Part of the reason for the novel’s broader appeal, even in an increasingly secular age, is that it provides escapism and wish-fulfilment aplenty.
But what if we aren’t ‘sold’ on the Christian aspect of the story? Does the novel’s only value lie in its power as an allegory – or whatever term we might employ instead of allegory? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is, nevertheless, a novel in which Lewis draws on the Christian story of salvation through a godlike figure (Aslan’s sacrifice on the Stone Table, and subsequent resurrection, are clearly meant to summon the Crucifixion and subsequent Resurrection of Jesus Christ), in order to promote the Christian story. Certainly, there are subtle differences between Orwell’s novel in which animal characters ‘stand in’ for human counterparts, and what Lewis is doing with Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia. But if we stick with mid-twentieth-century fiction and animals for a moment, we can find an example of unequivocal allegory: George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), which we have analysed here. Readers might quibble over Lewis’s categorisation here, and decide that what he is outlining is a distinction without a difference (perhaps clouded by his Christianity, and his unwillingness to see his children’s books as ‘mere’ allegory for Christianity, but instead as something more direct and powerful).
Lewis: he wrote a whole scholarly work, The Allegory of Love, about medieval and Renaissance allegory. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference to many readers, but it’s worth bearing in mind that if anyone should know what allegory is, it’s C. Aslan is not like Jesus (allegory): he is Jesus’ equivalent in Narnia. We might think of this as something like the distinction between simile and metaphor: simile is like allegory, because one thing is like something else, whereas in metaphor, one thing is the other thing. But he doesn’t: he is Jesus, if Narnia existed and a deity decided to walk among the people of that world. In short, Lewis rejects the idea that his Narnia books are allegory because, for them to qualify as allegorical, Aslan would have to ‘represent’ Jesus. Lewis didn’t regard them as allegory: ‘In reality,’ he wrote, Aslan ‘is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” This is not allegory at all.’ Lewis book(s) that are Christian allegory, right?’ But C.
Say ‘ Chronicles of Narnia’ or ‘ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and many people will say, ‘Oh, the C. Nesbit, however, had also written portal fantasy novels (as had George MacDonald, such as his 1895 novel Lilith) involving children leaving our world behind for a fantastical other world: see her novel The Magic City, for example. Indeed, the Pevensie children were partly inspired by Nesbit’s Bastable children, who feature in a series of her novels, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers.
Lewis) as well as pioneering children’s novels by E. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a classic children’s novel which looks back to both earlier fantasy fiction by Victorian writers like William Morris and George MacDonald (the latter a particular influence on C.
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