The Pervert, the Whip, and The Chronicles of Narnia
By Trevor Thompson, Dec 14, 2005
The media's focus on the controversy surrounding C.S. Lewis's personal life and religious beliefs is threatening to transform a wonderful fairy tale into something dark and distasteful.
 It's Saturday night, opening weekend for The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I'm standing in a long line waiting to get into the theater. There are kids everywhere, swarming around the lobby, throwing popcorn, unhooking the velvet ropes that keep us corralled like animals. They scream and giggle. It's 10:30 p.m. at night.
My cousin, 29 years old, medical student at the University of Washington, turns to me and snarls, "I hate children. Who brings their children to movies? Especially this late at night?" It is a shocking thing to say — that you hate children — and especially in front of all these parents. A few mothers glare at us balefully. I try to become invisible. I point out to her that the movie is, after all, a children's story. It has a PG rating. What would the author of the story say if he knew you hated children?
Well, the thing is, he might nod in understanding, offer my cousin a cigarette, and buy her a pint of Guinness. He might get her roaring drunk and then take her home and spank her naked bottom. He might beg her to lash a leather whip across his own naked buttocks.
No way, you say. Not C.S. Lewis. The celebrated Christian apologist, the most popular children's author of all time, was a boozehound, smoker, pervert, and hater of children? This seems to be the general consensus — with the exception of the child-hating bit. He didn't hate them. But by many accounts, he wasn't overly fond of them, and as for those other things I just mentioned, that was just scratching the surface. Consider he signed his private letters during his boarding school days as "Philomastix" — meaning "whip lover."
For the majority of the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have read The Chronicles of Narnia over the past 60 years, these disturbing personal tidbits about Lewis did not taint their experience. The books stood on their own as outstanding and entertaining stories to be enjoyed by children and adults alike. But the recent release of the Disney movie version of the first book in The Chronicles has changed things. As hordes of reporters, critics, and scholars have cashed in on the public's renewed interest in Lewis (an interest only Hollywood could generate), The Chronicles of Narnia is being transformed from an innocent fairy tale into an insidious work of Christian propaganda written by a priggish, sexually repressed evangelist.
At first glance, it seems there may be something to this dark and cynical take on The Chronicles. There is considerable evidence pointing towards Lewis's sexual issues. For years he lived with a woman old enough to be his mother. The woman was actually the mother of his best friend, who died in the trenches next to Lewis in WWI. No one really knows what was going on between the two of them, but at the very least it was weird and most Lewis scholars agree there was sex involved. Later in life, he was seduced by a married American Jewish woman, who introduced him to a kind of sexual awakening. Describing their relationship, Lewis wrote, "No cranny of the heart or body remained unsatisfied." This begs the question: What exactly defines a cranny? Then there's that Philomastix thing.
There is also his religion. Before writing The Chronicles, Lewis was a celebrated Christian apologist. Not surprisingly, some of that came through in his fairy tales. There is no doubt The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is littered with Christian references. Edmund, "a son of Adam," is tempted by the evil White Witch into betraying the good guys. The lion Aslan sacrifices himself to Edmund, but is miraculously brought back to life so he can lead the good guys to victory over the forces of the evil White Witch. Edmund equals Judas. His brother, Peter, equals St. Peter. Aslan equals Jesus. The White Witch equals Satan. And so on and so forth.
Christians have taken this flag and are running with it. Pastors around the country are incorporating The Chronicles into their sermons. Churches are giving out tickets to their congregations and sponsoring screenings. It looks like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ all over again — except this time it's worse because it's aimed at children.
True, it is aimed at children, but if the purpose of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to indoctrinate children into Christianity, it is a flawed tool. Who allowed the inclusion of all sorts of pagan mythology (Greek, Roman and Norse) in the forms of fauns, minotaurs, centaurs, Father Christmas, mermaids, talking beavers, and countless other examples? There's also the fact that Aslan the lion, though resembling Christ in his sacrifice and rebirth, is decidedly un-Christ like in character. A fearsome lion is not exactly an accurate representation of the Jesus Christ described in the Bible, as a recent article in The New Yorker points out:
"If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels . . . a donkey who reemerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotes, as the king of all creation — now that would be a Christian allegory."
But for some reason Lewis didn't write Aslan as a donkey. And why is that? It's because at the end of the day, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was not written as Christian propaganda. It was first and foremost a fairy tale. Lewis says the story started out with a simple image in his mind: A faun in the snow carrying a red umbrella. That's it. Not God giving Moses the Ten Commandments. Not Christ on the Cross. Not even Aslan roaring on top of a mountain. Just a nice, innocent, pagan figure with an umbrella. And from that image an entire new world was spun. A multi-million dollar world.
Over 95 million copies of The Chronicles of Narnia have been sold worldwide. With the release of the movie, publishers expect annual sales to multiply five times over. The movie had a $67 million opening weekend, surpassing Disney's wildest expectations. This means the next book in the series, Prince Caspian, is no doubt in the works. There are seven books in the series, so . . . you do the math. The numbers are going to be huge.
The reason The Chronicles of Narnia is so wildly popular has nothing more to do with Lewis's inclusion of Christian themes than it has to do with his rather sordid personal life. Sure, they are the focus of the media at the moment, but that will hopefully pass. The reason these books have become classics is because they are well written, enjoyable stories. That's why I devoured the books as a kid and that's why I bought them all again yesterday and started re-reading them.
Standing in line in the movie theater with those rambunctious children last weekend, I found myself longing to be one of them — and not just because it would have been cheaper for me to buy a ticket. I wished I had never heard anything about the controversy over C.S. Lewis and instead, like the children, could watch The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe without thinking about religious conspiracies or picturing an old man in a tweed coat holding a pipe in one hand — and a whip in the other.
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