A darker ignorance: C. S. Lewis and the nature of the fall

Mythlore, Summer, 2003 by Mary R. Bowman

Even within the Narnia books there is an admixture of childhood and adulthood in the children that might call such an assumption into question, though this is not an issue dealt with centrally in these books. Manlove remarks (with disapproval) that "Lewis, basically, wants his children to behave like adults. They are to grow up spiritually [...] but also they are to learn to manage their world. [...] We have to see them at once as children and as 'grown-up' in relation to Narnia" (122-23). While Manlove regards this as a flaw ("In asking us to believe in his children both as children and as adults, Lewis is sometimes in danger of forfeiting our belief in them as either" 123), it might also suggest that Lewis held less firmly than some to the idea that being a child and having adult responsibilities are contradictory.

Looking outside the Narnia series, we can see Lewis addressing this issue more directly, notably in his comments on Milton's prelapsarian innocents, and in their Venusian counterparts. In fact, he describes the experience of reading Paradise Lost as having jolted him out of the common preconception of Adam and Eve's childishness. He "had come to the poem," he reports, with just such an expectation, "associating innocence with childishness" and "hop[ing] to be shown [Adam and Eve's] inarticulate delight in a new world which they were spelling out letter by letter, to hear them prattle." In so doing, he states, he was expecting "something which Milton never intended to give and which, if he had given it, would have gratified a somewhat commonplace taste in me and would have been hardly consistent with the story he had to tell." Having rid himself of these preconceptions, Lewis comes to conclude that "[t]he whole point about Adam and Eve is that, as they would never, but for sin, have been old, so they were never young, never immature or undeveloped. They were created full-grown and perfect" (Preface 116).

This idea that paradisal innocence and even inexperience are coupled with adult intelligence and judgment becomes a key element in the depiction of the Lady of Perelandra. What Manlove observes but regrets in the Narnia children is made explicit in the Lady: she is a mixture of the childlike and the adult, unknown on the fallen Earth, as revealed in her reaction to one of her learning experiences: "At this point she clasped her hands and a smile such as Ransom had never seen changed her. One does not see that smile here except in children, but there was nothing of the child about it there" (61). And as critics have often observed, she is not the naive child of Lewis's pre-Milton expectations, but rather, as Wayne Shumaker describes her, "a creature without much experience of life but endowed with enormous intellectual power" (61). Similarly, Manlove observes a mature intellect at work during the temptation that coexists with her innocence:

She is both guilelessly trusting and intellectually rigorous during the temptation: though she trusts both to be speaking the truth and, knowing nothing of evil [...], cannot perceive the moral difference between the arguers and their arguments, she is at the same time of a razor-sharp lucidity that demands that a case made be thoroughly water-tight. (61)