The lion, the witch and the wardrobe

My six year old daughter, Arundhati, is buzzed with the excitement of being able to read by herself. She is devouring books too quickly for my wife or I to edit what she's reading, or frame and contextualize her books for her. She's on her own now.

She has just devoured Enid Blyton's the Magic Faraway Tree (four times), Roald Dahl's Charile and the Chocolate Factory, and C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. She's a hop, skip and jump away from the rest of Enid Blyton, moving moving on to the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and perhaps Tolkien.

This is potent stuff. Fiction like this can shape values for a lifetime. Which is why I was a little worried when I noticed Arundhati reading C. S. Lewis. Because C. S. Lewis was, "not to put too fine a point on it, a racist and sexist pig."

Should I point out the racism to Arundhati, so she is better able to protect herself from toxic attitudes? Or should I just let her enjoy the narrative, and trust that the rest of her upbringing will give her enough protection from toxic thoughts? In the balance, my wife and I chose to let her just enjoy the narrative. But it wasn't an easy choice.

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Am I being being paranoid about C. S. Lewis? Nope. Tragic but true. A bigot is he. Here's Anne Fadiman's take on C. S. Lewis in her excellent introduction to Rereadings:

When my son was eight, I read C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy aloud to him...

Henry loved The Horse and His Boy, the tale of two children and two talking horses who gallop across an obstacle-fraught desert in hope of averting the downfall of an imperilled kingdom that lies to the north...

My jaw dropped when I realized that Aravis, its heroine, is acceptable to Lewis only because she acts like a boy - she's interested in "bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming"- and even dresses like a boy whereas the books only girly girl, a devotee of "clothes and parties and gossip" is an object of contempt. Even more appaling is Lewis's treatment of the Calormenes, a brown-skinned people who wear turbans and carry scimitars. Forty years ago the near homonym slipped me...

The book's hero, Shasta, is the ward of a venial Calormene fisherman, but, as a visitor observes, "this boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine, but the boy is fair and white." That's how we know he belongs to a noble northern race instead of an uncouth southern one...

It was difficult to read this sort of thing out to Henry without comment...I blurted out "Have you noticed that The Horse and His Boy is not really fair to girls? And that all the bad guys have dark skin?"...

Henry...didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate or explicate the book...He wanted to find out if Shasta and Aravis would get to Archenland in time to warn King Lune that his castle was about to be attacked by evil Prince Rabadash and two hundred Calormen horsemen. "Mommy," he said fiercely, "can you just read?"

I sort of trust that Anne Fadiman's son will not turn out to be a racist or sexist despite having swallowed C. S. Lewis's poison.
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And how harshly should one judge C. S. Lewis himself? Was he just reflecting the spirit and attitude of his time? Or was he worse than that? Given his intelligence, erudition and the privilege he enjoyed as an Oxford don, I'm inclined to judge him harshly...but I can see both points of view.

And what about Tolkien? He is, of course, too sacred to be judged. But it does worry me a bit that he was a good friend of C. S. Lewis. I remember seeing their bust side by side when my sister Radhi and I had visited Exeter College, Oxford. This was before Hollywood made these men famous with Shadowlands and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.