Question on "Companion to Narnia" by Paul F. Ford

In one appendix, Ford indicates that Telmar was unpeopled when the
pirates arrived because the Calormenes were there.....but were turned
into animals! Does anyone know more about this? (I couldn't
immediately find more about it in Ford's book.)

BTW, while the book is very detailed (it even has an entry for the
asylum mentioned in MN, Colney Hatch) there's at least one odd
omission. On the one hand, Ford was gracious enough to include a long
entry on the subject of sexism in the books. However, there is no
mention that I remember either in that entry or in the White Witch
entry of Lewis' possible sexist motivation in writing the WW as a
woman - and as a two-dimensional killing machine, at that! (Even the
Green Witch might be argued to have a little more depth - if only
because even Baynes' illustrations of her face are truly deceptively
pretty, as well as her voice.) As one recent critic wrote in his book,
you almost always knew when a woman was going to be unpleasant or evil
in the Chronicles, if 1) she's already grown-up when you first meet
her, and 2) she never has children. After all, while Lewis didn't
limit his unlikeable women to those factors, those factors DO describe
not just the witches, but the queen giantess, Aravis' stepmother and
the Head of Experiment House.

Lenona.

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:35:53 -0700, lenona321.DeleteThis@yahoo.com wrote:

> In one appendix, Ford indicates that Telmar was unpeopled when the
> pirates arrived because the Calormenes were there.....but were turned
> into animals! Does anyone know more about this? (I couldn't
> immediately find more about it in Ford's book.)

Paul Ford recently posted at Into the Wardrobe; he or someone over there
might know.


> BTW, while the book is very detailed (it even has an entry for the
> asylum mentioned in MN, Colney Hatch) there's at least one odd
> omission. On the one hand, Ford was gracious enough to include a long
> entry on the subject of sexism in the books. However, there is no
> mention that I remember either in that entry or in the White Witch
> entry of Lewis' possible sexist motivation in writing the WW as a
> woman - and as a two-dimensional killing machine, at that!

Not to excuse him, but for one thing, such a female figure was traditional
in some patriarchial religions: Tiamat, Lilith, etc.

Iirc what Lewis said about it was (remember he wrote LWW in the 1940s) that
the popular image of Satan was a fiery, active figure, a rebel who stirred
things up and got taken as a hero (as Blake took Milton's Satan) -- and
Jesus was seen as passive, colorless. Lewis wanted to reverse those images:
to show evil as something cold and with no real power of its own, which
paralyzes action (the winter, the stoning wand [cf Circe; someone said the
only magic the 'witches' of that tradition had was wands]).

Here's one sexist image Lewis may have been drawing on: in some lit hist
book he compared something to a goverorness "who has finally succeeded in
getting a small boy in trouble with his father". Baynes illustrations look
like a stern primary schoolteacher wielding a ruler.


> (Even the
> Green Witch might be argued to have a little more depth - if only
> because even Baynes' illustrations of her face are truly deceptively
> pretty, as well as her voice.) As one recent critic wrote in his book,
> you almost always knew when a woman was going to be unpleasant or evil
> in the Chronicles, if 1) she's already grown-up when you first meet
> her, and 2) she never has children. After all, while Lewis didn't
> limit his unlikeable women to those factors, those factors DO describe
> not just the witches, but the queen giantess, Aravis' stepmother and
> the Head of Experiment House.

Good point; I don't recall any villainesses with children of their own. But
he tolerated two childless women in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH: the professor's
wife whom he praised as managing to be motherly and silly even though
physically childless, and celebate Grace ?Ironwood? who taught Jane to
accept authority of the male leader Ransome, and of Jane's husband.


Bree