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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I am not convinced by the author's thesis.

But I'm also not convinced by your defence of Narnia. It's 4 white British middle class kids (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) who have the privilege of being sent to the country during a dangerous time. I'm happy that you were able to identify with these characters. But for the many, many people who prefer to read stories about people like themselves and can't identify with Peter and Susan, I'm glad there is something for them now.

It won't last though. When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. For people who've enjoyed characters who look just like them, who've grown up with experiences just like theirs, any change feels like oppression. See the vicious backlash to any female or gay or non-white video game character nowadays. Game, book and movie producers who want to play it safe will go back to white straight males to avoid that backlash.

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> It's 4 white British middle class kids (Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) who have the privilege of being sent to the country during a dangerous time

That is only true for one book in the series.

What about Aravis and the Telmarines who were not white British? The very working class character who founds the original Narnian royal dynasty? Those are just the major characters, what about all the minor characters? Then there are the non-human characters who are not exactly like any of us.

BTW a lot of kids of all classes were evacuated during the war AFAIK - it was not a privilege.

> But for the many, many people who prefer to read stories about people like themselves and can't identify with Peter and Susan, I'm glad there is something for them now.

One of the purposes of literature (and one endorsed by CS Lewis) is to identify and empathise with people unlike yourself. Anyone who only enjoys literature about people like themselves is missing out a lot.

Any reasonable reader would conclude that the Pevensie children are the main characters in that series.

Indeed, that was the whole point - Lewis wrote Narnia for his goddaughter Lucy. That's why she's the main character! He wrote it so she could enjoy a story about a girl just like herself!

Fwiw, I've also enjoyed books and video games all my life, including Narnia. None of the characters have ever looked or spoken like me, unless they were a caricature to be made fun of. I still read a lot because that's my nature. That's fine, it is what it is. But I hope the next generation experiences something better than what I did.

Frankly your comment sounds like cope. You so badly want to identify with this series so you decided that the main characters are the Telmarines.

> Any reasonable reader would conclude that the Pevensie children are the main characters in that series.

The main characters even in books they do not appear in (The Magicians Nephew and The Silver Chair) or appear in only as minor characters (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle)?

The older two Pevensies are only main characters in two books.

> Frankly your comment sounds like cope. You so badly want to identify with this series so you decided that the main characters are the Telmarines.

That comment is an ad hominem and does not relate to what I sad at all.

I think the difference is that I am actually familiar with the books, and that you cannot let go of preconceived notions.

> None of the characters have ever looked or spoken like me, unless they were a caricature to be made fun of

I do not know enough about you to be able to evaluate that statement.

Edit to add:

> Indeed, that was the whole point - Lewis wrote Narnia for his goddaughter Lucy.

He dedicated one book in the series to his god-daughter. he was written about his motives and inspirations for the series elsewhere and it goes far beyond "writing a book for Lucy".

My Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather,

C.S. Lewis

——

This speaks to

1. The sheer magic of reading a story where you are the main character.

2. CS Lewis knew that and wrote this book especially for a young white British girl, so she’d have a story where she was the main character.

You read the books, great. But guess what, I did too.

You’re unable to see the obvious because you want to so badly be right about Narnia. Cool.

Yes, you're right about that specific dedication to Lewis' god daughter. But, you don't address the poster's point:

> The main characters even in books they do not appear in (The Magicians Nephew and The Silver Chair) or appear in only as minor characters (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle)?

He does have a point and you're not answering it at all.

The answer is obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with Narnia - the first 3 books featuring the 4 Pevensie children as main characters are an order of magnitude more popular than the others.

On goodreads the first book has 2.96 million ratings. Horse and His Boy - 371k ratings.

When people think of Narnia they think of the first 3. That’s the reason only the first 3 were adapted to film. These 3 movies crossed $1.5 Billion worldwide. Movies based on the others? Nothing, they don’t exist.

In terms of cultural cachet the books not featuring the Pevensies are afterthoughts. Anyone would know this.

Since you’ve appointed yourself the judge of points not being addressed, could you go around asking for a response to my point. Being the main character of a book feels really special, and the series being written for Lucy clinches that.

Yes but we were talking about the writer's purpose for writing the books. You're right those other books are less popular yet they exist and they serve as an example of non-white main characters in books 1950s by a popular author. It's not CS Lewis' fault that those books are less popular.

And, yes being the main character of a book feel special, there's no denying that but there's also the fact that the previous poster (and many others because even if they're less popular, 371k ratings on goodreads is nothing to scoff at) could find himself in those other books.

Its also unusual for the plot of a children's book published in 1954 to end with a brown girl (albeit an aristocrat) marrying into a white anglophone royal family - and earlier in the book a white English queen was considering marrying a brown prince.

I wonder how that went down in, for example, the Southern states of the US at the time? Never read anything about reactions to the plot, but did it sell there? Did people let their kids read it?

>the privilege of being sent to the country during a dangerous time.

Children of all social classes were evacuated- the slum child evacuated to a prosperous country farmhouse is practically a trope, while some children of wealthy families stayed in London. The only thing that decided whether children went or not was their parents' choice.

Though the Pevensies are relatively privileged in that they have a (EDIT: family friend not uncle) in the countryside who has room for them rather than being sent to a stranger's house.

(EDIT: actually, I can't remember- is there an indication that they knew the Professor before the war?)

You are right in principle, but the mansion does not seem to be owned by an uncle, and there is no indication they were related at all. He is to referred throughout the book as "the professor".

The Pevensies are definitely middle class kids. The sort of kids an academic like Lewis would have known in real life, and probably reflecting the real Lucy's family's circumstances.

Sorry, I got confused- it's the professor who stays with an uncle as a child in The Magician's Nephew.

Indeed - see "Goodnight Mister Tom" for an example of a poor child that was evacuated

The Pevensies were very privileged.

This makes sense, because Lucy was a stand-in for Lewis’ goddaughter. It wouldn’t have made sense for her to be working class.

The Pevensies were from Finchley, a wealthy area of London at the time.

Unlike working class children who had to stay with any random family, these kids got to stay in a mansion owned by an uncle.

Peter and Susan go to boarding school in later books.

Even the way they speak - that’s how posh kids speak.

Yeah obviously, just the act of getting out of London doesn’t mean they’re poshos. Everything else about them indicates that though.

I grew up lower middle class and none of these thoughts even entered my mind. What did was the amazing story, world, etc…

I identified with them, the Beaver family, the white witch, etc.

Do you struggle to identify with humans who do not perfectly match your income or life? Is that how most of your friends are?

I might be the weird one here but I identify with all kinds of characters in books…

I don’t know that describing evacuation as a privilege for middle class children is strictly accurate.

Evacuation to a private residence belonging to an uncle. A mansion at that.

They may have enjoyed more privileged accommodation upon being evacuated, but their being evacuated was not a privilege, if that what we want to call it.

Sorry but your memory fails you. The professor is not their uncle. He is not related to them.

However he himself stayed with an uncle when he was a child (in The Magician's Nephew)

> privilege

You live in a city the Nazis are going to bomb. Your family and your home is almost certainly going to be blasted to smithereens. The government has evacuated you - unaccompanied - to some strangers, and it doesn't care who these strangers are, so long as they volunteer to put you up.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-evacuated-children-of-the...

That is not privilege. Privilege is being able to sit behind a computer screen and face no real threats to your life. (Part of what made 9/11 so tragic for Americans, beyond the indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocent people, is the Americans thought they were untouchable until that point. It ripped a hole in their national psyche and they've never really recovered)

Similar evacuations and displacement are happening around the world. There are still millions of Syrians living in temporary camps in Turkey and Lebanon, for years. There are over 6 million Ukranians displaced within Ukraine, and millions living in Poland and other countries -- where they are at the mercy of those who offer them a home: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2022/not-a-single-safe-pla...

Do you think of this as privilege ? How many times have you been bombed out of your home?

They also got the privilege of all dying together in a bombing raid on the train.

I think that was a post-war railway accident, actually, not a bomb.

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