An Open Letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Impending Return to Power of Donald Trump

Nathan M. Turowsky MTS

[REDACTED]

November 7, 2024

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

3211 4th St NE

Washington, DC 20017

To whom it may concern,

            In view of the victory of an authoritarian Presidential candidate with vaguely Catholic-aligned positions on some polarizing issues, I ask that the USCCB not become régime stooges like the bishops did with people like Franco in Spain and Duplessis in Québec. It is a strategy for Catholic engagement with politics that has backfired within half a century in every country in which it has been tried in modern times (perhaps an argument can be made that in Ireland it took slightly longer than that), in addition to being immoral in itself.

Yours sincerely,

Nathan M. Turowsky MTS

CC: Christophe Cardinal Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

If you’d like to support my ability to be a gadfly on the ridiculously thick and machismo-oriented hides of my country’s Catholic leaders, subscribe to my Patreon!

Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets

Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024

❦

The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.

           I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.

           To avoid overloading this essay with ponderous “expository” material, and in deference to the precedents set in “acafandom” writing on more established genre canons like Star Trek and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, this essay will at various points presuppose the reader’s familiarity with the characters, situations, and visual and auditory aggregates depicted in Yellowjackets. Readers who have not seen the show can consult breakdowns of the first two seasons on entertainment websites including Vulture, The Cut, and Cosmopolitan, although these also contain elements of subjective review and not everything that has been said online about the show’s aesthetic or narrative quality aligns with my own opinions.

           Much of Yellowjackets’s unique thematic richness when it comes to the issues that this essay will address—issues involving religion, indigeneity, ruralism and the “Wilderness” topos, and their relationships with one another and with more obvious issues in the show such as gender—occurs by accident. For example, the indigeneity-related subtext informing the character of Lottie Matthews (and the closest relationships that she has with white characters, Laura Lee and later on Natalie Scatorccio), subtext that is substantial and is by turns endlessly fascinating and somewhat troubling, cannot have been intentional from the beginning because the mixed-Maori actress Courtney Eaton was matched with the character through a race-blind casting process. Yet by the show’s second season efforts are clearly being made to establish this as an intentional element of the character, such as the casting of another mixed-Maori actress, Simone Kessell, as Lottie’s older self.

           Nor is this to be wondered at. Television production is a collaborative process and an element of serendipity, chance, fate, or providence is inevitably one of the collaborators.[1] Authorial intent in this context is an important consideration when thinking through why the show is the way it is—attempts to artificially bracket out authorial intent as a consideration are just as limiting to one’s understanding of a text as are attempts to artificially inflate it—but it clearly cannot be the whole story. For example, the extremely common belief among the show’s viewers that the character of Jackie Taylor comes across as a closeted lesbian can be amply backed up with comments to that effect from writers, directors, actresses, and so on, yet there is also an element of sheer reader response in the audience’s decision that Jackie is simply more legible as a lesbian character.

           The intentional aspects of the show’s religious commentary mostly involve either what get called the dueling “supernatural and rational” explanations for some of the events that take place (incorrectly; supernatural and rational are not, properly, antonyms or a dichotomy) or the motif of cannibalism itself. The “supernatural or rational” issue is, in my view, a red herring tout court, and a pernicious one for multiple reasons: it creates a false sense that a “rational” version of the series would somehow automatically be narratively and perhaps ideologically superior, it betrays a habit of baselessly expecting that the series will eventually provide “explanations” rather than accepting that it is set in a stupefying universe, and it distracts the viewer from the analysis of religious belief in which, according to the series’ own creators, Yellowjackets is engaged:

I think if you are a spiritual person on any level, or had ever considered or wrestled with spiritual questions, something else to throw into the stew here is that there is an experience or phenomenology of like belief in spiritual experience. There is an expansive quality to it that perhaps you’ve felt in religious ceremony or looking at the Grand Canyon or an art or piece of music (sic), or being with family. However you’ve gotten it, I think we all have a kernel of that experience. So on the one hand, yes, something that expands this feeling seems great. But then there is all the tragedy and the times that it is elusive or completely unhelpful to you. So if you’re going to have a show that in some sense is trying to explore these elements of faith and spiritual experience, if you’re not also going to have the moments where those things are failures or useless, then you’re really not having a fair conversation.[2]

So much for the “supernatural or rational?” non-issue; the program is (in part) about religion, and the program is not a proselytization tool. What of cannibalism?

           Discussing the evil eye, in which some of my own relatives grew up believing in the Italian-American community of the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Migliore writes that belief is part of a “language of distress.” “First,” that is, “[believing in the evil eye] provides people with a means by which they can identify, explain, and communicate specific experiences to significant others. Second, it provides people with a means by which they can take action when confronted by misfortune.”[3] The Yellowjackets take action when confronted by misfortune in many ways, but, as is well-known and as is one of the main draws of the series, eventually they take action by eating people. This action, as with Migliore’s evil eye curatives, they connect to and situate within the magical or religious thinking that the show depicts (and that the show refuses to condemn).

           A great deal of research about the cultural and mediatic history of cannibalism went into the show’s development and writing. Some of this research, when performed in a Christian country by people interested in telling a story that touches on spiritual concerns,[4] is inevitably going to involve the Eucharist. Direct, clearly communicated Eucharistic imagery in the show is surprisingly sparse (especially given that there are major characters to whom religion in general and Christianity in particular are very important), but it is present at two key moments in the first episode of the second season, which are also the chronologically first cannibalistic acts to take place. At the beginning of the episode Lottie Matthews performs a series of protective rituals over Natalie Scatorccio and Travis Martinez—Nat calls them “Wicca bullshit”—before they go on a winter hunting expedition; one ritual has her make them drink her diluted blood, a finger pricked and allowed to drip into hot water or tisane. At the end of the episode Shauna Shipman, grieving her best friend Jackie Taylor (whose death in the last episode of the first season Shauna feels she caused), furtively eats a small, roundish piece of her ear in a moment whose visuals are immediately familiar to people who regularly attend Mass.[5] The symbolic connection is compounded by further connections that have already been established between Shauna and Roman Catholicism. According to Jackie, she “tried to become Catholic” at some point in the past (“I liked the saints; they were all so tragic,” Shauna says),[6] and Shauna reveres Jackie herself in ways explicitly analogized with devotion to a saint, even decades after adoring/consuming her bodily.[7]

            Catholicism has a long history of attempting and failing to “beat the cannibalism allegations” regarding the Eucharist, and an almost-as-long history of deep ambivalence about the Wilderness topos. As Fumagalli, among others, has pointed out,[8] for the bulk of the religion’s history, remote areas were generally seen not as spiritually nourishing or closer to God, but as pernicious because deprived of the “civilizing” aspect of the Church’s mission in the world. This is difficult to understand today; the Romantic movement changed the typical Western conception of the relationship between “wilderness” and the divine so utterly that the previous way of looking at it now seems alien, almost incomprehensible. Even consciously medieval-influenced twentieth-century writers, first and foremost Tolkien, struggle to replicate the medieval worldview on this point.[9] Yet in the medieval and even early modern Christian mind, it was important, obvious, and only dubiously countervailed by the experiences of hermits and desert saints. As Belden C. Lane puts it in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, “[t]hroughout much of the history of Western culture, mountains have been viewed as physically threatening, aesthetically distasteful, even morally reprehensible”; thus “fascination with mountain terrain is a relatively recently development in Western thought,” earlier writers having “scorned [them] as proud, insolent, sky-threatening, and aloof.”[10]

           The historian Allan Greer, in his biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha—on whom more later in this essay—Mohawk Saint, discusses this at length in the Yellowjackets-esque setting of seventeenth-century Quebec, where French Catholic missionaries of the Jesuit order and indigenous Iroquoian and Algonquian cultural systems did ideological and spiritual battle. Of an episode in Kateri Tekakwitha’s life in which she maintained her religious practice as a Catholic convert during a long hunting expedition, Greer writes that:

The vignette featuring [Kateri] praying at her rustic chapel in the forest came to be the favorite image in modern versions of her life story; it seemed to epitomize all the most appealing qualities associated with the “Indian maiden” as an innocent woodland creature at one with nature. All the more reason to note that the seventeenth-century Jesuits attached a very different meaning to this scene. Chauchetière and Cholenec worried about the moral and religious dangers of long hunting trips, even though they recognized their economic necessity for the convert Iroquois. Not only did the hunt pose practical problems in their ministry in that it kept people physically removed from the mass and from the supervision of the missionaries, but it took Indian neophytes into a wild environment with perilous associations. For the original biographers of [Kateri] Tekakwitha, space had moral meaning: the Christian village at Sault St. Louis, together with the fields that surrounded it, was good, whereas the forest was almost entirely evil, the dark haunt of demons and pagan savages. Thus, far from “communing with nature” in her woodland oratory, they saw [Kateri] doing her best to commune with civilization.[11]

On this point Yellowjackets is closer to the medieval Christian worldview than are most expressly Christian modern works of art. The two characters to die first in the Wilderness experience, not counting the initial plane crash, are both associated with the norms of the parent society on the urban or suburban, secular or conventionally Christian or Jewish, affluent East Coast of the United States. Laura Lee has a strong and mostly-conventional Evangelical Christian religiosity, and Jackie Taylor maintains her priorities about things like interpersonal hierarchy and who is having sex with whom long after the others have ceased to care. The Wilderness evidently does not need this. Yet it is Laura Lee who is Lottie’s first and most devoted confidante and Laura Lee whose baptism of Lottie backfires and sets Lottie down the path to starting the group’s later cultic practices;[12] it is Jackie whose earthly remains are the stuff of Shauna’s first act of cannibalism and, an episode later, the first full-fledged cannibalistic feast.[13] There is a series of motifs being put together here—a snowbound cabin; w/Wilderness; Canada; cannibalism; religion; the atavistic or uncivilized or “primal”—that recalls an episode in the earliest biographies of Kateri Tekakwitha. In this incident, Kateri’s closest friend, Wari Teres Tegaiaguenta, is a member of a group that resorts to cannibalism during a disastrous winter hunting expedition, guilt over which inspires her to adopt extreme ascetic practices to which she then introduces Kateri. The cannibalism motif informs their religious practice in a way that is technically separate from but unavoidably juxtaposed with the Eucharist, and untamed forest is again a place of extreme physical and spiritual danger.[14]

           In other aspects of Yellowjackets, as well as in Laura Lee’s and Jackie’s deaths, the Christian elements of the religious aesthetic and of the characters’ religious imaginary seem incongruous in the Wilderness topos. A piece of set design is, tellingly, a reversal, so to speak, of the attributes of St. Hubert, the patron of hunters. Hubert’s attributes include a stag with a crucifix between its antlers (and thus above its head), in reference to a vision that he is said to have had.[15] On an interior wall of the Yellowjackets cabin, however, there is a crucifix positioned below a stag’s head that has been mounted as a hunting trophy. Other reversals or parodies of well-known biblical and liturgical narratives and images abound, from Lottie’s chrismation with blood in the episode “Blood Hive”[16] to the Exodus 16-inspired “suicide on our roof” of a clutter of starlings in the episode “Digestif.”[17] These kinds of reversals and parodies are, in orthodox Christian belief, associated with the demonic, which at several points in Yellowjackets lends substance to an otherwise somewhat tendentious-seeming interpretation that the supernatural force in the Wilderness is a demon (despite various characters’ insistence that “It” is neutral or amoral rather than wicked).

           The demonic overtones interact somewhat uncomfortably—we might even say problematically—with the elements of the show’s look and feel that are most obviously influenced by Native American religion and culture. The “Antler Queen,” for instance, a polysemous symbol of the girls’ cult that is sometimes the person leading the group and sometimes a separate being sort of like an avatar or paraclete of the Wilderness/It, wears a crown of deer antlers like those worn historically by Iroquois political leaders.[18] Lottie, the first person to don the antler crown in the episode “Doomcoming,”[19] has, as mentioned above, at least two relationships with blonde white characters whom the narrative generally favors over her, morally speaking. (It must be acknowledged, however, that, subtext aside, the question of Laura Lee’s or Nat’s moral superiority over Lottie is one in which the show as scripted says it is not interested; these are, among other things, characters who love and are loved by Lottie on what is supposed to be a more or less even footing. The failure of writerly intent on this point seems to me to be an honest one.) The Antler Queen also conjures up specters of the pop-cultural wendigo, an appropriative and (according to many people) spiritually dangerous reperiodization of the folkloric Alqonquian cannibalistic monster of the same name; in mass media this being is typically depicted as a sort of stag-man, a portrayal especially popularized by the mid-2010s cannibalism-themed television series Hannibal. All of this is to say that juxtaposing Yellowjackets’s religious imagination with its preferred depiction and framing of cannibalism rapidly raises questions of cultural sensitivity vis-à-vis indigenous worldviews.

           In a key storyline early in the show’s second season, Nat runs across a large white moose on a hunting expedition, fails to shoot it, then, an episode later, finds its body half-immersed in a frozen-over lake. Efforts to haul the moose out of the lake prove unavailing as the group’s ropes break and it instead sinks to the bottom. The white moose too is an Algonquin religious and folkloric being, one much more benevolent than the wendigo; this is reflected by its positioning in Yellowjackets as a ray of hope, even though that hope is ultimately dashed. Particularly significant is that in the Algonquin culture in which the white moose plays the most important role, the Mi’kmaq of Maine and Atlantic Canada, it is a guardian spirit and a “messenger or link to the Creator.”[20] Several Native American people whom I know have told me personally that the white moose, among other things, leads hunters to food in the winter—exactly the situation in which Nat encounters it in the show. It is in this lake that the Yellowjackets eventually allow Javi Martinez, the second cannibalism victim, to drown, in a cruel parody of Mi’kmaq beliefs much like the cruel parodies of Christian beliefs elsewhere in the series. As Masuzawa points out,[21] to treat a religion similarly to Christianity is, in a primarily-Christian intellectual landscape, to ratify and validate it as worth taking seriously; looked at this way, the sequence of events surrounding the white moose validates indigenous North American religion more than anything else in the show.

           The white moose would, had the Yellowjackets successfully hauled it out of the lake and consumed it, have obviated the real or perceived need to engage in the ritual cannibalization of Javi five episodes later. It is possible that it falls through the ice as a way of taunting them and driving them further into despair, but I, and much of the show’s fandom, prefer to see the moose as a more positive figure. This turns its loss in the lake into an instance of power struggle between multiple forces within the Wilderness, and thus turns the Wilderness itself into a morally and spiritually contested space. In this context we might note that, early in the development of the Lottie-focused Wilderness cult, Lottie refers to “the ancient gods,” only shifting to the singular “It”—“we hear the Wilderness and It hears us”—later on. A reading that sees the moose positively—the way a Mi’kmaq audience would see it—would have it that Lottie got it right the first time, and that the Wilderness is a stage on which sacred dramas play out, dramas whose main characters might be very different from the main characters of Yellowjackets-the-television-series.

           Yet, sacred dramas aside, the this-worldly, human concerns of the characters we follow in the show generally see reverence for or deference to the Wilderness topos functioning in a socially corrosive way. It does not always corrode the microsociety that the Yellowjackets themselves build in the woods—quite the contrary; important moments like Taissa and Van coming out as lesbians in “Doomcoming” or Shauna barely surviving childbirth in “Qui” are made emotionally and relationally easier, if anything, by taking place in the new society and according to the new cultural practices. It does, however, corrode the connections that most characters seek to maintain with the parent society. (There are a few exceptions, characters who do not seem to miss anything about their pre-crash lives and might even actively prefer the Wilderness, and these are the characters who tend to become the diehard cultists in the show’s second season.) The stage of Yellowjackets is not one whose players can maintain at will investment in their backstage lives.

            It should go without saying that in most situations the concerns of a suburban high school are going to be both more legible and more sympathetic than the concerns of a backwoods cannibal cult to most television audiences. Admittedly, with the sort of viewership that Yellowjackets has attracted, this hasn’t always been the case, but it does mean that we can’t ignore the associations between Wilderness, religion, violence, etc., nor even the (atypical and quite boldly articulated) connection that the show proposes between all of these things and femininity. Yellowjackets is a feminist series; it is also a series in which womanhood and women are somewhat horrifying. The same can be said of its relationship with rurality and atavism, and there is much less of a history of conceding this sort of point or seeing it as acceptable and empowering among indigenous and ruralist thinkers than among feminists.

           What is one to make, then, of the questionable symbolic and aesthetic association between indigenous religion and violent, atavistic brutality? Two avenues come to mind for reparative reading of this admittedly troubling facet of Yellowjackets’s aesthetic schema. The first is for the viewer to determine that what appears to be presented as terrifying and despicable is in fact not, and that, like Melville in Chapter 57 of Moby-Dick,[22] the Yellowjackets writers are willing to entertain an astounding degree of relativism about what the characters are doing and then commend that relativism to the audience. This avenue has an intuitive appeal and at points is spelled out within the text. “When you were with those women you were free,” the Antler Queen tells Lottie in “Burial”;[23] “God is alive; magic is afoot,” the soundtrack (Buffy Ste-Marie interpreting Leonard Cohen) tells us two episodes later.[24] The viewer doesn’t have any immediate reason to doubt that this is partly the case—that, whatever else Yellowjackets’s Wilderness is, it is also an enchanted forest where the terrifying and transgressive contains or points to the sublime.

           A second avenue might be to look at the show through a more conventional cultural or moral lens but conclude that this lens isn’t actually being inherently violated by the Wilderness topos. Put simply, in this reading, what produces the barbarity is not the look, feel, or Sitz im Leben of indigenous culture and indigenous religion themselves; it is how that is experienced and engaged with by interlopers from the cultivated world of end-of-history liberal suburbia. None of the human characters in Yellowjackets are actually from the Wilderness or from cultural groups that traditionally live there, and the most obviously malevolent supernatural agency in the series communicates in French, a colonial language par excellence in much of North America’s vast internal frontier.

           As Margaret J. Leahey remarks in “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,” French missionaries and traders in what is now Canada and parts of the Northern United States had little interest in forcing, encouraging, or even teaching Native peoples to speak French; indeed, many of them preferred to learn Native American languages instead despite the extreme difficulty of doing so as adults from a Romance starting position.[25] Kateri Tekakwitha likely understood more Latin than French, because all the Frenchmen she ever met would have spoken primarily Mohawk outside Mass and Latin in Mass. Thus early in the settlement and colonization process French was a white man’s language in ways that English and Spanish ceased to be much sooner. To this day French is somewhat racialized (as “white”) within Canada; when primarily Anglophone First Nations voters helped sink the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Premier Jacques Parizeau infamously blamed “l’argent pis des votes ethniques” (“money and the ethnic vote”) for the loss. It’s difficult to say whether the writers of Yellowjackets are expressly aware of this history; as Americans it is likelier that many of them tend to associate the French language with Canadianness writ large.[26] Nevertheless, it provides a potential resource for interpreting the horrors of the Wilderness as those of imperialism rather than those of indigeneity.

           But let’s set indigeneity and imperialism aside and think, on a human level, on the things the characters in this show do to one another. The show connects brutality and survival in ways that are less Golding than London or even Nietzsche; the “freedom” in “when you were with those women you were free” bears more than a whiff of Also Sprach Zarathustra’s madman or Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand, that nineteenth-century Will that baptizes harpoons “non…in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.”[27] I don’t think this is by any means a moral problem with the show, since the demonic can’t be honestly depicted without depicting why some people find it appealing, but it does mean that Yellowjackets is a story that contains Tolkienian “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”[28] The view of the Wilderness’s ominous quality as solely an issue of colonial domination would seem to run into a wall here.

           I would further submit a third, synthesized avenue of understanding, which has become my own preferred reading of the show. As seen above in the discussion of Mi’kmaq beliefs, we can support an elevated moral and aesthetic reading of the Wilderness even if there is something genuinely foul and evil out there too—even if, so to speak, the Francophone demon as well as the white moose is a going concern with real power over the enchanted woods. Lane, moving on to the subject of deserts from the discussion of mountains quoted above, introduces an interesting and illustrative nuance, a nuance that itself produces much of the Christian spiritual tradition and grounds that tradition ecologically.

In a similar way, deserts have been viewed with fear and contempt as the snare of the devil, the abode of dragons, or the lair of the lawless. As wilderness, wüste, waste, the desert becomes the haunt of demons—at best a “negative landscape” or “realm of abstraction,” located outside of the ordinary sphere of existence, susceptible only to things transcendent. In early Christian tradition, the desert was perceived ambiguously, usually as an unfriendly, intimidating domain; but for those able to endure its purifying adversity, an image also of paradise.[29]

Looked at with this stereoscopic spiritual and moral vision, Yellowjackets seems to share concerns not so much with Lord of the Flies or even with The Call of the Wild as with Dune. Perhaps, much like Arrakis, God created the Wilderness to train the faithful.[30]

           Yellowjackets on a human level is almost certainly meant to communicate a studied and methodologically “correct” agnosticism about not only the existence of God (or the Wilderness) but the existence of any religious “knowledge” as such. Yet resources within the text for a theological reading of the show exist, and are not present within the text necessarily merely by accident.

❦

[1] Might that “serendipity” or “fate” itself be viewed as an “author,” depending on the religious beliefs of the interpreter?

[2] Bart Nickerson, quoted in Jackie Strause, “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.

[3] Sam Migliore, Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 49-50.

[4] See the above block quote for a denomination of the show as “spiritual” rather than “supernatural.” The narrative is interested in epistemology to an unusual extent; much of the second season, in both timelines, involves the characters factionalizing based on degree of receptiveness to mystical experience, as opposed to more obvious cleavages such as race, class, sexual orientation, amount of practical survival prowess, or on-paper religious background.

[5] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 1, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired March 26, 2023, Showtime.

[6] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Karyn Kusama, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired November 21, 2021, Showtime.

[7] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 6, “Saints,” directed by Billie Woodruff, written by Chantelle M. Wells, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 19, 2021, Showtime.

[8] Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994).

[9] The degree and suddenness of the change in attitudes can be and has been, however, exaggerated. Martin Korenjak, “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.

[10] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42.

[11] Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131. Greer favors the French form “Catherine” over the Mohawk form “Kateri,” for various reasons to which I am sympathetic but which I have made a decision against; thus in quoting him I render “Catherine” as “[Kateri]” to maintain consistency with the rest of my text.

[12] Op. cit., “Saints.” The character is always referred to and addressed as “Laura Lee,” either a double-barreled given name, like the Mary Graces and Mary Katherines that many families have, or a full name the use of which is ubiquitous among the other characters, like Charlie Brown or Mary Poppins.

[13] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 2, “Edible Complex,” directed by Ben Semanoff, written by Jonathan Lisco, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 2, 2023, Showtime.

[14] Op. cit., Greer, 182-184. Cf. footnote 8 for Greer’s “Marie-Thérèse” vs. my “Wari Teres.”

[15] The legend appears in most older reference works on Catholic saints and is amply attested in art, heraldry, and even alcohol labels; that of the liqueur Jägermeister will be the most familiar depiction of St. Hubert’s stag to many readers of this essay.

[16] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 5, “Blood Hive,” directed by Eva Sørhaug, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 12, 2021, Showtime.

[17] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 3, “Digestif,” directed by Jeffrey W. Byrd, written by Sarah L. Thompson and Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 9, 2023, Showtime.

[18] William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, ed. Francis Jennings (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 17.

[19] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 9, “Doomcoming,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ameni Rozsa and Sarah L. Thompson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired January 9, 2022, Showtime.

[20] Chief Bob Gloade, quoted in Diana Hall, “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip,” National Post, October 8, 2013.

[21] Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Masuzawa does not condone or approve of this; nevertheless, she makes a strong case that this is, descriptively, how this works in Western intellectual and artistic cultures, and thus, for our purposes, that this is a case of Yellowjackets taking its implications seriously.

[22] 278-280 in my Collins Classics edition. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Collins Classics, 2011).

[23] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 7, “Burial,” directed by Anya Adams, written by Rich Monahan and Liz Phang, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 14, 2023, Showtime.

[24] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 9, “Storytelling,” directed by Karyn Kusama, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 28, 2023, Showtime. We might note that the choice of song also reinforces the series’ connection to Kateri Tekakwitha in that Cohen’s lyrics are taken from Beautiful Losers, a novel that he wrote as a young man in which she is one of the main characters.

[25] Maragret J. Leahey, “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.

[26] With all that Canadianness tends to imply to Americans—remoteness, coldness, “nordicity” in general, perhaps a more collectivist political culture, a history assumed to be without the series of enormously violent inflection points (Revolutionary War, Civil War, etc.) that characterizes the United States’ history.

[27] Op. cit., Melville, 501.

[28] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. In The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 33.

[29] Op. cit., Lane, 43. This passage in Lane goes on to cite, in its own notes, Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, which, while beyond the scope of this essay, has immediate areas of relevance to Yellowjackets as well.

[30] This Herbertian bon mot appears most prominently on 501 in my 2010 Ace Books edition.

Bibliography

Fenton, William N. “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making.” In The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, edited by Francis Jennings, 16-36. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985

Fumagalli, Vito. Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994.

Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hall, Diana. “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip.” National Post, October 8, 2013.

Herbert, Frank. Dune. New York: Ace Books, 2010.

Korenjak, Martin. “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.

Lane, Belden C. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Leahey, Margaret J.  “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. London: Collins Classics, 2011.

Migliore, Sam. Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Nickerson, Bart, Ashley Lyle, and Jonathan Lisco, lead writers. Yellowjackets. New York: Showtime, 2021-2023.

Strause, Jackie. “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene.” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.

 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

An Exercise on Gifts

I got assigned an interesting penance at confession a few days ago, and I was not able to make it to Mass for Epiphany due to a snowstorm, so I did the penance as a bit of spiritual writing instead. Running this publicly is meant to inspire anyone who would like to do the same reflection.

My penance was to reflect on three gifts that God has given to me and three gifts that I, like the “Wizard Kings” (in some Romance languages; los Reyes Magos, i Re Magi) of the Epiphany, can give back to God. I found the first part of the question a bit more difficult, not because I’m trying to be ungrateful but because writing about “gifts of God” or “gifts of the Holy Ghost” can be so abstract. Eventually I decided to list diligence about intellectual work, relative material comfort, and genuine interest in sacred things as three aspects of my character and circumstances for which I feel grateful to Him.

The gifts that I can give back to God are were a bit easier: First, I do both fiction and nonfiction writing that’s made many people who read it significantly more open to the sacred, including people with good reason to fear or resent “religion” as it’s structured in their societies—gay people, people who have had traumatizing experiences in the past, members of minority groups where there’s some religious component to the go-to excuses for how they’re treated. Secondly, as a matter of instinct I’m materially generous to poor people, panhandlers and so forth; I know people who are much more so than I am, but also people who are much, much less so. Finally, I tend to be on the punctilious side about things like prayer and Mass attendance.

The reader may notice that the three gifts that I can give back to God correspond, so to speak, to the three gifts that God gives to me. This ought to tell us something, perhaps.

The Last True Conservatives

The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I do not write about this current, which in its classic form was named Aristasianism and called Web 1.0 chat groups and certain clubs in 1990s London home, from a place of ideological sympathy. I will be presenting it as a tacitly racist, avowedly elitist and class-snobbish movement that escapes being a form of fascism only through its commitment to pre-fascist ideas about subjects like culture, sexuality, authority, punishment, and the state. Much of what I have to say about Aristasianism may sound sympathetic and perhaps even approving, but the truth is much simpler: I think Aristasianism is funny, in a way that is not true of Bronze Age Pervert, the so-called manosphere, masculinity-obsessed fascist pseudointellectuals like Julius Evola, or frankly even Mishima outside a few specific stock jokes about him and deliberate instances of humor in his novels. Part of this is simply because a bunch of lesbian poshos, no matter how conservative they are, just do not have the pull within “real politics” that right-wing men tend to; part of it, however, is because of the uniquely complicated and surreal underpinnings of Aristasian political philosophy. Aristasian thought involves multiple layers of reality, a cosmic shift to degeneration and decay that happens to coincide with the culture shocks of the 1960s, and, most characteristically, a posited parallel world in some way “realer” than the immediately apparent world in which men do not exist and there are two feminine sexes, blondes and brunettes.

All of this comes from a quintessentially English-eccentric mishmash of 1. ideas taken from Dharmic religions (either 1a. directly or 1b. through motivated and often politicized interpretations in the writings of Western scholars like Mircea Eliade and René Guénon) and 2. classic prejudices of the British upper and upper-middle classes. Like many such trends and currents, it seems to have begun at Oxford. “A History of Aristasia-in-Telluria” by someone going by Miss Anthea Rosetti, a document on a website called aristasia.net which as of this writing must be accessed via Wayback Machine but is probably the closest thing extant to an official internal history of the movement, is my source for much of this, although I’ll discuss some other, more hostile witnesses later on. By Rosetti’s account, “at Lady Margaret Hall [one of Oxford University’s constituent colleges] in the early 1970s[, a] group of Sapphically inclined female students who sensibly disliked the modern world and admired the philsophical (sic) works of René Guenon (sic) found each other.” To the extent that I do have any unironic ideological sympathy for Aristasia, it is probably situated here; a political and philosophical framework for right-wing or traditionalist-conservative lesbians that is not just copying and pasting mainstream rightist politics into an incidentally-lesbian mind like Cynthia from Dykes to Watch Out for is something that probably needs to exist. History is full of examples of gay people whose orientation did not lead them to the broadly left-liberal value set that we associate with the LGBT community today, and in this respect these “Sapphically inclined” early-70s Oxonians were engaging with and advancing a worthy intellectual tradition. It isn’t even completely novel or outré that they were unhappy with the cultural changes of the preceding decade; gay writers like Mary Renault and Noël Coward were at best ambivalent about them as well, and memoirs of Hollywood actresses of the period often remark that their roles got worse in the first few years after the Hays Code fell. Indeed, I would argue that this first cohort of proto-Aristasians have a sincerity and courage of their convictions to them that one sees precisely in their not having had as much to gain from turning back the clock as many people who were not lesbians would have.

The early-stage Aristasians did not use that term yet; they went by a number of names that, according to Rosetti and other sources, included Lux Madriana (“Light of the Mother,” in an early phase that emphasized the religious dimensions of the movement, a form of monotheistic goddess-worship), Romantians, and the Silver Sisterhood. By the time of the Silver Sisterhood name, in the 1980s, they had moved to a compound in County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, which they ran in a way supposedly styled after a Victorian girls’ boarding school. This is the point at which some of the more hostile witnesses come in and at which another characteristic Aristasian preoccupation—physical discipline of a type that they (implausibly, in my opinion) insisted was not sexual in motivation—becomes prominent. Of the at least seven or eight meanings of the euphemism “the English vice,” sadomasochistic sexual practices in general and flogging in particular are among the most common, and the latter was a facet of Britain’s traditional educational culture that “St. Bride’s School” seems to have adopted with verve. There continued to be a strong religious and mystical element derived in large measure from Guénon’s “Perennial Philosophy” interpretations of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, as was the case at every stage of the Aristasian subculture, but the surface-level aesthetics of the 1980s iteration were those of a posh girls’ school in the Home Counties, or perhaps in the Bombay Presidency, around a hundred years before. They kept casting about for pre-“Eclipse” (their term for the shocks of the 1960s) societies and ways of life to emulate, the consistent animating conviction seeming to have been that, wherever the society or culture that they wanted lay, it has to have been somewhere in the past—or in another world, since this was also probably around when the concept of “Aristasia Pura, the Feminine Empire,” with its blonde-brunette sexual binary, was introduced.

The disciplinarian penchant, the promiscuous borrowing from past ways of life, and an involvement in early video game culture unfortunately aroused the attention of overtly fascist movements like the British National Party and its leader, John Tyndall, who corresponded with St. Bride’s/Silver Sisterhood leaders in the 1980s. Accounts of the nature of this correspondence and of the proto-Aristasians’ reasons for engaging in it vary. Rosetti, an Aristasian or former Aristasian who is interested in a positive assessment of the movement and its legacy, insist that the subjects discussed were “boring stuff about Guenonian (sic) metaphysics” and that Aristasia was never a racist movement, but I recently found a thread on the British internet forum Mumsnet that was not so sure. According to the Mumsnet thread there was a certain amount of local news coverage in the northwest of Ireland at the time that suggested, among other things, the presence of a large amount of antisemitic literature in the community. I unfortunately don’t find this difficult to believe of people who came primarily from the traditionally very antisemitic upper echelons of British and Irish society and who corresponded with the leader of the BNP. It should be noted, however, that Mumsnet is not a solid investigate source and that, in keeping with the forum’s reputation for strident transphobia, many of the people making these claims seemed primarily interested in establishing whether or not the Aristasian leaders of this time were gender essentialists because they were trans. I am not interested in “transvestigating” these people and I consider the idea that this is relevant insulting, so all I will say for now is that, while Rosetti’s view that Aristasia was consistently non-racist is probably straightforwardly wrong, it doesn’t seem to have been motivated by racism or antisemitism in the same way that Evola, Bronze Age Pervert, et al are.

I know someone who, in my opinion aptly, described the pre-fascist racism of the British Empire as “the 1910s equivalent of ‘white people drive like this and black people drive like this,’ only backed up by the armed machinery of the State.” Any movement that tries to replicate British imperial aesthetics and lifeways, even in a radically different context (like, for example, one in which lesbianism is normative and men are at best peripheral), is going to take up at least some of this through osmosis, in addition to, as I’ve stressed, whatever prejudices these women had before they were Aristasians. I have no difficulty believing that this school-cum-compound-cum-vacation-destination (yes, really, for a while it was, further calling the insistence that the flogging wasn’t meant to be erotic into doubt) was happy to communicate with racist politicians and had at least some members who read a lot of antisemitic screeds in their spare time, and one does not actually have to conceive of the movement as predicated specifically on racism—I believe Rosetti that it was and is not—in order for this to make sense. This should inspire some soul-searching on the part of people who are not motivated by racism themselves but who have ideas that are amenable to racist impulses. Mary Renault, whom I mentioned earlier, left England in part because of the widespread homophobia of the time and settled in, of all places, apartheid South Africa; what does that tell us?

In any case, the association with Tyndall was short-lived mostly because the sojourn in Ireland was itself short-lived and, whatever the relationship between Aristasia and the BNP may have been, the former do not appear to have left the latter any forwarding address. In spite of this the next stage, comprising the 1990s and early 2000s and focused in the London area, was probably Aristasia’s period of greatest public presence and political involvement, not that this is saying much for a group of radical traditionalist kinky lesbian separatist Perennialist mystics that probably never numbered more than a few dozen committed members.

I have not named any individual Aristasian leaders so far because of the community’s Potemkin village quality; prominent Aristasians cycled through personae and pseudonyms over the years and occasionally used more than one at a time, depending on the situation. Rosetti says that Hester St. Clare, the name used by the earliest of the Lux Madriana leaders at Oxford around 1970, was “probably not her real name.” Donegal-era community leaders included someone going by Sister Angelina (the figure “transvestigated” by the people on Mumsnet) and someone going by Miss Martindale. Martindale is a particularly bizarre and multivalent figure who may have retained far-right political associations, ended up with an assault conviction in 1993 in connection with the flogging and disciplinary practices (which she strongly advocated and, again, insisted were not sexually motivated), and made numbers of media appearances as a sort of sideshow in the 1990s British press. The period of her prominence, and perhaps dominance, within the movement is what Rosetti and others depict as what we might call “classic” Aristasia. The axis mundi here is London, the historical references of choice tend towards interwar rather than Victorian, the “Feminine Empire” aspect of the movement with its posited or theorized or longed-for all-female blonde-brunette world is especially emphasized, and the disciplinary practices are, despite or perhaps because of Miss Martindale’s run-in with the law, kept in the foreground as well. Documentary crews film the insides of Aristasian homes—not many of which exist, of course, but there are a few—as human-interest curiosities, women associated with the movement participate in various low-stakes culturally conservative causes such as opposing metrication, and the group expands onto the early internet. As far back as the Donegal phase the Aristasians had a somewhat hypocritical attitude towards computers; because they thought that they improved focus and concentration (which admittedly may have been true of 1980s computing technology but is certainly not true now), they treated them as exceptions to the general eschewal of post-1914 (in Donegal) or post-1965 (in London) technological forms. Thence came the involvement in the early PC game industry and thence also the very-online quality of the current remnants of the Aristasian movement, which mostly go by different names and lack or have deemphasized things like discipline, fringey rightist politics, and the stark blonde-brunette gender binary. (“What about redheads?” is one of the first questions most people ask about “Aristasia Pura.” The answer, admittedly a cogent and even thoughtful one, is that redheads in Aristasia have a hormonal or chromosomal ambiguity a bit like intersex people in our world. Relatedly, most Aristasians are “straight” in the sense that blondes go for brunettes and brunettes for blondes. Readers familiar with lesbian cultural history might find this reminiscent of butch-femme roles, but in fact the blonde-brunette binary is much more consciously tied conceptually to heterosexuality than the butch-femme binary ever was, even though it is more distinct aesthetically.)

The increasing preoccupation with online, virtual, constructed, and imagined worlds is, in my interpretation, what ultimately led to the movement’s current moribund state. In 2005 or 2006 a few newer and mostly internet-based community leaders announced something called “Operation Bridgehead,” in which they claimed to have received orders from Aristasia Pura that the this-worldly sector of the movement was to absent itself from participation in affairs of the world. For a group that thrived online and as a media curiosity in the infamously sensationalist and gawking-oriented British press, this would have been a serious blow no matter what. In Operation Bridgehead’s case the problem was compounded by a somewhat prudish new-look policy of stripping Aristasia of its overtly lesbian and quasi-sadomasochistic aspects. What was left therefore lost much of its unique appeal; Operation Bridgehead left a group of internet-dwelling fantasists who were most comfortable around other women and liked Perennialism, vague knee-jerk conservatism, and, increasingly, anime and Japanese pop culture more generally. I should stress that I do not mean most of this pejoratively. I know and like many people of whom some or most of these things are true. The problem is that there are tons of women like this in the world and one really does not need to subscribe to an idiosyncratic lesbian separatist interpretation of the Perennial Philosophy in order to be one.

In its own way, Aristasia ended up with the same problem that the “disappearing center” has in the developed West’s mainstream religious culture. If there aren’t many people retaining a set of cultural forms anyway, there is not much reason for one to retain them oneself absent a strong motivating drive to find something in them of substance that one cannot find anywhere else. You don’t go to an Episcopalian church on the Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time unless you strongly believe in God and in moderate-to-progressive Anglican theology, because there is no longer much social infrastructure around doing so, especially for younger people; you no longer style yourself an Aristasian and treat it as a moral and political imperative to dress like Greer Garson unless you have a strong belief in a system of behavior that not even the remnants of the organized Aristasian community advance any more. Even if you do, you are left basically to do it on your own. I first found out about Aristasianism years after its collapse via the YouTube comments on a video of a scene from a mid-2000s anime, probably not in any objective sense the best way to find out about it. I’m writing about it now mostly because not many other people are, although it does show up in an academic book or two about Perennialism and, of course, in the Mumsnet thread.

❦

What is one to make of a culture, or subculture, or movement, with this kind of limited and constrained and, it’s difficult to avoid concluding, ultimately failed history? “Learning from failed experiments” is a pat and somewhat insulting concept here; former Aristasians have not necessarily abandoned all the value and importance they placed on their ideals. These days some of the old Aristasian leadership is based in Southern California and is involved in goddess spirituality and (more conventional) LGBT activism there. Are the radically conservative political or quasipolitical or historiographical tendencies still there? I am not sure; I don’t know these people. But even if they are not, it is instructive to think on the fact that they were. In other words, the goddess spirituality and the strident lesbian activism did and thus could coexist with some deeply strange and even dangerous rightist or rightist-tending ideas. It is again tempting at this point to talk about “internal contradictions” or the Aristasian ideology falling apart under its own weight because it contained elements that could not practically exist alongside each other, but this too strikes me as too easy, somewhat along the lines of Adorno’s dubious “right-wing authoritarian personality” concept in which authoritarianism was constructed as 1. self-evidently a personality trait rather than something else and 2. concentrated exclusively among people who disagreed with Adorno politically. It is easy to write off Aristasia as incoherent and doomed to fail if one starts from the premise that Aristasia was incoherent and doomed to fail and then simply begs the question.

It might have been a matter of attracting or pursuing the wrong allies. Orwell points out in his excellent essay on Rudyard Kipling that “Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist (sic; Orwell usually, but not always capitalizes these kinds of terms),” a term I have used for Aristasia before. People claiming to be conservatives at the time that Orwell was writing this were always in fact, he said, “either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.” If we take Orwell at his word—it is not self-evident of course that we ought to, but I think that he has a solid point here—we see that even a generation before Aristasia was a twinkle in Hester St. Clare’s eye the pristine pre-Eclipse world, and ideologies predicated on it, were no longer anywhere to be found. No doubt someone writing a generation before Orwell could have said the same, and so on, and so on, like the ancient writers on Sparta who always situated the golden age of Spartiate equality at some point in the past, relative to themselves. Confucianism and Taoism, similarly, project their ideal pasts arbitrarily far back; the Tao Te Ching seems to long for something pre-agricultural, whereas Confucius—more “progressive” than Laozi in that his cutoff point is right after neolithic river delta state consolidation rather than right before—pinpoints the days of Yu the Great, who invented flood control. This seems like a pat progressive argument (in the historiographical sense) but I think something equally damning can be said of people who are always looking to a more and more more distant, yet somehow always-any-minute-now, future for a world without devastation and woe. Once upon a time petroleum was the one neat trick that would fix the world’s conservation problems, because it spared the whales. This sounds utterly deranged to us today—we have by and large saved the whales and yet the whole biosphere is in peril in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1860 when the first commercial petroleum exploration was getting underway—but the documents, the editorials and political cartoons and policy papers and correspondence, are right there to consult. “Atoms for Peace” were meant to save us all too, once.

It should go without saying that the present sucks as well, particularly since it doesn’t exist; only the past has any demonstrable existence, and the present is a mere moving front between that demonstrable past and the undemonstrable future. So an attitude towards time is never going to be a cogent basis for political action. An attitude towards history might be, but at that point we are in the realm that cannot support something fantastical along the lines of Aristasia. So the invested Aristasian looking for kindred spirits outside her clique is left casting around for the next best thing, and the next best thing, unfortunately, is in most cases fascists—which makes the Aristasians the accomplices of fascists whereof Orwell spoke, perhaps.

Yet lack of care with the company they kept was not, actually, what did Aristasia in. It was, in my opinion, lack of care about venue and context and situation-in-life. Rosetti quotes one woman’s admission that Aristasians tended to be “‘somewhat overbalanced’ on the side of imagination, intellect and the fantastical”—hence the nonsexual component of the reasons for the violent discipline. These were people who need to, to us the parlance of our times, touch grass, and in Donegal and earlier at Oxford they did. The urban setting of London and the penchant for the early internet probably were not good for keeping them grounded—and one does need to be kept grounded even if one truly believes that one’s true home, heaven or Aristasia Pura or the Western Paradise or whatever else, is a great Somewhere Else, because until then we still must live in this world, unremitting Benjaminian shitshow though it is. I cannot blame people for not wanting to accept this, but the wages of not accepting that one must function in the world is, put simply, not being able to function in the world. I wish I could decide I was no longer interested in functioning in the world and let the chips fall where they may. I do not think that I actually can, and if I could I think that I would be obliged to choose otherwise.

Could a version of Aristasia that chose otherwise have had some staying power? Ought it to have had any?

Repent at Leisure

With neither joy nor penitence

In these lethargic times, the one

And only laugh that still makes sense

Comes from a grinning skeleton.

—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro

❦

Taylor Swift released an album last month, Midnights, her tenth (not counting the two rerecorded versions of earlier albums that she has made as part of an intellectual property battle). Taylor Swift album releases are major events in popular culture and have become major events in my own life as well, since I’m only liking her work more and more as she, like me, slowly passes out of early adulthood. The 2020 Folklore/Evermore diptych solidified me as a superfan for life—which can’t be said for everyone who loved those albums, because they hadn’t necessarily liked her earlier albums too, whereas I had—and I was excited about Midnights because I heard it was going to be in a confessional register and confession, penitence, regret, and admission are concepts that I think about a great deal. Sure enough, the album is packed full of lyrics dealing in shockingly overt terms with things Swift, or Swift’s narratorial voice, has done wrong in her life, ranging from emotionally manipulating her listening public, to infidelity in an intimate relationship, to liking money. (Strict theology would reverse the order of the first two in an ascending ranking of severity, although all three would be very bad.) Much of the album’s sound exists mostly as a distracting smokescreen to disguise the jaw-dropping candidness of what she is actually saying, as do some of the specific lyrical flourishes; at one point she cops to what I suspect is a dead-serious Baudelairean conviction that she is going to hell when she dies, but she frames it as part of a tongue-in-cheek du Maurier-esque narrative about an imaginary inheritance dispute.

This brief essay isn’t intended as an essay about Taylor Swift, although I could write about her for several pages at a time if I wanted to—as, I suspect, could most competent living writers who follow popular music. It’s intended as an essay about the public aspect of penitence, the part of a process of making amends where we actually tell other people what we did wrong. Sometimes this isn’t necessary—nobody needs to know about that one time you masturbated to dodgy early-2000s hentai, other than arguably a confessor or spiritual director, and even then the details are probably a bit too much. Oftentimes, however, a public and communal dimension to penitence should or even must exist, either because the immoral acts harmed a community or because the penitent needs some kind of green light from other people before accepting that the moral crisis that she precipitated has been resolved. I’ve often thought that the medieval Church’s transition from Mediterranean-style large public airings of grievances to Celtic-style private confessions was at best a mixed blessing. Part of the reason for this is probably cultural (as a product of a mixed Italian-American and American Jewish family background myself, I recognize my extended family very readily in Seinfeld’s famous Festivus episode), but I think there is a serious sociological and theological argument to be made for confession as a more public and collective act as well. God judges nations as well as people; surely the intermediate formations of human life—the parish, the town, the diocese, the county—should have some means of putting wrongs aright as well.

Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to know the difference between publicly admitting wrongdoing and oversharing about things in which nobody is interested. This can be true even when it comes to wrongdoing that did hurt other people in obvious and publicly noticeable ways. As an example I’ll share something about myself that does not make me look very good, just as “scheming….to make them love me” does not make Taylor Swift very good and running a company that “stinks” because he is someone who “couldn’t smooth a silk sheet if [he] had a hot date with a babe” did not make George Costanza’s boss look very good. I, in my teens and into my early twenties, had an exceptionally poor understanding of conversational boundaries, especially around subjects like sexual desire. While this at no point went beyond words, my struggles with verbal boundaries and understanding when I was testing them cost me several close friendships over the years. I finally realized and amended my behavior when this had happened enough unrelated times that it was no longer reasonable to deny that I was the person at fault. (“I’m the problem! It’s me!” Swift sings in one of the songs on the new album.) The reason I’m bringing this up is, again, by way of example—it’s been several years, thankfully, since this problem arose in my life, and I’ve either managed to repair or accepted the loss of my relationships with the friends with whom I had it in the past. That being the case, is my bringing it up out of nowhere in an essay like this an admirable spontaneous admission of wrongdoing and desire to reform, or is it unsettling oversharing and dredging up old news to fish for sympathy and attention? At least in my mind it’s clearly the former, which is why I am writing about it, but the reader does not have access to my innermost thoughts and thus can only take my word for that.

A higher-stakes public example might be the French Catholic prelate Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who earlier this month came forward as a sexual abuser without anybody having publicly accused him. Did Ricard have a genuine case of conscience, or was he trying to position himself as having a perverse sort of moral authority? Not even all of Ricard’s colleagues within the Catholic hierarchy seem confident that they can tell the difference, and Catholic bishops are not generally credited with a habit of second-guessing other Catholic bishops’ morals. At the very least Ricard’s approach leaves a somewhat better taste in my mouth than the retired Bishop of Albany Howard Hubbard asking to be laicized as a general application of a rule despite vociferously denying the allegations against him, even though Hubbard is probably setting a better precedent for the Catholic Church. Then again, might this itself be because I used to admire Hubbard very much and thus feel more betrayed and disillusioned by the strong possibility that he’s a sex criminal? It often happens that our motives for how we receive an attempt to atone for wrongdoing are as mysterious to ourselves as our motives for attempting to atone in the first place are to our fellows.

I don’t think that going back to collectively and communally “acknowledging and bewailing our manifold sins and wickednesses,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer, himself someone who did many horrible things in his life and had many horrible things done to him in turn, would actually solve those mysteries. It might diffuse them somewhat and make them easier to bear, in the same way that I am able to think about Cardinal Ricard and Bishop Hubbard more or less at my leisure but would feel much more call to dwell on and perseverate on equivalent conversations if people were having them with me in private. Even so, taking the process of working through wrongdoing and making it the public’s or the community’s business is not something to do or to advocate lightly. For long years rural areas in several Western European countries had a custom called rough music or charivari, in which people guilty of crimes against social and familial order, such as adultery or domestic violence, were shamed in loud public processions rather than being turned over to the courts. (The title of this essay comes from a proverb about bad marriages.) Even though the aesthetic of this practice appeals to me and even though there is a lot to recommend public shaming over against (say) sending people to prison for years, rough music was a form of lynch law at its core.

Yet not every public confession of wrongdoing or public airing of grievances must involve as stark and extreme an intervention in someone’s life as charivari. If a society does make penitence and atonement everybody’s business, it provides paths to actual reintegration in a web of moral actors that simply letting guilt gnaw at individuals in private does not. It is worth applying a renewed emphasis to this at least in liturgical penitential contexts, and I would argue in secular contexts as well. For that renewed emphasis to be workable in secular settings the practice of whipping up ideologized online hate mobs would probably need to have a stake driven through its heart first, but that is itself what people used to call a win-win.

This is where I would like to, by way of a pithy and topical envoi, say “if you’ve never told anyone to commit suicide for disagreeing with you about what fictional characters should have sex with each other, you’ve nothing to fear.” Unfortunately, this isn’t true—there is always a great deal to fear in this world, and especially a great deal to fear when it comes to confiding and being vulnerable around other people in their multitudes. I would submit, however, that letting that fear rule us, letting it induce constant defensiveness to the point of privatization of sin, has led us places that are even worse by far.

Reading Narnia in My Late Twenties

A couple of years ago I reread the Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels by the British literary figure C.S. Lewis. The series was one that I devoured and greatly enjoyed as a preteen, although it was never as personally important to me as the work of Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien, and I became interested in seeing how it held up when I became aware of the sizeable, politically and intellectually fractious fandom that the books have online. Moreover, I’ve been reading a lot of Lewis’s non-Narnia writing over the past several years, mostly due to having fallen in with a number of people who greatly admired it when I was in graduate school.

The Narnia books are the only works that Lewis wrote for children; the rest of his literary output consists of academic writing on medieval and Renaissance literature, works of popular philosophy and theology of varying but mostly high quality, and a variety of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories for adults, some of them excellent and some of them less so. Lewis had become an atheist in his youth and returned to the practice of Christianity in his early thirties, and much of his work assumes a culturally Anglican but philosophically skeptical audience. There is a lot to admire about his gentle, humane perspective and writing style; however, the man and the writing are far from perfect. Some of his work is gallingly sexist or racist; some is poorly-argued or about subject matter of dubious relevance or importance; some of his science fiction short stories in particular are much more amoral than the rest of his body of work. For the most part he is “to the left of” Tolkien politically and theologically, but he is still firmly right-of-center and he talks about current political and social issues a lot more than Tolkien does.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a cottage industry emerged, particularly in Britain, of criticizing the Narnia books on all sorts of grounds related to Lewis’s religious beliefs, political positions, and personal prejudices as expressed in the books’ writing style, thematic emphases, and plots. Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials series of young adult fantasy novels, emerged as a particularly fierce critic of the books’ Christian thematic content—one of the connecting threads of all seven novels is Aslan, the Great Lion, the creator of the Narnian world and a manifestation of Jesus Christ in a world populated by talking animals, as whose agent most of the protagonists act. I do not feel like addressing these criticisms in depth and checking their validity was not one of my reasons for rereading the books; however, I do acknowledge them and believe that some (but not all) of them are responding to genuine problems with the books and with Lewis’s worldview.

The Narnia books were published in one order but have a different internal chronology. I read them according to the internal chronology; this is apparently how Lewis preferred that they be read, but he did not have particularly strong feelings on the subject and many fans elect to ignore him. Personally I think that both orders have their strong points and weak points; first-time readers will better follow the overall narrative by reading the books in chronological order, but the order of publication carries on a more complete plotline for the first four books.

The first thing that struck me about the books is that their casual, conversational style is clearly intended for children—contrast the stark-yet-prolix style of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—but more literate children, or at least children more willing to consult a dictionary, than children’s authors today seem to assume exist. (I myself had to look up the word “apophthegm” and a slang use of the word “brick” that is dated now but might not have been at the time that the books were written.) The Magician’s Nephew, the book that I started with, involves human children from around the turn of the twentieth century being present at the Narnian world’s creation; travel between different universes was not the commonplace in science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s when the books were published that it is now, so Lewis spends some time explaining the concept in addition to showing instances of it. The setting’s earthly timeframe is introduced with observations like “schools were usually nastier than now. But meals were nicer.” Child readers are invited to imagine themselves in the days “when your grandfather was a child” via comparisons involving things with which they will be familiar.

The comparisons of various things in the stories to the British education system in particular persist throughout the books; one of the few good things Lewis has to say about the culture of Calormen, an Arabian Nightsistan-type country in the Narnian universe that figures prominently in two of the later books, is that “story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” British educational culture in the 1940s, which was transitioning to more humane disciplinary methods and a more modern, science-oriented curriculum relative to the “nasty” schools of the 1890s and 1900s, also comes in for attack. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which feature children transported to Narnia from around the end of or just slightly after World War II, involve a progressive boarding school called “Experiment House” with discipline so lax that it produces loathsome priggish brats at best and sadistic bullies at worst. Lewis’s depiction of Experiment House is part of a sustained satirical criticism of the social policies of the postwar Labour Party government, one in which he also ridicules as faddish the progressive convictions (vegetarianism, republicanism, pacifism, etc.) of one of the main characters’ parents and laments the decline and eventual demolition of a previously well-off character’s country house. One wonders what possible educational philosophy Lewis would have presented positively in the books. Perhaps he was simply mindful of his audience and aware that most children would rather not be in school than be there, unless they are abused or very lonely at home.

In addition to being better able to perceive the political content in Lewis’s depictions of the education system in the books now that I’ve done considerable time at every level of my own country’s education system myself, I’m also a lot more conscious of the books’ circumscription of sexuality. Obviously a children’s book series can’t and shouldn’t be sexually explicit, but it’s remarkable how little even implied sexuality figures into the lives of even the adult characters. This is something that Pullman criticized fiercely due to his inference of an attack on female sexuality in particular from the fact that one major character, Susan Pevensie, is absent in The Last Battle because she would rather focus on “nylons and lipstick and invitations” than on coming to Narnia’s aid in the world’s death throes. (Personally, I think that the idea that the only reason a twenty-one-year-old woman would be interested in looking put-together and getting invited to things is that she’s looking for sexual partners is itself profoundly sexist, although there are other things about Lewis’s decision to single out Susan in The Last Battle that I do take exception to.)

There is one notable exception to this feature of the books, also involving Susan. In The Horse and His Boy, which is the first (and less racist) of the two books to feature Calormen, Susan and her three siblings have been living in Narnia ruling it as kings and queens for fourteen years and have grown to adulthood there (which will subsequently be reversed when they finally return to England). Susan is contemplating a political marriage to Prince Rabadash, the eldest son and heir of the Tisroc (may he live forever!) of Calormen. At first, when Rabadash visits her in the capital of Narnia, she’s charmed and more than willing to go through with the marriage; however, when she visits him in the Calormene capital, she finds that at home he is a petty, capricious tyrant, and tries to call the marriage off. At this point Rabadash attempts to imprison her in Calormen and she and her brother Edmund have to escape via subterfuge. Rabadash then spends the rest of the book attempting to invade Narnia to abduct her. He insists that Susan is obliged to become his wife because he wants her to and because he perceives it as good for Narnia to be allied to Calormen; when discussing the fact that she sees things very differently, he calls Susan a “false jade.” Most readers will take this term to mean something like “liar” or “deceiver” but in fact it is an archaic euphemism for a prostitute—shades of self-ordained “nice guys” today who call women “sluts” and “whores” for not wanting to have sex with them. Rabadash, naturally, is resoundingly defeated by the book’s heroes and heroines. The Horse and His Boy’s perceptiveness about this particular type of male sexual mentality, to my mind, covers a multitude of the series’ sociopolitical sins.

I was surprised by how much I liked The Horse and His Boy in general. It is an atypical Narnia book in a number of different respects. A good friend of mine says it feels the most like a “typical fantasy novel” in that it is set entirely in the Narnian world, has relatively scanty religious content, and has protagonists who take their quest on themselves rather than having it handed down to them as a mission from God. It’s a story about freedom and slavery, and a story about knowing that the place where you are or the place where you are from is not really “home.” Our male protagonist Shasta is fleeing being sold into slavery by his cruel foster-father in Calormen; our female protagonist Aravis, a Calormene noblewoman, is fleeing a forced marriage to a powerful man several times her age. Through coincidence (which does not actually exist in Narnia and is instead the will of Aslan), both Shasta and Aravis have horses in their lives who are in fact Narnian Talking Horses enslaved in Calormen, and the four of them set out for freedom in Narnia together.

 ❦

The Horse and His Boy represents Narnia as Anglo to the point of overt cultural chauvinism against the generically Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Calormen, a representation that becomes explicitly racialized in the second book to feature Calormen, the series finale The Last Battle. However, the themes in this book resonated strongly with me, as someone who has had a hard time making a “home”—family and friends and gainful and meaningful work and a rich religious life—in any of the various places I have lived. Although I have never been enslaved, I have definitely felt unfree in other ways and believe that there is something inimical to true freedom in the society in which I live. Calormen is, of course, a symbol appropriately overt and unmistakable for young readers—slavery and rigid hierarchies in general pervade every element of the empire’s society. “For in [the Calormene capital] Tashbaan there is only one traffic regulation,” says Lewis, “which is that everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important; unless you want a cut from a whip or a punch from the butt end of a spear.” Even a generally sympathetic Calormene character at one point casually threatens to beat her slaves to death, and Shasta is not initially appalled by the idea of his foster-father selling him into slavery because for all he knows his buyer might be less abusive. C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to a fan that The Horse and His Boy is about “the calling and conversion of the heathen”; I prefer Lewis’s still-living stepson Douglas Gresham’s belief that it is about the experience of longing and the desire to be Someplace Else.

The Last Battle involves a Calormene invasion of Narnia under the aegis of a Narnian Talking Ape who sets up a phony Aslan to encourage Narnian collaboration with the invaders. The heresy that ultimately leads to the end of the Narnian world is the idea that Aslan and the Calormene god Tash are the same being. Many people have a difficult time understanding the book’s interfaith stance, largely because Lewis was writing before today’s main positions on interfaith issues were fully developed. Muslim readers have seen something sinister in the book’s depiction of Tash and Aslan as not only separate but antithetical; since Calormene society is generically “Middle Eastern,” could this not be taken as an allegorical repudiation of the idea (accepted in most circles but rejected by many Evangelicals and some very conservative Catholics) that the Abrahamic religions are worshipping the same God? But the Calormenes are not monotheists, and Tash has no real symbolic affinities with Allah; he’s described as a monstrous four-armed vulture-man, more akin to something out of pre-Abrahamic Semitic paganism or the Rigvedic pantheon than to the bodiless, appearance-less deity that Muslims confess. A devout worshipper of Tash is invited into Aslan’s paradise at the end of the book, because he sincerely and with a good heart sought the divine. But the book has absolutely nothing good to say about the worship of Tash as a religion, only about this particular devotee as an individual. The conventional interfaith stance that the book is closest to is probably inclusivism, which holds that members of religions other than that of the inclusivist can be saved, but not saved because their own religions are in themselves true. In online forums and social media sites there is much misunderstanding among Narnia fans of what exactly inclusivism entails and how it is different from other interfaith stances.

 ❦

The actual theology of the Narnia series is a little offbeat in general, and generates controversy even among conservative Christians who share most of Lewis’s sociopolitical hobbyhorses. Tolkien nominally disliked the books because of their magpieish mishmash of different real-world mythologies (as opposed to Tolkien’s attempt at self-consistency with his primarily Norse and Celtic influences), but I have read articles suggesting that he objected to their implied theology too. Some Evangelicals today object to the inclusivism in The Last Battle, which tends not to bother mainline Protestants or Catholics. Some Catholics object to the books’ fundamental premise that Jesus might take a nature other than humanity upon Himself in another world, which tends not to bother Protestants. Some mainline Protestants object to the gutless caricatures of philosophical liberalism in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, which tends not to bother Evangelicals or Catholics.

If I were asked to list three main theological concepts or premises present in The Chronicles of Narnia, here is what I would list:

1.      An integral, organic connection between humanity and the natural world. Humans, when present in Narnia, rule over the various Talking Beasts and mythological creatures as kings and queens, but there is nevertheless a certain ontological equality between human and Talking Beast nature, and indeed between Aslan the Great Lion and Jesus the Son of Man. Talking Beasts can and in some cases do lose the ability to speak and reason and revert to being normal animals; at the beginning of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, certain normal animals are chosen to become the first Talking Beasts. This is also implicit in the books’ inclusion of Classical figures such as Bacchus, Silenus, and various nymphs and dryads; the “natural” paganisms of Classical Antiquity coexist with and operate under the umbrella of the “supernatural” truths of Christianity.

2.      An emphasis on truth and reality. The Last Battle features a heavenly “real” version of Narnia in its final chapters, the phony Aslan is set up against the true Aslan, and the name of the Calormene who sought to serve Tash honestly and righteously is Emeth, Hebrew for “truth.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has “real water” that obviates the need for any other sustenance and enables its drinkers to look directly into the rising sun. In The Silver Chair Aslan is “The Real Lion.” Lewis wasn’t an empiricist and the series’ quasi-Platonism doesn’t have much of what people today would understand to be evidence to support it, but the books have no room or patience for postmodernity, relativism, or irony.

3.      A portrayal of God as a partner, protector, and friend before He is a father or king. Lewis would of course never deny the majesty or transcendence of God, but Aslan is primarily someone to be friendly with rather than someone to obey. The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy are to a certain extent exceptions to this since the characters are less personally close to Aslan than the extended Pevensie family and friends who are the protagonists of the other five books.

Of course, there are numerous other theological ideas present and asserted within the books. The first core concept that I mention here is itself part of a wider celebration and affirmation of the goodness of creation and the real comforts of the world that extends throughout Lewis’s body of work. Michael Moorcock called Lewis and Tolkien’s writings “Epic Pooh” that had a lulling and complacency-inducing effect on the reader; this may have some merit, but Lewis genuinely believed that there was much about the world worth celebrating rather than simply buckling under and submitting to. He doesn’t see the world “sacramentally” in the way that a Catholic like Tolkien would—Lewis likes Pilgrim’s Progress too much for that, and there doesn’t even seem to be any equivalent to the Eucharist in Narnia—but he doesn’t have the occasional Protestant distaste for the phenomenal world either. In The Four Loves, not one of his best nonfiction writings, he speaks highly of St. Francis’s denomination of his body as “brother donkey,” because donkeys are next to impossible either to hate or to revere.

 ❦

The first-published and best-known Narnia novels are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, about which I have not said much, less because they do not interest me and more because they will already be so familiar to most people with any interest in the series. They got pretty good movie adaptations in the late 2000s; they’re the only books to feature the “original” core human cast of the four Pevensie siblings (although each Pevensie has at least one further appearance). The movie adaptations have led to some odd interpretations of the characters among the series’ fans. Most notably, Susan, who in the books is a pragmatic and convention-minded person of average intelligence and slightly above-average drive, in the movies stays pragmatic but is also more book-smart and willful than Lewis wrote her. I do not want to pass judgment on whether the Narnia fandom’s adoption of Susan’s movie characterization has made most fans too inclined or not inclined enough to see the sexism in The Last Battle’s treatment of her. It certainly makes her relatively passive behavior in The Horse and His Boy (not appearing at the climactic battle nor interacting with Rabadash when he is finally punished for his misdeeds) harder to take into account.

There is a great deal more to be said about the Narnia books but these are the main impressions that come to mind at the time that I am writing this. In particular, there were several moments in The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in particular that were deeply meaningful to me as I read them but that I don’t really wish to discuss at any length in an essay like this. The two that come to mind right now are Aslan’s declaration of his steadfast presence in main male protagonist Shasta’s life in the former book and Lucy Pevensie’s ships-in-the-night instant feeling of kinship with a “fish-herdess” in an underwater kingdom in the latter. Maybe someday I will be more willing to address my feelings about these scenes logically and discursively. In that case I will have taken a great step towards fully understanding my own feelings on this touchstone series in the history of children’s fantasy literature.