if, as an author, you're going to do something as big as exclude someone from heaven (and I know Susan may get there eventually, but Lewis doesn't deign to show us this, and I think that's important, especially in a children's book), you need to think about who and why you're choosing a little more carefully than you might under other circumstances. Yeah, I think this is true. It's wrong to assume that Susan never ever gets to heaven, but what's shown and emphasized versus what's not shown and emphasized in a novel is certainly significant.
I think part of the problem here is, as I observed earlier, that so often any choice made by an author in our world is going to be a loaded one. A writer may not intend to imply anything about women in general when they choose to make a particular female character a vain person, but the implication is still there. Because that's how we're taught to read texts, and we've been taught to read texts that way because so often the implied judgment of women was indeed an intentional one (so much as we can say anything about an author's intentions in a given text).
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Date: 2005-08-31 01:33 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think this is true. It's wrong to assume that Susan never ever gets to heaven, but what's shown and emphasized versus what's not shown and emphasized in a novel is certainly significant.
I think part of the problem here is, as I observed earlier, that so often any choice made by an author in our world is going to be a loaded one. A writer may not intend to imply anything about women in general when they choose to make a particular female character a vain person, but the implication is still there. Because that's how we're taught to read texts, and we've been taught to read texts that way because so often the implied judgment of women was indeed an intentional one (so much as we can say anything about an author's intentions in a given text).