Tag Archives: genre: children’s books

Susan Pevensie and Other Wicked Girls

fiction May 15, 2013 Leave a comment

Some of the most interesting writing in the world to me is new takes on old things, or applying a certain type of critical lens to a piece of writing, and literary criticism in general.

(You know you’ve grown up a lot when you enjoy literary criticism.)

Anyway, one of my favorite things to read about is classic characters from another perspective, or apply a critical lens to the way male authors portray female characters. A classic example is Susan Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia. Her family dies in a train crash and she is lost to Narnia because she becomes, from the sound of it, a normal adolescent girl who is interested in boys, clothing, and makeup.

C.S. Lewis himself says of Susan:

The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end… in her own way.

I don’t like the whole implication that girls who grow into women and discover sex can’t get into Heaven if they don’t somehow save themselves from all their sin. A lot of pro-Narnia blogs will say that Susan is preventing Susan from getting into Narnia but the argument is sort of weak, in my opinion.

Since the publication of the Narnia books, a lot of writing has cropped around the character of Susan who is left to face the world without her family. It’s implied that Susan survives the crash, having not been there. One of the more prominent tales of Susan post-Narnia collection is Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Problem of Susan.’ It’s a short story about a Professor Hastings (who sounds very much like a grown up Susan Pevensie) dealing with the trauma of losing her family while be questioned about the Narnia books.

Where is this going? The final destination is a poem (or possibly a song), written by Seanan McGuire (who wrote ‘The Newsflesh Trilogy‘), which I love, called ‘Wicked Girls‘ which captures so perfectly and embraces that old boys club stigma that girls who challenge societal patriarchy are bad girls.

Wendy played fair, and she played by the rules that they gave her;
They say she grew up and grew old — Peter Pan couldn’t save her.
They say she went home, and she never looked back,
Got her feet on the ground, got her life on its track.
She’s the patron saint priestess of all the lost girls who got found.
And she once had her head in the clouds, but she died on the ground.

Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in,
A gray dustbowl girl in a life she was better off leavin’.
She made her escape, went from gray into green,
And she could have got clear, and she could have got clean,
But she chose to be good and go back to the gray Kansas sky
Where color’s a fable and freedom’s a fairy tale lie.

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we’re calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like — we’re determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

Alice got lost, and I guess that we really can’t blame her;
They say she got tangled and tied in the lies that became her.
They say she went mad, and she never complained,
For there’s peace of a kind in a life unconstrained.
She gives Cheshire kisses, she’s easy with white rabbit smiles,
And she’ll never be free, but she’s won herself safe for a while.

Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
They never once asked to return to their lives
To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
And one queen said ‘I am not a toy’, and she never returned.

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we’re calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like — we’re determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

Mandy’s a pirate, and Mia weaves silk shrouds for faeries,
And Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Kate poses riddles and Mary plays tricks,
While Kaia builds towers from brambles and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear:
Be wicked and lovely and don’t live in fear —

Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we’re calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like — we’re determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.

For we will be wicked and we will be fair
And they’ll call us such names, and we really won’t care,
So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes,
There’s a place they can go if they’re tired of chains,
And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost,
But we’ll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost —
We won’t take our place on the shelves.
It’s better to fly and it’s better to die
Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

fiction March 3, 2012 Leave a comment

Yesterday was Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and I feel that I should note it.

The first book I read on my own, at the ripe old age of 4, was Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!. I must have read it, say, a million times. I read it to my mom when I was sure I could do it. Then I read it to my dad when he got home from work. Then I read it to my sister, who was too young to read or even really understand it at all. She was also too young to escape my reading to her, which my parents gladly took advantage of when they got sick of Marvin.

They were so happy I could read though. Before, I had my parents read those books to me. I think my dad still knows all the words to Old Hat, New Hat by heart, and my mom can still do all the voices she used to do for Are You My Mother?. They read those stories to me hundreds of times. They weren’t all by Dr. Seuss, but all of them were contributed by children’s authors who published at Random House under the umbrella of Beginner Books. Beginner Books was founded by Dr. Seuss, his wife, and Phyllis Cerf.

Even now, I enjoy going back through my Dr. Seuss books when I need a dose of childhood. At Christmas I still visit the Grinch in Whoville. I won’t be going to see the movie, but for the first time in years yesterday I opened The Lorax. My all time favorite Dr. Seuss book, The Sleep Book, is still proudly displayed on a shelf in my room and I read through it every so often before bed when I don’t want to do serious reading or a crossword puzzle to make me drowsy.

But throughout my early years, I read his stories frequently, especially after I could read on my own. I didn’t realize I was reading about racists (The Sneetches), or Hitler (Yertle the Turtle), environmentalism and anti-consumerism (The Lorax) or anything else in this picture:

dr. seuss - alternate titles

I suppose I was, and those messages seem quite obvious now, but I didn’t notice them so much when I was young.  Not judging people by the color of their skin and growing up to love trees might be a credit to Dr. Seuss, though.

But that stuff is all retrospective. At the time, I had no idea what a racist was, or what a Hitler was. I just liked the books. Yertle the Turtle, especially, amused me endlessly. It really speaks values about my sense of justice and fair play that, even as a kid, I was filled with glee when Yertle became king of the mud. The words in those stories, written mostly in anapestic tetrameter, captivated me as would future words of future stories in future books, but some of the real magic in Dr. Seuss came from the illustrations.

As someone who hasn’t grown up to be an artist or illustrator, I am still floored and awed by the creation of creatures I had never heard of and could never find anywhere else but in my mind’s eye. They helped develop my own imagination.

I used them to bond with my family as well. My family were all brought up on those books…at least everyone under the age of 60. My aunts, uncles, and cousins all read Dr. Seuss’s stories to me while growing up.

When I used to go to my aunts’ huge house in Harrison, 10-15 years before they left for the condo in Somers, I’d go down to the basement and pull out all the books I didn’t have at home and read those. I spent hours and hours curled up on the couch, reading about things like Bartholomew Cubbins’ hats. I have a very specific memory of an evening where everyone was together but sort of doing their own thing, and I was reading about 500 hats. That’s one of several of my early childhood memories of my family – reading with them.

I’m actually missing huge chunks of my childhood. I was literally missing for long periods of time. I must have been. I spent so much time completely engrossed in Dr. Seuss’s works, that while my parents will swear I was sitting in the living rooms of my various relatives, on their various couches, I know that I must have been somewhere else.

I know I was. As a kid, I spent countless hours on Mulberry Street, in Whoville, or with a mischievous cat. 20 years later, and I’m a better person for it. Journeys like that never leave you.

Neither does that cat. He used to visit me quite often when I was young. I don’t see him so much anymore, but sometimes if I glance out the window on a rainy day, I just manage to catch a glimpse of a red and white striped hat zipping out of sight.

Happy birthday, Dr. Seuss, wherever you are.