Yeah. It's all downhill from here. Make sure to check out the dedication in The High King when you get to it, too -- ick.
I don't remember how much of this I noticed and was bothered by when I read them as a child -- my memories of the series overall was pretty darn fuzzy after thirty-odd years since I last read it, and they were library copies so I wasn't able to endlessly reread them like I did books I owned. I suspect it's rather telling that, prior to the reread, whenever I tried to think of the handful of rare genre heroines I adored and identified with as a little girl, Eilonwy never came to my mind...all the initial promise of a girl who was brave and actually got to DO STUFF was so annoyingly undercut by both other characters and the author as the series went along. I may not have liked Lewis' editorializing about girls in combat, or his treatment of Susan in the last book, but at least in Narnia there were a bunch of girls of different ages and personalities, and they weren't treated so much like being female made them part of an alluring but incomprehensible alien species. :(
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Date: 2010-03-13 05:45 pm (UTC)I don't remember how much of this I noticed and was bothered by when I read them as a child -- my memories of the series overall was pretty darn fuzzy after thirty-odd years since I last read it, and they were library copies so I wasn't able to endlessly reread them like I did books I owned. I suspect it's rather telling that, prior to the reread, whenever I tried to think of the handful of rare genre heroines I adored and identified with as a little girl, Eilonwy never came to my mind...all the initial promise of a girl who was brave and actually got to DO STUFF was so annoyingly undercut by both other characters and the author as the series went along. I may not have liked Lewis' editorializing about girls in combat, or his treatment of Susan in the last book, but at least in Narnia there were a bunch of girls of different ages and personalities, and they weren't treated so much like being female made them part of an alluring but incomprehensible alien species. :(