wingedbeast

Setting: The BHB Orchard, later on in the picnic.

Peter sits, silent and stern, with arms crossed.

Susan: Edmund, if you would take a walk with me. I'm quite sure that Cain and Peter haven't exhausted their conversation.

Peter remains silent.

Cain: Oh, I can explain the biological history of modern domesticated plants. For instance, do you know that cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower share a common ancestor?

Peter narrows his eyes and ignores Cain, but talks to Edmund: Don't trust her. With the kind of company she keeps, these days, she's probably working with the White Witch.

Susan: Certainly, but she's a force of winter. I never bring her around here, she'd ruin the crops and I refuse to live in a world without Officer DeVille's apple pies.

Susan: Besides, Edmund, you're a Pevensie. Taking unnecessary, easily seen and completely useless risks to further the plot is just part of what we do.

Cain: I have pictures, in this book, of what corn looked like just a scant 100,000 years ago.

Edmund looks at Cain, looks at Peter's increasing anger.: Let's take that walk.

Susan and Edmund walk a ways away from the table, but remain in the same row between trees so as to stay in sight.

Edmund: I think I know what you want to talk about. Lucy said you mentioned it. King Arthur mentioned it. It seems a lot of anger that you must have over just one line.

Susan: I admit that, as I first began to consider the line, I was angry about it, as well as fearful. Love that could be so easily taken away cannot have been there in the first place.

Edmund: It was a figure of speech, a joke. I admit that it was a bad joke, perhaps in ill taste. But, I only said the line after you had verified that the condition had not been made, when it was safe to be sure that I did not love you any less.

Susan: Perhaps, but as a figure of speech or even a joke, there was nothing to establish that as a joke I should enjoy or a figure of speech I should recognize. So, I have a different interpretation to consider, one that I think holds truer.

Edmund: This is where I get to see what you do? You cast villains as heroes and heroes as villains? Mock goodness to call it evil?

Susan: Some concepts of goodness are due mockery. Some heroes and villains are cast in wrong light. And, sometimes... well...

Susan: In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, before Eustace was turned into a dragon, why weren't you more sympathetic to him?

Edmund: You mean while Eustace was being a prat and a bully? While he mocked Narnia?

Susan: Oh, sure, let's go right to the start of the book, his mockery of Narnia came after having his home invaded by cousins who, nigh immediately, made him an other that is not allowed into their play.

Edmund: Narnia wasn't play, it was a real world that we knew.

Susan: Not that Eustace, a nine year old talking to who he thought were other children, could tell.

Edmund: He was a nasty bully of a-

Susan: I'm sorry, but that narrator was also quite cruel of you, while you were ensorcelled by magic, denied your free will. I cannot rely upon that narrator to inform us of traits. What is shown of Eustace is a boy, raised in a different method than the author personally liked, with an interest in forms of non-fiction. And, one that I should note hadn't lived an entire lifetime enough to know that being an adult requires more than writing someone off as a nasty bully.

Edmund: How do you know we didn't make more of an effort to include him?

Susan: Show, don't tell, and certainly don't tell and expect people to guess the opposite, dear Edmund. Aside from Authorial Fiat and Authorial Error of Omission, why didn't you, who had the most reason to befriend Eustace, take the effort, in text, to do so?

Edmund: Am I obligated to be the redeemer for everybody, just because I was once redeemed?

Susan: Perhaps not. But, you are the one who was redeemed, the one who did bad and was not bad, the one who should, most, see that a few wrong things done are not done for just the sake of evil. Of the four of us, you should have been the one most ready to help Eustace, rather than bully him for being ill prepared for a sudden yanking into a realm he couldn't possibly have prepared for.

Edmund: You can make anything look bad, can't you?

Susan: All it takes is looking.

Edmund: Okay, why is it that you think that I wasn't kinder or more sympathetic to Eustace?

Susan: For the same reason that you felt not the slightest ounce of temptation to be kind or sympathetic to Radabash.

Edmund perks a brow: Really? Radabash?

Susan: Let's leave aside the fact that the role of the innocent that's likely to have a head turned by athletics is more likely for Lucy or that the role of the unbendingly "good" *uses air quotes* and, let's face it, arrogant man to save the lost sister is better given to Peter. By whatever authorial failing the page becomes what it is, it is what it is.

Susan: You didn't feel even the slightest desire to soften the blow, disentangle from the situation without insult, or even to discuss Aslan with the man.

Edmund: He was the villain.

Susan: You weren't reading the story, you were in it. Nobody gets to know that someone is the bad guy or that someone is irredeemable. But, anybody can be fearful of being thought too sympathetic.

Edmund: That's what you think the line was about? Me being fearful? Of what?

Susan: C.S. Lewis's divine command morality.

Susan: Perhaps not fear, but joyful obedience. Either way, this same form of divine command morality is why some argue that the laws of Ancient Israel, that codified slavery, including the allowance of some practices that would be rightfully identified as rape today, represent perfect morality.

Susan: They'll use such arguments as how this practice doesn't have to be rape, treating the entire thing in the pure abstract so as to ignore the actual lived realities of actual people that lived, all so that this biblical-literalism-god can be good. Whether for honest love of God or fear of Hell, they do it, they treat people as abstract things that don't have to be loved as yourself, all so that God can be good.

Susan: I think you're afraid, Edmund. I think you don't fit in as well as you pretend. I think you can't fit in, because the restrictions of C.S. Lewis's particular idealism don't allow for one to have any real sympathy for the devil, or others who don't fit in. So, you find yourself not freed, but confined, not in the light, but in the darkness, as though that Wardrobe didn't open up into a wide open world, but was just a closet.

Edmund: Wait? Are you suggesting I am a homosexual?

Susan: No. You could be. You could be not. It has a convenient language to use. But, I do think that you don't fit into Lewis's ideals, not like Peter and Lucy do. I certainly didn't. And, when you don't fit in, the options are to either be denied as unfit, for daring to live with practices and priorities of which Lewis, or society, or a particularly conservative and spiteful version of God does not approve or to constantly be on guard against letting people see how ill you fit.

Edmund: The text doesn't necessitate any truth to that. But, for the sake of argument, if true, what would you even hope to achieve?

Susan: In the abstract, I wish for a more complex and fuller morality, one that feels for more people... or just a touch less fear and hate in the world. In the specific...

Susan puts a hand to Edmund's cheek: A bit of freedom and joy for my suffering brother.