Lion, Witch & Wardrobe.

[lovecraft68]

Er... not a Narnia book, and I doubt many of those writing their own take on Narnia would've read that one first, so not tremendously relevant to how people might react to Narnia. Books and series have to stand on their own merits, not on the merits of something the author wrote later for a different audience.



Lewis was a human being, and as such his work had failings. It's just as legitimate to discuss those failings as it is to discuss the scientific limitations of Aristotle or Newton, and modern authors have just as much right to reinterpret Narnia through their own lens as Lewis had to reinterpret Greek and Roman myths through his didactic-Christian lens.



Female suffrage arrived in New Zealand and South Australia before Lewis was even born, and it reached the UK when he was twenty. Nancy Wake and her ilk were killing German soldiers with their bare hands years before Lewis wrote that "battles are ugly when girls fight". So I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea that Lewis was too early to be aware of feminist ideas.

Indeed, the beginning of "The Silver Chair" makes it pretty clear that it wasn't that Lewis was unaware of such modern ideas as allowing a woman to run a school, but rather that he'd encountered them and didn't approve.



Of course you're entirely at liberty to dislike Gaiman's work, his interpretations of Lewis, or indeed his haircut, but it seems a bit absurd to direct the "can't read children's stories" accusation at a man who's written a dozen successful children's stories and won two of the biggest awards in children's lit.

Perhaps consider the possibility that he did read them, and just didn't take the same view of them that you did. It does happen.

Your responses are well thought out, but you're quoting someone who cringes at the very thought of female equality and will always have a skewed view on anything where females are anything other than slaves and targets for all manner of abuse.

When we-and most of us do it- review or form opinions on books we can't help some of our personal ideologies coming through and seeing it that way without looking at the reality

HP Lovecraft in these days of ludicrous PC lynch mobs(I am amazed the term black ice has not been branded racism yet) is reviled as a racist. Was his writing racist? Yes.

But he grew up in an era where many people were. Despite what the white knights of PC liberty may like to think if they were raised in a time where everyone was racist(as in owned slaves etc) or sexist or homophobic then guess what? You will be too.

So one has to look at the time and location the author was writing to try to interpret what they really had in their heads

As for Gaiman...I would love to be such an awful writer as him.

 

[Bramblethorn]

But he grew up in an era where many people were. Despite what the white knights of PC liberty may like to think if they were raised in a time where everyone was racist(as in owned slaves etc) or sexist or homophobic then guess what? You will be too.

I make allowances for that, it's certainly harder to go against those things when society considers them normal, but there've always been people like John Brown who saw right from wrong and bucked the trend. Lewis in particular positioned himself as a moralist and social critic, so I hold him to a higher standard.

And when I compare the way Lewis writes about women with some of his contemporaries like John Wyndham, I feel CSL could've done a lot better.

As for Gaiman...I would love to be such an awful writer as him.

I'd cry all the way to the bank