and tried to be that good example for the younger siblings, who tried to be grown up and motherly for her siblings when they weren’t with their parents. Susan who was transformed in Narnia, along with her siblings.
Susan, who had this life she’d worked for and then it was all taken away from her, and she was back in the body of who she’d been before this all had begun. Her memories remained untouched. The sheer cruelty of that act is breathtaking.
Then at the end of Prince Caspian, where they’ve been allowed another chance at their old home (thousands of years after the time they’d left it the first time) and she is told that she can never come back and the return is the same as it was before. Memories perfectly preserved.
Then we hear in the last book that she’s no longer a friend of Narnia, that she’s given it all up for nylons and lipsticks and silly girlish things.
And honestly, can you blame her? Leaving and then coming back, not once but twice had to have been horrifyingly traumatizing. Her coping mechanism was to throw herself into what was required for girls/women of the time and pretend that it had all been a make-believe game. It wasn’t malicious, it was a survival tactic.
There’s some wonderful work done exploring the “Problem of Susan” from both commercial and fanfiction authors. It’s not hard to find if you’re looking for it.
However, the Problem of Susan had a profound impact on me as I grew up. I had internalized the concept that “lipsticks and nylons” were bad and that wasn’t something to even bother with. Not if you wanted to remain friends with Narnia. And oh how I wanted to keep on the good side there, I wanted to tumble through to a different place where I might actually figure out the kind of good I could do.
I hated the fact that I was a girl and that made me almost useless here. In Narnia, I could fight or save people or be clever and witty and defuse dangerous situations. In Narnia, I knew I would have a purpose and that I’d be good at whatever that was. There was no such certainty in the real world. I was too quiet or too bossy or too inconveniently smart for my age.
It took me a long time to figure out that all of that was complete and utter crap. That I could have lipsticks and nylons and still have my fantasy worlds. That I could have a purpose and that I wasn’t useless. That the Problem with Susan wasn’t with the character as much as it was with the author himself.
So that’s the first out of the series of the books that made me who I am today. Let me know what you think in the comments or tell me about some of the books that made you.