Fantasy Apostates

[steepholm]

A few days ago, kalimac wrote an LJ post about Susan's absence from Narnia in The Last Battle (by way of a very pertinent quotation from Holly Black's Doll Bones) emphasizing that what really rankled wasn't her growing sexual maturity but her decision to think of Narnia as a fantasy that she'd outgrown. I agree that this aspect has been relatively neglected, especially post-Pullman; it certainly struck me as the most relevant aspect of her behaviour when I read the book. In fact - and I'm not sure I've seen this mentioned - it's an exact reprise of what Edmund does to Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when he pretends that Narnia was just a game that he and Lucy had invented. That is something that Lewis feels so strongly about that he has to forewarn his readers ("And now we come to one of the nastiest things in this story") - something he doesn't even do with the murder of Aslan.

I commented then, and have been thinking about it since, that the horror of this kind of betrayal is easier to understand if you have been a younger/st sibling, as Lewis was. I didn't co-create secondary worlds with my elder brother, but I certainly remember his outgrowing the kind of imaginative play that goes into them, and the bereft feeling that followed. When I read of Susan's denial, that was the string that vibrated. For those siblings who have lived together intensely in secondary worlds the abandonment must feel even keener. Did Warnie lose interest in Boxen before Jack was ready? Did Branwell go to the bad because Charlotte abandoned him in Angria?

I've been asking my students about it this week, and there was definitely more recognition of the pain of being left behind in this way amongst those who have experienced it - though that's hardly surprising. I do suspect, though, as I suggested the other day, that the whole psychodrama might have been been brought to wider attention earlier had Freud not been an eldest child. (Did that fact result in eldest child psychology being seen as normative? I don't know enough about the subject to say, but I suspect it may.) Afterwards, reading of Freud's daughter Anna's intense sibling rivalry with her elder sister Sophie and her subsequent specialization in child psychology, I wondered whether I might have better luck with her. Sure enough, her first paper, an account of her own analysis with her father, turns out to be entitled "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams" (1922).

I thought it an oddly Gradgrindian title, with perhaps more of a smack of the self-help book than I would have expected, but certainly intriguing given the subject of putting aside "childish" fantasies. Having read it I now know that it's actually about fantasies of beating. Cursed ambiguity of the English language! Nevertheless, although the Freuds (père et fille) see the fantasies as being about the father-daughter relationship rather than anything to do with siblings, I'm not so sure. And it's certainly intriguing that the fantasies themselves involve the elaboration of a mediaevalesque secondary world, which Anna goes on to turn into fiction. The final sentence is chilling, especially for fantasy authors:

By renouncing her private pleasure in favor of making an impression on others, the author has accomplished an important developmental step: the transformation of an autistic into a social activity. We could say: she has found the road that leads from her fantasy life back to reality.

Wo Anna war, soll Susan werden, indeed.

Comments

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Well, I was an oldest sibling, and as such usually identified with elder siblings in stories--since Susan was the elder sister, she was my favourite; I ran into the same problem with Narnia that I did with Little House on the Prairie and some others, where stories always seemed to be about younger siblings! (Later, this was part of the attraction to Duane's So You Want to be a Wizard.) Anyway, I remember also that it was her abandoning Narnia, rather than boys and lipstick, that upset me, but from the opposite perspective perhaps of the rest of you, because I was afraid I might someday also be expected to give up magical worlds and adventures and lead the way into grownuphood. I didn't, obviously. ;)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You were a brand plucked from the burning! There's DWJ (eldest of three) and Sophie Hatter, as well, of course. But your experience and hers appear to confirm the general rule/expectation.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Yes, and DWJ's were as likely to be lonely orphans, at least in the books I had to hand. Moril I loved despite his younger siblingness, but he was such a daydreamer it was hard not to. Sophie I didn't encounter until later; for some reason none of the libraries near me had HMC.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's it exactly. I'm also an oldest sibling and the fear that I might also lose -- or be somehow forced to lose -- the love of magical worlds and adventures resonated with me too.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I too had that fear. My diaries at 12-14 are full of fantasies about staying a kid and avoiding puberty. But my younger sister had nothing to do it. It was seeing my friends change that did it.

And I also really resented how it seemed like almost all the books I read were about how hard it was to be a younger sibling, as though being the older sister was some kind of cakewalk. Ramona Quimby, Olivia Potts, Laura Ingalls. Harriet M. Welsch was an only child; that was some relief. There were some good only children--Dorothy Gale among them. But I can't think off the top of my head of a children's book about an older sibling.

Now I can, I mean. Long Lankin by Lindsay Barraclough is terrifying and awesome, and about an older sister.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

God, yes. Puberty scared the crap out of me. And I had absolutely those thoughts about the younger siblings in books--I'd forgotten about Ramona, but I was so very annoyed that she got her own whole series, where Beezus only turned up in Henry's books!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Beezus did have one book of her own early on, but yeah, after that it was kind of all Ramona, all the time. However, Beezus certainly wasn't portrayed as having it easy -- in fact she seemed to have to do a bunch of the parenting herself (and rebelled against that later).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It did irk me, as an eldest son, that in traditional fairy tales it's the youngest of three sons who gets the prize.