The Horse and His Boy: Strong Female Characters

Because I loved their production of The Magician’s Nephew last year, I went to see the Shaw Festival’s 2019 production of that other seldom-adapted Narnia story, The Horse and His Boy.

This adaptation took a few more liberties with the original, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (particularly since the original is probably the most racist of the Chronicles, and that’s saying something). In fact, I appreciate that they clearly worked hard to adjust Lewis’s often-sexist tropes for the twenty-first century. However, one of their strategies for doing so made me uneasy, because although on the surface it seems to empower women, it does so by diminishing the traditionally feminine.

What did that look like? Well, the “good” and “strong” female protagonists became proficient physical fighters. Queen Susan not only rode to war as an archer but also engaged in hand-to-hand combat and actually beat up Prince Rabadash. To introduce her character, Aravis pranced onstage wielding two short swords and sparred with her father (and won). Later, she complained that Shasta got to go to battle when she was “the warrior.”

Similarly, the play’s Queen Lune charged into battle with as much vigour as the book’s King Lune. The now-female Hermit cheered them on from afar with enthusiastic praise of “women fighting in battle” — purposely recalling and subverting the phrasing Lewis used to have Father Christmas lecture that “battles are ugly when women fight” (LWW).

To contrast, the play put Lewis’s line about “nylons, lipsticks, and [party invitations]” in a character’s mouth to explicitly outline what strong women and girls don’t want to be like. Much as in the book, Aravis’s friend Lasaraleen’s extreme interest in traditionally feminine things (such as nice dresses, comfortable luxuries, and being pretty) is played for humour. Lasaraleen, we’re given to understand, is worse than Aravis because she’s interested in “silliness.”

I’m really uncomfortable with the idea that strength must mean physical strength through violence and that the traditionally feminine is necessarily weak. And I say that as the former little girl who loved to play with toy swords and hated nice dresses.

In my reading, Aravis was always a strong character, whether or not she was into swordplay. Her strength came from her insistence on being the captain of her own fate: she knows what she wants and takes action to get it. She acts to escape her unwanted arranged marriage; she quickly figures out how to turn the potential disaster of being recognized on the streets of Tashbaan into a workable plan. She insists that Shasta listen to her opinions and ideas, she is quicker to understand and analyse situations that he is, and she swallows her pride to apologize when she realizes she’s behaved badly. In other words, she takes charge of her own story.

Similarly, Susan didn’t have to become an enthusiastic warrior in order to be strong. It takes strength of character to realize you were wrong about a suitor and change your mind. Was Susan passive in the original book? Sure, but she was also kind-hearted, compassionate, and thoughtful. Instead of changing to story to have her her fight Rabadash with her fists, why not change it to emphasize the strength in those qualities?

For instance, according to the books, Susan is the type of person who feels compassion for enemies and opponents even as she has to kill or beat them. That’s an important way of being strong. Being an excellent archer (canon) but choosing not to go to war (canon) because killing is wrong (potential adaptation choice) could also be an important way of being strong. So is exercising mercy (or justice), standing up for your own needs even if they’re “inconvenient” to others, having emotional intelligence, or knowing how to make your appearance serve your goals.

The Horse and His Boy isn’t the only striving-for-equality story to fall into this trap, especially in genre fiction (e.g. fantasy, action). Heck, as a woman who leans what is traditionally considered masculine-of-centre, I’ve had a lot of learning to do about traditionally feminine things being as valid and worthy as the traditionally masculine.

But the trivial “oh, just make her physically formidable” method of building so-called strong female characters is a cop-out. Orchestrating cheesy scenes of the female Avengers kicking villainous butt isn’t the same as spending more time developing each of their personalities as vividly as Tony Stark’s, Steve Rogers’s, or Peter Parker’s. If a female character’s role is “prize for male protagonist to win at the end of the plot,” making her kick-ass doesn’t make her any more of a person — it just reflects the  storytellers’ new ideas of what makes a woman a “good” prize.

Instead, I’m excited to see more stories where traditionally feminine strengths are important and valued in characters of all genders — like 2017 Donald Duck’s love for his nephews and Steven Universe’s empathy and Peeta Mellark’s domestic skills. I want to see diverse representations of female strengths and flaws — like Captain Marvel’s physical power, yes, but also Hermione Granger’s nerdiness and Diane Lockhart’s conviction in her ideals and the My Little Ponies’ strong relationships. And also Captain Marvel’s arrogance, Hermione Granger’s high-handedness, Diane Lockhart’s occasional naivete, and the ponies’ vanity, selfishness, and stubbornness.

I’m not much into nylons and lipsticks personally, but I’d like to see stories where that’s important — where we recognize that girls like Lasaraleen aren’t necessarily silly. Why not a character who expresses themselves through make-up, just like other “not silly” characters get to express themselves through visual art or music? Or a character who knows how to navigate social classes in a society where that’s important if you want to survive and thrive. A diplomat whose “soft” power accomplishes what threats of force never could.

To be fair to the Shaw festival, all that would be difficult to accomplish with The Horse and His Boy — Lewis’s own prejudices are baked into most of his writing.

That’s why, although I love Narnia, and I love how modern productions handle our sharp divergences from some of Lewis’s moral conclusions, I’m also excited for the new fantasies, from artists Lewis and his fellow white, male contemporaries wouldn’t have considered worth listening to or perhaps even capable of telling interesting stories.