It was a Sunday, so the post should have had Christian content...Stonepicnicking_Okapi, a Dreamwidth blogger, came up with a wonderful set of blog prompts based on Internet-generated "holidays." One of those prompts was "Who is your favorite Tolkien character?"
I had difficulty enjoying Tolkien, as a child, because his characters are nearly all men, and middle-aged to old men at that. As an old lady I'm no longer so badly turned off by a cast of middle-aged to old men, but my favorite Tolkien character is still Galadriel. And even she doesn't get much of a part.
Oh of course Tolkien's blokes are lovable, each in his own way, once you decide to overlook the paucity of decent parts for girls to read in the story. Liking Gandalf and Bilbo and Frodo and Sam and Aragorn and the valiant Rohirrim and the animated trees, and even the best-appreciated-from-a-very-healthy-distance Great-Aunt Lobelia, is obligatory. Still, I admire Tolkien more for his poetic style, his use of archetypes, and his phenomenal linguistic talents, than for his characters, anyway.
His old friend and/or critic C.S. Lewis did better with characters, I think, despite certain inherent weak points. I admire Lewis's characters partly because of Lewis's personal weak points. Lewis was both motherless and sisterless in a time when popular culture taught young men that they weren't supposed to understand women, or even like them much. Give them babies, then go and get killed and leave them a good pension, seemed to be the ideal. So Lewis pottered along, lonely, grumpy, unattractive, well into middle age, and then he bonded with a woman who didn't seem to be as much his type even as Tolkien was. But readers can tell why he loved Helen Joy Davidman so. Whatever she did or didn't have in looks, money, or connections, she whipped his characters into shape and made it possible for him to write about human relationships beyond prep school and military life. Lewis did learn how to write decent parts for women--far better than men usually do, because Lewis did not overestimate the proportion of his women characters' thoughts that had to do with men.
Admiring Peter and loving Lucy, in the Narnia books, is mandatory. Lucy is after all based on the godchild who moved into the "grandchild" slot in Lewis's mind, and Peter is an Ideal Self. They do no wrong. There's also much to be said for Reepicheep, and the friendly hrossa, and Puddleglum, the pessimist who has gone through life being told he's far too optimistic. Emeth, the (Calormene, not Arab) warrior who encounters (Aslan, not Jesus) in the place where he expected (Tash, not Muhammad) to be, is a literary triumph; very little is said about Emeth, but readers have no alternative to liking him.
I think my favorite Lewis character may be Orual, in Till We Have Faces, an odd, isolated novel that takes time to grow even on Lewis fans. It is Pagan rather than Christian. Orual is a barbarian queen, considered ugly, lonely--a bit like Lewis's pre-Christian self--good at leading her barbarian army, but the story is about her spiritual journey to confront "the gods" who have adopted her sister into their tribes. (Lewis's vision of the Greek "gods" looks a bit like Tolkien's Elves.) You have to sit with the message Orual brings back to humankind, and during that time you have to have worked through bereavement for yourself, in order to appreciate the story or Orual. I didn't, when I read an old battered first edition of the book at age sixteen. I do now.
It could be argued that most good writing in English has been done by Christians and therefore most of the good characters in English literature belong on a list of favorite characters in Christian literature, too. Elvira Ware, surely one of the most lovable and relatable heroines of romance of all time, certainly aings a lot of Christian songs, but the overall purpose of Jubilee seems to me (arbirtrarily, but not without study of Margaret Walker's nonfiction) more Humanist than Christian. Huckleberry Finn is driven to a point where his conflict of loyalties leads to the resolution, "All right then, I'll go to Hell," in a way that adults tend to read as evidence that he's on the long hard road to Heaven; but his story, likewise, is addressed to a general audience, is not evangelical, and therefore seems more Humanist than Christian to me.
Dorothy Sayers' detective stories were more Humanist than Christian in their author's own mind. It seems ironic that Peter Wimsey, well educated as he is in Christian culture and literature, is not a Christian, but there we are. He always has the right quote from the Bible or a Christian poem, but he never seeks comfort in prayer. Peter and his beshert, Harriet Vane, are likable and enjoyable, even down to their faults. Their author intended them to have faults, some of which they gradually outgrow in the series, some of which they don't. But the stories are part of Christian literature only in the broad sense that, as potboilers, they were written to fund the thought and research that went into The Mind of the Maker.
Nevertheless, I've always loved one of the minor characters in the Wimsey stories: Miss Climpson. She plays a real speaking part in only two of the novels but is mentioned in the others. Friends call her Kitty, short for Katharine, and she cheerfully refers to her employment agency for other single and widowed women as "The Cattery." At a time when women were supposed to be able to marry for money, but many weren't, Miss Climpson affirms that nature itself teaches us that women are meant to do a lot of other things besides having babies. "Just being a good wife and mother" is all very well but, at best, it lasts less than half of a woman's active lifetime. Recognizing their employability is the only decent way society can deal with the "useless" women who are not and will never become mothers, or, perhaps, even wives.
The Christian literature of the period was desperately in need of Miss Climpson, whose cozy eccentricity (and knitting) probably inspired Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (who appeared in print a little later). And it still is. Young women always need to be reminded that motherhood is one of those hazardous duties to which a vocation needs to be absolutely clear. "Just being a good mother" is indeed a lovely and divine vocation for those who really have it. Tragically, women who aren't careful often give birth in a complete absence of any vocation to motherhood--and this is the biggest problem facing humankind today.
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