“Susan doesn’t get to go to Heaven with her siblings because she decided she liked lipstick and parties!”
One, there is a very simple reason Susan does not show up in Aslan’s Country with the others at the end of The Last Battle: she’s alive. Her siblings are in Aslan’s Country because they are dead. Susan is not there because she is not dead. That’s literally it.
Two, it’s a massive oversimplification of the text to try to boil things down to ‘Aslan finds mature femininity sinful’ or ‘she can’t be saved because she grew up’ (or my least favorite, saying she’s cast out because she “discovered sex”, which I find a pretty inappropriate statement to make about a very young teenager and a complete misunderstanding of the actual situation). The “problem of Susan” is not that she can’t go to Heaven because she grew up. Her story is that she struggles with her faith and allowed her desire to seem grown-up and part of the in-crowd become her driving influence, forgetting what was most important. It is not meant as a dig at femininity, it is meant to show a loss of priorities.
When Susan is in Narnia and faced daily with the truth, it’s easy for her to believe, but whenever she’s presented a challenge that will require an intentional show of faith, she always seemed to struggle (for example, in Prince Caspian she’s shown to intentionally choose her doubts over what she felt deep down, and thus took the longest to see Aslan again). After leaving Narnia the second time and readjusting to life in England, as time went on it would have gotten easier to gradually forget her faith when the evidence is no longer clearly spelled out in front of her, and eventually her memories that she once knew were true came to feel like nice childhood stories instead. With those memories, and consequently the testimony that once came with them, no longer real for her, she could allow herself to prioritize other things such as self-image. The story is not trying to say that liking to feel pretty is some sort of sinful indulgence, it’s trying to demonstrate how we can get distracted from what matters when we place too much importance on how the world sees us.
The point C.S. Lewis was making was that it’s important to be humble and not lose yourself in trying to appear so smart and so mature to others. Critically, Susan’s story is not just Susan’s story — it is Lewis’s story. Lewis was raised Christian but became an atheist and turned much of his focus on looking intelligent and grown-up, and when he came back to his faith later in life, he looked back on his choices feeling foolish for trying so hard to be so grown-up because it blinded him to what mattered to him. There is a difference between simply maturing into an adult, and becoming the specific kind of grown-up who tries to be grown-up, which is the particular thing that irritated Lewis and something that he frequently touched on in his works.
I wouldn’t know where to look for the quote now, but I remember Lewis saying that Susan was the character he related to the most because of her struggle. He had to intentionally choose his faith and act on it, and it wasn’t always easy. He understood how hard that can be and knew firsthand how one could let oneself forget if they’re not actively working at it. Lewis was not a misogynist who had it out for Susan — he WAS Susan. And on the other hand, Susan can be Lewis. Susan can find her belief again later in life. He specifically said as much, that she can find her way to Aslan’s Country in her own time and in her own way. He chose not to write that story because something as big as the process of returning to your beliefs and being intentional about it through every difficult step was more mature material than he really wanted to write (contrary to the myth that he simply died before he could get around to it, though I suppose in any case it’s true that he died before he ever might have changed his mind). But the simple fact that that would have been the plot is all the proof anyone needs that Lewis imagined a happy ending for her where, eventually, she comes to be with her family in Aslan’s Country.
To say that she was banned from getting to Heaven is patently untrue. Susan is merely living out the rest of her natural life and taking the longer route back to Aslan. That’s no bad thing by any means. There’s no reason her journey should be exactly the same as her siblings — she is not Peter or Edmund or Lucy, she is herself, and different individuals have different stories. Hers is longer and filled with more bumps and is, frankly, the more ordinary and more relatable for many people. The only “problem of Susan” is how often most of this gets misinterpreted or missed altogether.
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