Narnia Recap: Edmund has followed Lucy into the wardrobe and found himself lost and alone in the magical land of Narnia. Edmund calls for Lucy, but thanks to Narnia Time, she has been in the world long enough to leave the immediate area of the portal. A woman riding in an expensive sleigh pulls up and introduces herself to Edmund as the Queen of Narnia; she demands to know what Edmund is. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Chapter 4: Turkish Delight
"My poor child," she said in quite a different voice, "how cold you look! Come and sit with me here on the sledge and I will put my mantle round you and we will talk."
Edmund did not like this arrangement at all but he dared not disobey; he stepped onto the sledge and sat at her feet, and she put a fold of her fur mantle round him and tucked it well in. [...]
The Queen took from somewhere among her wrappings a very small bottle which looked as if it were made of copper. Then, holding out her arm, she let one drop fall from it onto the snow beside the sledge. Edmund saw the drop for a second in mid-air, shining like a diamond. But the moment it touched the snow there was a hissing sound and there stood a jeweled cup full of something that steamed. [...]
"It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating," said the Queen presently. "What would you like best to eat?"
"Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty," said Edmund.
The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle onto the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now, and very comfortable.
Raise your hand if you read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child and wanted nothing more than to taste this strange "Turkish Delight" concoction that was apparently so good that it could cause you to be warm and cozy in the coldest winter and would bring you to betray your own family for more of it. I know I did.
I can't have been the only one: I remember when the most recent movies were coming out, several articles ran fluff pieces about how the candy wasn't particularly that good and that quite a few children were going to be terribly disappointed should they ever have a chance to try the stuff.
Wiki has this to say about Turkish Delight:
Turkish delight or lokum is a family of confections based on a gel of starch and sugar. Premium varieties consist largely of chopped dates, pistachios and hazelnuts or walnuts bound by the gel; the cheapest are mostly gel, generally flavored with rosewater, mastic, or lemon. The confection is often packaged and eaten in small cubes dusted with icing sugar, copra, or powdered cream of Tartar, to prevent clinging.
They're gel cubes. The more expensive ones suspend nice things in the gel -- nuts and fruit, mostly -- but they're essentially gel cubes. And may I just say that if I have a choice, I'd rather eat the ones dusted with sugar than with cream of Tartar! But I certainly wouldn't want to eat a whole box of these things.
(Interestingly, you can buy them from Amazon, or there are online recipes, if you're feeling adventurous.)
In re-reading this book, I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene. This is a lynchpin scene for the entire book -- literally everything that will happen in the novel from here on out will be a logical result of this scene here. Edmund is (supposedly) seduced to the side of evil, and his price is a foamy beverage and a box of sugar-dusted gel cubes. As Judas had his blood money; so it seems that Edmund must have blood candy.
I find myself wondering, therefore, why gel cubes? Were they picked at random by Lewis or as something he knew his younger relations were especially fond of? Was the confection a rarity in London at the time and therefore especially valuable, like a candy version of (something else I haven't bothered to taste) rare caviar? Or is there a symbolic meaning behind the candy -- perhaps, that the insubstantial, un-fulfilling, and utterly non-nutritious nature of the candy is analogous to the wages of sin? Is there a meaning behind the name Turkish Delight that Lewis hoped to invoke? Can a good English boy want a confection that is heavily associated (according to Wikipedia) with the Eastern Orthodox church?
These are the thoughts that keep me up at night, I swear.
While he was eating the Queen kept asking him questions. At first Edmund tried to remember that it is rude to speak with one's mouth full, but soon he forgot about this and thought only of trying to shovel down as much Turkish Delight as he could, and the more he ate the more he wanted to eat, and he never asked himself why the Queen should be so inquisitive. [...]
At last the Turkish Delight was all finished and Edmund was looking very hard at the empty box and wishing that she would ask him whether he would like some more. Probably the Queen knew quite well what he was thinking; for she knew, though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.
This is another major speed-bump in the "Edmund as Traitor" narrative: Edmund has been given magical food by the villain.
Food has a long history of being an important motivator in people's actions, particularly in the ancient mythological sources that Lewis draws so much of his material from. The food of the underworld compels anyone -- even a goddess like Persephone -- to remain in the underworld even against their wishes; the pomegranate seeds that Persephone ingested force her to spend several months of the year in Hades with her husband. The food Circe served Odysseus' men turned them into pigs and wild beasts; the men instantly shed their humanity and became pets for her garden and food for her tables. Ambrosia, the food of the gods, confers immortality on those who consume it; again, regardless of the wishes of the already-existing gods.
These are stories about the power of food, and it's not surprising that food is considered powerful in older stories. To modern, wealthy audiences, food is a pleasure, but to ancient, poorer audiences, food was a necessity. You lived or died by the food that you ate. Some foods made you sick, other foods killed you -- it wasn't a stretch of the imagination that certain foods could rob you of your freedom and compel you to do things against your will.
That food was dangerous was a fact of life, but also a source of drama -- you had to eat, after all, and thus was every meal a source of potential danger. Not even the gods were immune from the danger of ingesting something secretly terrible: Tantalus was confined to Tartarus for holding a banquet for the gods and serving his son as the entree. Surviving myths held that only Demeter, in her constant sorrow, was tricked, but I'm convinced that earlier, less-reverent versions of the same tale featured all the gods being duped. The story packed a meaningful punch: no matter how powerful you became, your friends could still poison you at the dinner table.
Knowing this classical history as Lewis must have, it is simply not enough to provide us with a scene where Edmund ingests magical food from a villain -- food so powerful that the eater will do anything to have more, even to the point of gorging himself to death -- and then never attempt to justify how Edmund can still be seen as a traitor acting on his own free will.
"Son of Adam, I should so much like to see your brother and your two sisters. Will you bring them to see me?"
"I'll try," said Edmund, still looking at the empty box.
"Because, if you did come again -- bringing them with you of course -- I'd be able to give you some more Turkish Delight. I can't do it now, the magic will only work once. In my own house it would be another matter." [...]
"It is a lovely place, my house," said the Queen. "I am sure you would like it. There are whole rooms full of Turkish Delight, and what's more, I have no children of my own. I want a nice boy whom I could bring up as a Prince and who would be King of Narnia when I am gone. While he was Prince he would wear a gold crown and eat Turkish Delight all day long; and you are much the cleverest and handsomest young man I've ever met. I think I would like to make you the Prince -- some day, when you bring the others to visit me."
This scene is not the seduction of a young mind from the principles of good-but-boring to the side of evil-but-exciting; this scene reads -- to me -- as the witch manipulating Edmund through the magical hypnosis she has cast upon him.
She's fed him magical food -- food that appeared to be Turkish Delight because that was what Edmund most wanted at the moment -- and now she's using that word as a hypnotic trigger to plant a command in Edmund's mind: He will obey her. He will bring his siblings to her. He will come directly to her house. Magical hunger will torment him day and night until he completes this command. Tur-kish de-light, tur-kish de-light, tur-kish de-light. This isn't the seductive serpent in the garden -- this is the Imperius curse.
Then one more command comes up, and it is a command that has unintended consequences:
"And, by the way," said the Queen, "you needn't tell them about me. It would be fun to keep it a secret between us two, wouldn't it?"
The witch seals Edmund from telling the others about this visit. This will, I believe, crop up in a way that the witch doesn't intend in Chapter 5.
73 comments:
I almost wonder if it was chosen *because* many children have no idea what it is - after all, it has "delight" in the name, it must be the best candy EVER, but nobody knows where to get any and nobody's parents know how to make it, so you're left picturing chocolate and sugar and meringue and ambrosia and trying to imagine what a candy named delight could be - and Turkish, at that! Some sort of magical confection served in a colourful tent on a golden platter by a gaggle of belly dancers, while a dragon and a phoenix play cards in the background?
Don't you have Turkish Delight in the States? I wasn't a child in Lewis's time, of course, but I do remember it as being a fairly common treat from my childhood.
It's nicer than 'gel cubes' makes it sound. The kind most commonly eaten in England thirty-odd years ago, at least, was sweet and rose-scented. I don't know about US candy, but jelly sweets of various kinds are a fairly major part of the English tradition. Turkish Delight would be kind of the gourmet variety: not what you'd expect to find in the corner shop, and probably not something an English child could afford to buy with pocket money. It'd be a delicacy you'd only expect to get at Christmas or if an uncle made a rare visit bringing gifts.
Given that, it's not a bad choice: it's a sweet that children would always have to depend on adults to provide, and adults probably wouldn't provide it nearly as often as a Turkish Delight-loving child could wish. Sweets within a child's regular reach would taste very different - they'd be flavoured with fruit rather than flowers - and all in all, it's very much a luxury food for Edmund. Non-nutritious, hard to obtain, and since it's wartime, probably in even shorter supply than usual as it'd have to be imported. Hence, an adult who could conjure it out of the air and promise to provide it whenever Edmund wanted would be an adult who offered a bewitching vision of a world entirely free from discipline and practicality.
Those are all reasons for it. But I suspect the words themselves are also important. I certainly wouldn't put it past Lewis to play the 'Oriental despotism' card. Not for a moment - especially when the word 'Delight' can also be conveniently repeated. The two words together manage to imply 'Oriental despotism' and decadent sensuality. Lewis, in Narnia at least, is extremely uncomfortable with sexuality, and most of his sensuality is focused around food - or at least, most of his open sensuality is; descriptions of the Snow Queen and Aslan have a certain eroticism to them which suggests that his sexual imagination was very preoccupied with power.
But with food, Lewis is openly sensual. Good food is sturdily English - buttered toast, bacon and eggs, that kind of thing, and when white Shasta encounters Western food for the first time, he reacts to it with a kind of instinctive delight that almost implies bacon is a race-memory for him in a piece of essentialism worthy of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Vegetarianism, as we've mentioned previously, is a sign of bad character. I fear that Turkish Delight also has its moral place in Lewis's scheme of things: rather than being hearty and wholesome, it's decadent and addictive.
Also notable is the way Lewis places a moral value on communal eating, of course. Food eaten in company is usually a good thing, and offering food is usually a sign of hospitality. The Snow Queen, by producing food outdoors rather than in and failing to partake herself, is indicating her malignity: beyond the soothing glow of the hearth-fire that twinkles on the teapot is beyond the pale. Good characters break bread and make a little home; bad characters eat the wrong food in the wrong ways.
This particular confusing bit of theology is reflected in much of Christianity. Satan has us all in our grasp, therefore God will throw us into hell for being mind controlled by a much more powerful being.
Kit Whitfield My sister brought some Turkish Delight back to the states for me after she spent a summer at Oxford in high school. I remember being horribly disappointed and kind of grossed out. Jelly based candy isn't really a thing here. Even jelly beans, despite the name, don't really involve jelly. Gummy bears are about as close as we get.
Being British, Turkish Delight was apparently far less of a mystery to me - indeed, I always thought of it as a rather ordinary, if not quite simple and sweet enough for most children. When I was introduced to Narnia, and read about Edward eating an entire box of the stuff and still wanting more, it seemed somewhat bizarre; I always thought that it would surely begin to feel sickly and unpleasant when you ate too much, and couldn't wrap my mind around wanting to eat a room full of the stuff, enchantment or no enchantment.
I never really developed a taste for garden-variety lokum. But then, I've never really cared for gel sweets in general. I would happily go without dessert, if the only thing on offer was a bowl of jelly/jell-o. Good pasha lokum, however, might be one of my favourite things ever. It's less like gel, and more like... Marshmallows, I suppose. Wonderful stuff. I've only ever had it once, unfortunately.
Bayley, that was pretty much exactly how I imagined it, too. There was probably a djinni in the background, too.
Kit, I think there's something to be said for the theory that Lewis is invoking Orientalism here. As you say, Lewis seems to be coming from a "pampering is bad for you" perspective where good people are created from hard circumstances, stiff upper lips, and good English comfort of the strong-food-and-warm-fires variety.
When things in the book turn cozy, they're cozy in an almost savory sense: bread and butter, bacon and fat, warm fires, comforting-but-probably-scratchy blankets. Any time sweetness is brought in: sugar, sweets, silk, and sensuality, it seems to evoke a sense of wrongness.
I do not know if this is a product of Lewis' religion or culture, or if it's a natural extension of wartime making sugar scarce. Or maybe I'm coming from a more sensual American background where sweets and silk pillowcases are regarded as a perfectly normal and not especially expensive (relatively speaking, as always) luxury, and therefore just another normal fact of life. Or, alternately, I'm reading too much into the text and the other Pevensie children don't have/crave sweets because they're too busy fighting wolves and rescuing fauns.
I never knew what Turkish Delight was - the first time I read the books, my mind had conjured up a candy something like a very ornate and complex version of peanut brittle, and that's what it's been ever since. o_O
I have no idea how anyone could eat a whole box of that stuff at once. One piece is enough to set up a tingly sharp-cheddar feeling in my cheeks just from the richness and sugar overload of it, and two makes me start to feel a bit queasy for the same reason.
The whole idea of "hearty=good; exotic/indulgent=bad" reminds me of "Eight Cousins" where Uncle Alec takes away Rose's 'frills and furbelows', her coffee and treats, etc. and gives her plain but looser clothes, milk, thick bread and porridge. The contrast being that Rose really was sallow and enjoyed being spoiled, and needed a healthier lifestyle; it wasn't just about all the trappings of wholesomeness where the author seems to be running on equal doses of nostalgia and "Kids These Days".
Lucy sits for a comfy, homey tea in the home of a repentant would-be kidnapper and is the story's little darling; Edmund takes candy and gets in the stranger's car, said stranger being an actual kidnapper and murderer, and therefore becomes complicit in the villain's plans. Their actions parallel each other; both meet someone unknown who has villanous intentions, go into a place where that person has power and control, and take food from that person. But because Lucy's interaction was with someone who found himself unable to complete his intentions, she's given a 'no harm-no foul' pass, and Edmund is left as He Who Caused Aslan's Death.
Edmund's arc makes more sense from a Calvinist perspective. The Queen's Turkish Delight is a pretty clear symbol of sin, and by the doctrine of Total depravity, every human is essentially mind-controlled into sinning until direct intervention by God (as Edmund is later, in his big scene with Aslan).
(And that's why I'm not a Calvinist.)
I think the fact that Turkish Delight can be sickly in big quantities may be part of the point: it calls attention to how unnatural the magic is that Edmund wants to keep eating it.
I think the wartime bit of it can't be ignored. Even here in the States, people did without during the war. I remember my mother talking about the sort of "butter" you got during the war, and throughout my childhood, a stick of butter sat on the dining room table whether it made sense in the context of the meal or not. My mother never used the butter herself due to her severe heart problems, but she made sure it was there. Clearly, doing without proper butter in her early years had led my mother to associate a stick of butter with plenty, it had become a sort of totem to her.
I think that's going on with the Turkish Delight - which I always imagined tasting like honey, but far more exotic, because "Turkish"- it is a totem of plenty, and Edward is enjoying more of it than he should, by himself.
For one thing, a child could be expected to do this. I expect my husband to save a little bit of a special treat for me because he is an adult. I don't expect an 8 year old to do so. For another, it's magical, what chance does the poor boy have?
As you say, Lewis seems to be coming from a "pampering is bad for you" perspective where good people are created from hard circumstances, stiff upper lips, and good English comfort of the strong-food-and-warm-fires variety.
Given how petty Lewis often is in the Narnia books, it might be as simple as 'He didn't personally have a sweet tooth.' There's plenty of love for pampering of the right variety; in fact, Lucy's much more comfortable in her visit than Edmund is in this scene, and sensual comfort is a running theme in the stories.
But I think it's also conservative nationalism. Traditional English fare doesn't make much of desserts. Tumnus offers Lucy cakes, and the Knight in The Silver Chair serves them up as well, and Caspian's ship carries honey (according to Amazon Search Inside), so it's not that sweet food is completely taboo. If it's cooked to an English recipe, it's fine. The swipes at the Scrubbs' diet and Shasta's instinctive preference for Western fare suggest that Lewis loads a lot of moral implications onto personal tastes (not just in food, but in literature, furnishings and pretty much every lifestyle choice), and his imagination is essentially colonial. You eat the food of the motherland if you're the right sort.
I find gelatin in anything but extremely small or dilute quantities will make me very queasy. Since I have a typical sugar-saturated American palate, I think it's not the sweetness.
I can't imagine gelatin-queasiness is totally common here, though -- if I've learned anything from James Lileks' Institute of Official Cheer, it's that Americans practically inhaled gelatin during the Great Depression... or at least their cookbooks claim they did. ;)
It's interesting to hear what different people imagined the Turkish Delight as being. Peanut Brittle was definitely one of the things I thought of, because that was in the fancy Christmas food catalogs that my parents received every year and it was easy to imagine that Turkish Delight might be something similar. Other times, I imagined if might be something fluffy like a meringue -- the text states they are light and airy. Such mystery!
I remember I had similar difficulties imagining "Divinity" growing up. I still can't picture what that tastes like -- it's water, corn syrup, sugar, vanilla, egg whites, and... pecans? What the heck does THAT taste like? Is it really divine? I suspect at this point, no matter WHAT it tastes like, I'd be disappointed by the build up. :P
Speaking of literary confections ruined by the build-up, has anyone else tried the Willy Wonka brand sweets they're putting out over here now? I bought some and found them dreadful, but NOTHING could live up to THAT legend. :)
It may be the result of inferior ingredients (or an unfortunate interaction resulting from the pecans, which always seem a bit musty to me), but when I made divinity it tasted like stale sugar and not much else. ^_^;; The merengues, on the other hand, came out just fine.... :-D
On the topic of gelatin, and I have not even ATTEMPTED to Snopes this, so it may be a total urban legend, supposedly some researchers are working on a human-based gelatin:
http://news.onlinefoodgrocery.com/food-news/171/human_based_gelatin_created_by_chinese_researchers.html
Original post: Raise your
hand if you read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child and wanted
nothing more than to taste this strange "Turkish Delight"
concoction that was apparently so good that it could cause you to be
warm and cozy in the coldest winter and would bring you to betray
your own family for more of it. I know I did.
Of course not. It's not worth being
forever after unhappy if you haven't got Turkish Delight in your
mouth at this very moment.
Reading the comments, apparently
Turkish Delight has very different connotations in Britain. The
American ones were comforting in their own way: “There's this candy
that, when you eat it (even if you were tricked into doing so), will
cause you to lead an unpleasant and unfulfilled life. Aren't you glad
it doesn't actually exist?”
I was not happy to find out that it
did, in fact, exist, and was somewhat apprehensive when I had an
opportunity to try a piece a couple years ago. My first thought was a
half-relieved half-disappointed* That must have taken
a lot of magic to make this good.
*Yes, I don't want addictive Turkish
Delight, but there's a middle ground between making everything else
seem bad in comparison and being itself bad.
BrokenBell: It's less like
gel, and more like... Marshmallows, I suppose. Wonderful stuff.
I dislike both jelly and marshmallows
for the same reason: they're both just lumps of sugar with nothing to
make them taste good. No chocolate, no flour and yeast and other
baked-good ingredients, nothing to form a symbiosis of deliciousness.
Ana: I remember I had similar
difficulties imagining "Divinity" growing up.
Never heard of it.
has anyone else tried the
Willy Wonka brand sweets they're putting out over here now?
I had a Wonka chocolate bar a long time
ago (seven years? Eight? I was pretty young). They were selling them at a
toy store Dad had taken us to in order to pass the time while Mom was
doing something. If I remember correctly, it was slightly better than
Hershey but not as good as Cadbury.
supposedly some researchers are working on a human-based gelatin
I heard about that. Not human per se, but yeast engineered to produce the human equivalents of the stuff they get from cows. Zero chance (as opposed to minuscule but not impossible) of mad cow disease, more predictable quality (that's why they make the yeast produce human gelatin instead of cow gelatin), and vegetarian. (Although apparently they're not planning yeast-based vegetarian Jello anytime soon; just medical gelatin. Can't imagine why.)
If I remember correctly, it was slightly better than Hershey but not as good as Cadbury.
A compote of sugar, vegetable fat and soil tastes better than Hershey. I first tasted one in my teens, knowing it was a popular brand in the US. I couldn't believe anyone would eat that yuk. (Don't get me started on Twinkies...)
I quite like Turkish Delight. It's not a sweet for very young children, on the whole. Here's a little anecdote about the first time I tasted it:
My brother and I were only allowed sweets on Saturdays, and we'd make a little trip to the shops; it was an event in the week. That day we went to a different shop. I couldn't really read well, so I picked out a bar based on the wrapping - a shiny bright pinky-purple colour*. It was, in fact, rose-flavoured Turkish Delight in a thin coating of chocolate.
I took a bite, and got such a shock that I burst into tears.
It didn't, in retrospect, taste that bad. It was just a bit startling to a tongue used to chocolate bars based on caramel, nuts and other richer-tasting stuff. My mother was nice enough to see my point and let me have something different, fortunately. I came to like them in later years, though that brand is pretty mass-produced-tasting...
*It looked like this: http://www.iheartcandies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/frys-turkish-delight-2.JPG
Kit, your story made me laugh out loud. I'm glad your mother was nice and helped de-traumify the experience. :)
the Last Sea tastes sweet as a sign of its holiness
I'd have to dig out my copy of the book to check, but it's possible in that context "sweet" just means "not salty" -- the word is used to indicate fresh water, sometimes. For a sea to be drinkable would certainly mark it as supernaturally benevolent.
>>>I certainly wouldn't put it past Lewis to play the 'Oriental despotism'
card. Not for a moment - especially when the word 'Delight' can also be
conveniently repeated. The two words together manage to imply 'Oriental
despotism' and decadent sensuality.
>>>Good food is sturdily English - buttered toast, bacon and eggs, that
kind of thing [...] Vegetarianism, as we've mentioned
previously, is a sign of bad character.
I'm getting flashbacks to The Flying Inn. Horrible, horrible flashbacks.
Well, Lucy describes the water as 'the loveliest thing I ever tasted', which implies more than just fresh and neutral-tasting.
My grandmother made Divinity when I was a child (she died in the mid-90's), and I haven't had any since. It's apparently a tricky thing to make - if there's too much ambient humidity it won't set properly - and my aunt who's tried to make it has never gotten good results. The best description I can come up with is a cross between fudge and marshmallows; it's made in bars and is soft, but it's also light and airy and not chocolate. A few years ago I had a mug of "white hot chocolate" at a cafe and thought it had a similar flavor.
Coincidentally, I spent much of my childhood thinking that Turkish Delight was something like Divinity dialed up to 11.
I went to the Narnia exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia not long after it opened, and tried one of the chocolate-covered Turkish Delight bars they had for sale. It was pretty terrible, and felt like I was eating jellied old-lady perfume.
Original post: Raise your hand if you read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child and wanted nothing more than to taste this strange "Turkish Delight" concoction that was apparently so good that it could cause you to be warm and cozy in the coldest winter and would bring you to betray your own family for more of it. I know I did.
Oh definitely. It was many, many years later that I discovered that as a child growing up the Pacific Northwest (and by the way, Twilight plot hole for you to discuss at your convenience: it is sunny almost all day every day from June trough August in Western Washington, there is usually about 2-3 solid weeks of sun before school lets out) I had actually been eating Turkish delight, in the form of Aplets and Cotlets. They are very nice (I suspect nicer than most because they are based on fruit puree and therefore a bit more substaintial) and I could definitely eat a whole box of them, but I doubt I would sell my soul for them unless they were enchanted fairy food.
I just love turkish delight, but only when it is the rosewater stuff covered in chocolate. I understand the chocolate is a non-authentic western addition, but I find it pretty boring without it.
I had no idea that it was unknown in America. My reading of the book is that Lewis definitely expected audience familiarity with the stuff, and it was not intended as a mystery. Otherwise, how could the audience make the comparison implicit in the phrase "several pounds of the best Turkish Delight"?
Also, the fact that Edmund can finish that sized box is definitely intended to telegraph its magical nature. I don't think many people, even adults, could eat a single pound without throwing up.
I had no idea what Turkish Delight was, but there's a version of it made in Washington by Liberty Orchards called Aplets and Cotlets. They make all kinds of flavors now, but Aplets (apple flavor) and Cotlets (apricot flavor) were the original varieties. I'm not sure of their availability out of state, but they're super easy to get here. They even sell them in the drug store. They were a special treat when I was growing up, so I am quite fond of them.
I'd sort of thought that was a reference to the fact that they'd been on a ship for quite some time without fresh, non-salt water. Spring water is very different from rain-barrel water, and exaggeration isn't unheard of after a long period of deprivation.
At any rate, re: the Turkish Delight:
As a child, I'd always conflated Turkish Delight and marzipan, because
that's another fancy-sounding candy that always came up in similar
contexts (though I'm not entirely sure why Narnia is a Christmas story
like The Nutcracker - perhaps it's the forever-winter aspect of the
story until the White Queen is killed).
I thought they were different words for the same thing and were a
chocolatey-caramel-honey-toffee sort of sweet. I knew that marzipan gets
pulled or moulded or something, from some old children's book, and I always
thought the "Turkish" part of Turkish Delight referred to a special
shape, similar to fancy geometric designs straight out of
Constantinople.
I'm also surprised by the lack of Turkish Delight in America. It's quite common in Australia (probably due to British heritage); Cadbury's assortment boxes always have a couple of TD in there, and it's common enough that you can find the more traditional (i.e. coated in icing sugar rather than chocolate) varieties at the deli section in most supermarkets here.
Rose-flavoured TD is probably my favourite sweet. Which is great, because my wife hates it, so I get it all.. :-)
I've had Aplets and Cotlets but didn't realize they were similar to Turkish delight until seeing the picture. Huh. Like many here, I found them too sticky to be delicious.
I think the symbolism is very clear: The food of Evil is sweet but unsatisfying while the food of Good has protein, vegetables and grains, and will leave you full of energy for further adventures. This stuck with me even when I read Narnia at the age of eight or nine.
I was very disappointed with Turkish Delight when I finally had it, but I had been imagining a rich, soft caramel-mocha toffee of some sort, I think, so my expectations were bound to be dashed.
For that matter, I grew up reading the Little House On The Etcetera books and thinking horehound candy must be delicious, and when I finally got some it was absolutely revolting to me. I just do not have the same tastes as Historic Literary Children, I guess.
What does horehound candy taste like?
And do you really not have marzipan in the States? In case not: it's a concoction of icing sugar and powdered almonds that sets fairly solid. It's traditionally used as a coating for Christmas cakes - a layer of marzipan and then a layer of royal icing over a fruit cake. It can also be mixed with food colouring and shaped into edible animals and the like. If it's made fresh from scratch, it's slightly grainy and pleasant-tasting in a nutty sort of way; if it's commercial and factory-made, it's smoother in texture and has a pretty overpowering taste of almond oil that I always found rather medicinal. Think amoretto.
I suspect it's traditionally a festive food more because it can be worked into decorative figures than because of its taste: it makes a visually pleasing gift. (And possibly was a way of using up the leftovers once you'd finished covering the cake?) But with the advances in moulded and coloured chocolate, it's become much less common because most people find chocolate tastes better.
For that
matter, I grew up reading the Little House On The Etcetera books and
thinking horehound candy must be delicious, and when I finally got some
it was absolutely revolting to me. I just do not have the same tastes
as Historic Literary Children, I guess.
Oh my goodness, I know precisely the scene you mean -- Little House in the Big Woods (the only one in that series that I really liked a lot) where they have the maple syrup party and pour out candy onto the snow to cool and it's lovely and all the children love their candy so much. And then everyone dances until they drop.
It's such a vivid scene, even after all these years.
(Incidentally, the books (but not the illustrations, alas) are available for free in eBook form on Mobile Reads: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35515 )
I imagine that the candy actually probably IS revolting. How not-surprising yet utterly soul-crushing. *wistful smile*
Oh, and Kit: We have marzipan here now that cake decorating has become a popular hobby, but it's not something most children are/were likely to taste "back in the day".
Actually, the sweets of my childhood were fairly limited: commercial chocolate bars (I hated them and grew up "not liking chocolate" until my 20th-ish birthday and a fateful present from Godiva's Chocolate), jelly beans and gummi bears (which I enjoy but make me sick in moderate quantities), caramels (yum), gums (meh), and various toffees and the like. I can't really recall much else -- I disliked "candy" as a child and always gave my Halloween haul to Mom and Dad to eat. (I did, however, insist on "organizing" the candy. I cannot tell you if there was a reason for that or not.)
American children have a lot more options available now, including much darker chocolates to try, if they desire. Oh, and things with cream in them, which is always nice.
(I hated them and grew up "not liking chocolate" until my 20th-ish birthday and a fateful present from Godiva's Chocolate)
Yeah, I have to say, I've tried various kinds of commercial American chocolate, and they were rubbish. Even Cadbury's was different (and worse) than the UK version. Well, See's chocolates from San Francisco were very nice, but the impression I got was that 'good' American chocolate was generally about as good as adequate UK chocolate, and 'average' American chocolate wasn't really chocolate at all.
This is changing with the growth of American Food Snobbery, thank goodness - the Lindt brand chocolates can be found now in most stores and are quite good in my opinion.
We still don't have rose water stuff, though, and this is notable in, say, Wiccan cookbooks - there's always at least one recipe calling for rose water and as an American you are left thinking "Wha---?"
I was bitterly disappointed when I found out what Turkish delight was, and I was twenty-something. I'd always imagined it to be something like baklava, the most exotic dessert I was familiar with - rich with honey and nuts, maybe less crumbly; something golden and remarkable and the perfect end to a spicy meal. (I don't think I had any familiarity with Turkish food, but most of the "foreign" food I knew about growing up was at least somewhat spicy.) Definitely not an "empty" food. Sometimes Lewis reminds me of Sir Roderick Spode, Wodehouse's fascist extraordinaire. English turnips! English bicycles! English breakfasts!
I also was really curious about the drink. I sort of imagined it like those little cans of "European" instant coffee mix; I think they came striped like the French flag and were all very exotic - caramel macchiato and praline mocha. Anyone else remember those? They didn't taste much like coffee or caramel or mocha, but they were sweet and creamy.
Marzipan tastes awful to me. I think it may be the almond extract. I love normal almonds, but almond extract and marzipan . . . not so much.
Horehound is one of my favorite candies. It's dark, and has a little bit of an edge. You mostly taste the brown sugar/molasses undertone that you can find in good quality root beer barrels (the hard candy). But under that, there's just this hint of herb, something a little like licorice root, or . . . have you ever chewed a mouthful of thyme, and when you're done, there's a sort of herbal roughness under the thyme taste? That's what horehound tastes like to me, all wrapped up in brown sugar syrup. It's not something everyone would like, though. (It took me years to understand why some people don't like licorice, especially the really dense strong stuff, and years more to understand why anyone would touch the strongly salted stuff with a ten foot pole.)
I'm quite fond of Ghirardelli chocolates, but can't stand most other varieties, including Lindt and Cadbury. I suspect this is childhood snobbishness; Ghirardelli was my mom's thing.
I can get rose water through one of the local restaurants that does Turkish/Lebanese fusion food; they put the stuff in their water, and they'll sell you some if you want.
Kit: And do you really not have marzipan in the States? In case not: it's a concoction of icing sugar and powdered almonds that sets fairly solid.
The closest I've ever gotten to learning of that mysterious "marzipan" was by reading the bilingual wrapper of a chocolate-and-marzipan candy bar, whose French side easily translated as "chocolate with almond paste". (I probably should have bought the candy bar just to know what it tasted like.)
Even Cadbury's was different (and worse) than the UK version.
Every other Girl Scout said that when we imported some for a taste test. I thought they were equally delicious, and was horrified at their throwing the American candy away. "Don't throw it away! Give it to meee!"
Ana: there's always at least one recipe calling for rose water and as an American you are left thinking "Wha---?"
Unless you're an American who watches Good Eats, in which case you're vaguely aware of how to make rose water, involving steaming rose petals and bowls to catch and condense the steam. Or something like that.
Unless
you're an American who watches Good Eats, in which case you're vaguely
aware of how to make rose water, involving steaming rose petals and
bowls to catch and condense the steam. Or something like that.
For me, even making rose water would be problematic: where do you get the petals?? Rose bouquets are obscenely expensive where I live and since they aren't meant for ingestion, there's no way to tell what chemicals were used in the growing process.... o.O
For the love of all things, do NOT ingest florist's flowers in any way, shape or form. Formaldehyde is used less frequently these days, but it's not a trivial concern, and there's plenty of other stuff you don't want to be eating. Roses are difficult plants, and grown in confinement, host to a number of maladies that often require application of a diverse range of fungicides and pesticides. I would not feel comfortable eating them at all, and I'm usually pretty blase about this sort of thing.
Get thee to Amazon! (I see Cortas, my usual rose water brand, has orange blossom water, which sounds much more appetizing to me right now.)
Don't people grow roses in their gardens around your way?
Dav, goodness, I hadn't even thought of formaldehyde! My cats eat cut flowers, so I guess it's good that I don't get them very often. How dreadful. :(
Kit, not especially 'round here. I live in the American Southwest and the dry heat (we've gone almost a month with 3-digit fahrenheit temperatures, and maybe... two months? without rain...) doesn't seem to agree with roses. I've got the Roundup breed in my front yard because the Home Owners Association DEMANDS shrubbery, but the roses are brown crispy dried paper on the bush. Poor things.
Roses are grown around here, but the rose growers would have strong words for anyone who stripped off enough petals to be useful. Strong words, and possibly a pair of garden shears.
Joshua, I WISH our HOA was staffed by the Knight Who Say Ni -- they had fewer rules about PRECISELY how big the front garden MUST be. If it was up to me, I'd rip the whole thing out and xeriscape, but noooooooooooooooooooooooo. :(
xeriscape?
Landscaping that uses little-to-no water. VERY useful in southwest American dry climate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
Ha! Last week my back lawn was so wet, it was pretty much a mud bath. The drainage system was overwhelmed, and a gigantic water blister formed in it about six feet across and eight inches high. If you'da walked on it, you may have broken through the floating grass-and-dirt layer and sunk who knows how deep.
The overflow caused a small stream to run across my driveway continuously for a period of weeks.
Still, last winter a spring actually started up in the driveway, in addition to above.
Yeah, I do need to work on the drainage system.
But, back a little closer to the topic, could you plant a herb garden? I hate gardening myself, but the improvements fresh herbs can make to my cooking inspire me to bother. Sage, rosemary, thyme can look quite attractive, not at all like a veggie garden.
There's a passage in one of his nonfiction books, I forget which one, in which Lewis appears to say that food can control your behavior even in our world. It's along the lines of "We often wonder why we are struggling so badly with temptation when a simple list of what we have eaten and drunk in the last twenty-four hours would answer the question." (Not an exact quote but that was the gist of it.)
"Drunk" I can see, but "eaten" is surprising to me. Eating foolishly may make me fat, or perhaps grumpy with indigestion, but it doesn't generally seem to have much moral component for me. I wonder about Lewis' relationship with food. I think it's Orwell I'm recalling as saying, about his public-school education, that they were constantly somewhat starved; but it may have been the same for Lewis, and that would tend to leave you with issues around food. Especially if, like Orwell, you were being berated for wanting more food.
When I first read that passage I interpreted the temptation as sexual temptation. I don't know if that's what it meant to say, but there are certainly a lot of folk beliefs about lust-inducing foods. Most sources I've read dismiss the reality of these effects, but something doesn't have to be real to be believed in.
There's a modern idea that moral guilt has to come from your own choices. I'm not sure that idea was as strong in the past, even the recent past. In _Dracula_ one is morally compromised by being victimized by the vampires, and in fact it's implied that one might be damned for it (though this can be avoided by killing the vampire). It's striking that the victimization isn't particularly shown as being the victims' faults--they are presented as good people--but it's still damning by a kind of spiritual infection or contagion. Similarly, "Even a man who is pure and good/and says his prayers at night/May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms/and the autumn moon shines bright." And he will be evil as a werewolf, even if he has done nothing evil by his own choice.
Maybe it comes from a view of people as essentially evil, so that we can *always* presume that the werewolf or vampire's bad behavior arises from the person's innate evilness and is not really externally imposed. Similarly, Lewis may feel that it's fine to condemn Edmond for something done under magical duress, because it's "just the kind of thing" that Edmond would do anyway, if....
If what? If his moral code weren't interfering? The whole thing still seems very unfair to me. I can enjoy stories in which evil is a coercive magical force, but they mix horribly with a Christian worldview in which people are held accountable for their sins. If a critter can damn you with a bite, it seems to follow immediately that God is at best capricious and at worse downright malevolent.
Hm. Now I want to write a story in which the main character has to maintain his/her fundamental moral purity through being possessed or transformed into something frightful.
Anyway, maybe Lewis sees it not as "if his moral code weren't interfering" but "if his common sense/caution weren't interfering." That is, Edmond is quite happy to do evil but until charmed he is afraid of the Witch. Charming him just lets his essential badness shine through.
I think it is worth remembering that in the story, Edmund is not in fact condemned for his sins either before or after he encounters the Witch. Aslan saves him. That's kind of the point. Despite the legitimacy of her claim being supported by Aslan and therefore the author, she doesn't in fact get him.
I never tasted Turkish Delight until I was about 9 or so, which would've been a couple of years after first reading this book. I'm sure it was around but I simply never encountered it until then. Like Dread Pirate Matt said above, I'm pretty sure it was in a Cadbury chocolate box. And I thought it was disgusting. (A couple of years ago I decided to give it another try, see it I liked it a decade later. Same reaction.) I remember thinking "Why would Edmund ask for THIS?"
Before that, I also imagined Turkish Delight as being sort of similar to baklava. (In rolls, not in squares.) My grandmother's Greek so I figured "Turkish Delight" would be sort-of similar to a Greek dessert she used to make, given that Greece & Turkey are next to each other and all.
By the way, that brings me to something which I only really noticed just recently. The nation of Turkey DOES NOT EXIST in the Narnian world. How would the Witch know what "Turkish Delight" is?
Yeah, although if I get a little picky it's not Christianity per se that provides the rigged game, it is the particular atonement theory Lewis is allegorising, which is a very old variant of substitutionary sacrifice. The unfairness of Edmund's situation described by people here seems to me to be part and parcel of the general criticism of substitutionary atonement, where God loves us so much He sends Jesus to save us from God's hatred. Which, what?
Other atonement theories in Christian theology do not suffer from this defect.
I agree that Lewis's treatment of Edmund strikes me more as a tragedy of a boy with realistic human faults getting in way over his head, rather than the author throwing him under a bus.
Oh, Turkish Delight! Last August, I went to England on vacation. On my last day, I stumbled into some shop selling Turkish Delight. I had never tried it before, and everything I knew about it came from Chronicles of Narnia. So... I got a nice large box and figured that it would make for dinner.
Of the food plans that I made during vacation, this was one of the worst. I still can't think about it without getting a little queasy.
Actually, Ana, the horehound candy shows up in some of the later books, as I recall -- the process for making it is more complex than what they do in Little House In The Big Woods, and so we see it as a storebought treat only. I entirely agree about the enduring wonder of that scene, too...
As for the horehound, I think Mr. Edwards brings them horehound for Christmas in The Long Winter? It's been a while.
It's also been a while since I tried the candy, so it's tough to remember the taste exactly... sort of a cloying bittersweet root-beer-mint-black licorice fusion (three flavors I enjoy on their own!), and powerful enough to make me gag. The fact that horehound was used as throat medicine is probably telling.
I think it is worth remembering that in the story, Edmund is not in fact condemned for his sins either before or after he encounters the Witch. Aslan saves him.
Oh, I think Lewis condemns him pretty thoroughly. Or at least, seems to take an unseemly satisfaction in writing about how bad he is. There's just a sense of relish rather than compassion when he writes about characters who've fallen into his traps that I find uncomfortable and sadistic.
Dav: I'd always imagined it to be something like baklava, the most exotic dessert I was familiar with - rich with honey and nuts, maybe less crumbly; something golden and remarkable and the perfect end to a spicy meal. (I don't think I had any familiarity with Turkish food, but most of the "foreign" food I knew about growing up was at least somewhat spicy.
Haha, that was basically my thinking in a nutshell when my parents first read the books aloud to me. I had only the faintest idea what Turkish food would be like, but I sort of supplied a different orientalist picture of it than Lewis probably wanted - delicious, addictive, and slightly bittersweet desserts and of course the cocoa (I somehow decided that was the magic beverage) he was drinking with it was spiked with cinnamon and cloves. The meal of sin was hardly overly sweet, it was seductively bittersweet, a much more potent combination in my mind.
Also, this Californian will have you know that marzipan was the staple of my childhood! Also Ghirardelli! Not all of our American desserts are worse than British ones! Really! :D
aravind: Ghirardelli fist bump! I made myself some real cocoa last night because I couldn't sleep, and was astonished all over again how good real chocolate can be.
And about Edmund...I don't think that Lewis finds him beautiful either. After eating all that Turkish Delight his face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.
Those "flaws" that you list are indeed natural and understandable conduct. But they remind me irresistibly of the way that Catholic children, as young as seven or eight, are taught to prepare themselves for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, aka Confession. Teasing, quarreling and selfishness are high on the list of things that children that young are likely to be guilty of; they're trivial sins, child-size sins, but failures of love nonetheless.
So I guess the question is, how much responsibility does Edmund bear for his actions after this chapter? He's not sentenced to death, officially, for crankiness. Is his subsequent betrayal a continuation and exaggeration of this lack of charity, and something he could have chosen not to do? Or is it mostly because his judgment was clouded with Turkish Delight, so his choices were not made freely?
A debate to be continued, no doubt!
Another thing that occurs to me: these are, after all, childrens books. Officially, so are the Potter books. So the question is, in a children's story, how much are children's actions allowed to matter? As adults, we look at this and say, Edmund is a child, I don't care what he did, you don't sentence a child to death. Slytherin House is full of children, what was Dumbledore thinking?
But for a child reading these stories, is it reasonable to to allow a child's actions to have life-and-death consequences? Is it reasonable to allow children to choose, to stand or fall by those choices, to act as independent moral agents?
As adults, we look at this and say, Edmund is a child, I don't care what he did, you don't sentence a child to death. Slytherin House is full of children, what was Dumbledore thinking?
This is one reason why I liked the His Dark Materials books SO much -- Lyra is a child, she acts like a child, but she also confides in the adults and the good adults do sensible adult things. The story is driven by child-agency AND adult-agency and I really, really liked it in contrast to other YA novels where, essentially, adults have to be cut out of the loop in order for the story to occur.
(For the record, this is also why I loved The Hunger Games.)
But I definitely see your point.
Also, we probably would have bought the cricket bat, too. :) I don't like Ghirardelli, though, I'm a Lindt/Godiva girl. Odd, that.
"But for a child reading these stories, is it reasonable to to allow a
child's actions to have life-and-death consequences? Is it reasonable to
allow children to choose, to stand or fall by those choices, to act as
independent moral agents?"
I would say yes. We live in a world that does not recognize child-agency and only capriciously recognizes children as independent moral agents (as in, "Oh, they don't know any better" "you should know better!"). I think it can be empowering for children to read about other children making choices and being held accountable for them. I remember building (some of) my own sense of morality or of myself as a moral agent through the books I read as a child. I frequently considered "if I was in the protagonist's shoes, would I have made that choice (the textually moral one)? Could I make it now that I have an example of someone else doing so?" Of course, it's a double-edged sword, because it both bolstered my courage and determination to do good and produced anxiety that I might fail my own great moral tests. In that sense, I guess you could say it was both empowering (here are children acting as independent moral agents, I can do that) and terrifying (how could they expect me to make that choice? I'm just a kid!).
I guess what it gets down to is treating children like adults. Sometimes that can be terribly unfair, and sometimes it can prepare children for adulthood in a positive sense by offering some of the responsibilities and privileges of adulthood.
My problem with the idea that Lewis's treatment of Edmund is charitable because it shows human failings to be forgiveable is this: the other children are not shown as humanly flawed in the same way.
Susan, at this stage, is presented as motherly and well-meaning. Peter is adventurous, upright and heroic. Lucy is angelically innocent and forgiving. They're supposedly just as human as Edmund, but we don't see their failings to anything like the same extent. They're just Good Children. They're plucky and obedient to the proper authorities and everything that a conservative man of Lewis's principles would want children to be - which is to say, they're very much children idealised from an adult's perspective.
I don't think it's about knowing better, because I don't think it's about knowledge. The characters' inner lives are not what Lewis is interested in; old-fashioned-teacher-like, he's really only interested in their behaviour.
A modern reader might argue that Edmund's behaviour is more that of a fallible child than a culpable adult, but Lewis doesn't make allowances for childhood. And this is not because he treats children as fully rounded human beings with moral agency. The good children of his books are good right from the start and their only real moral agency consists in doing what Aslan would want.
If Lewis treated all his children as equally fallible and showed their failings having a variety of consequences, then I'd buy the idea hat he's interested in showing how Christ saves us all from our sins. But when he singles out certain children to be anti-favourites, only acceptable after they've been sufficiently punished and brought back into line, after which they show the same hearty pluck as all the others, while at the same time showing his favourites as almost without flaw, then I just don't believe it. If you believe we're all flawed but forgiveable, your characters should be all flawed and in need of forgiveness. But with Lucy and Peter, there's nothing to forgive.
Lewis might profess the idea that we're all in need of forgiveness, but as a writer, he's instinctively against it.
Child-agency HAS to be inflated in YA novels or the child hasn't much to do.
Depends on the plot, I'd say. Jacqueline Wilson (though she writes for a slightly younger audience) quite often writes stories about children trying to deal with adult-sized problems. It's just that they're naturalistic - The Illustrated Mum is about trying to cope with a bipolar mother, Lola Rose is about being on the run from an abusive father, and so on. She's very clear that children are flawed but moral people with agency; she's just also realistic about how much a child can accomplish: the triumph is usually surviving the situation with your sense of self and your hopes more or less preserved.
I don't think I've read Jacqueline Wilson -- I'll have to keep an eye out for her.
It's funny -- I never noticed as a child, but in the upcoming chapters, Peter is going to be a real jerk. As a child, it read like proper righteous fury against an offending Edmund against an innocent Lucy, but now as an adult, I feel like Peter edges from "understandably irked" into "outright bullying". Does this make Peter flawed? Does it help (again) to humanize Edmund's "traitor" actions because he's pushed away by his older brother?
For me it does. I just... can't quite shake the feeling that Lewis is 100% in agreement with Peter's words and actions. I'm not yet certain that I can prove Peter's favored status, though, with anything in-text.
You know, something just occurred to me. While I suppose she could be running a confectionary or importing from Calormen, I assume we're meant to believe that the Witch conjured this Turkish Delight by magic. If so, how powerful are her abilities? Maybe all of Tumnus' fine English food was also conjured by the Witch, and that's his primary motivation for taking the kidnapping job? (He probably never expected to actually see a child)
Is the witch herself Narnia's primary agricultural industry?
Peter does apologize to Aslan later for his harsh treatment of Edmund: "That was partly my fault, Aslan. I was angry with him and I think that helped him to go wrong." I assume we're meant to understand that Peter had sinned then.
I wouldn't quite say that Turkish delight is entirely unknown here in the U.S.; I noticed some for sale at Kroger earlier this week (Kroger is the largest grocery chain in the U.S.) and someone must be buying it. But I had never eaten any till I read TLTWATW, and I doubt I'm in the minority. (I wonder exactly how much of that Turkish delight is purchased by people who have just read Lewis, actually?)
One does have to wonder just where all the Narnians were getting their nice British-style food from, with the land being covered in snow and ice all year round. Fish and meat are feasible, but toast and jam? No way are they growing wheat and fruit themselves. Not to mention tea! So clearly the food has to be either imported or magically created.
Someone on a previous Narnia post linked to a fan fiction in which all the food had been imported by the witch and used to coerce Narnians into collaborating with her; it was quite well-done IMO.
"his face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky.
He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say."
That bit really unsettled me when I was re-reading this recently. Poor Edmund can't catch a break, can he? Even the narration is making fun of him.
"It's funny -- I never noticed as a child, but in the upcoming chapters, Peter is going to be a real jerk. As a child, it read like proper righteous fury against an offending Edmund in protection of an innocent Lucy, but now as an adult, I feel like Peter edges from "understandably irked" into "outright bullying"."
I just re-read that section (well, skimmed) and I don't know if I agree with you. I think Peter was justified in calling Edmund out about his behaviour in his tirade early in Chapter 5 -- if anything, though, Peter should've done it a lot sooner. The narration tells us in Chapter 3 that over the past few days Edmund has been regularly tormenting Lucy, teasing her by asking if she's found any more magical lands in the cupboards and so on; you'd think that Peter (acting as he is as the surrogate father) wouldn't tolerate that for more than a day before telling Edmund to give it a rest. Can I ask, though, what parts would you say seem like "outright bullying" to you?
There is another odd thing I'd like to mention, though -- in this early part of the book, whenever Peter & Susan talk about Lucy's story about going into Narnia they always frame it in terms of Lucy lying or "being a frightful liar". Never in terms of her simply making up stories or playing a joke for an overly long time, which are things that children do all the time. I remember when I was seven or eight I wrote a note in "futuristic" handwriting and spelling and tried to convince my family that it was left by a time-traveller (yes, I was a weird kid) -- yes, I was claiming things that I knew weren't true, but it'd be a bit of a stretch to call me a "frightful liar", wouldn't it? For the kids to have that attitude just doesn't seem very... natural, or realistic.
Can I ask, though, what parts would you say seem like "outright bullying" to you?
I'm torn between answering and saying YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE --- BUM BA DUM! (That was a sinister sound effect at the end there.) ;)
“You didn’t think anything at all,” said Peter; “it’s just spite. You’ve always liked being beastly to anyone smaller than yourself; we’ve seen that at school before now." -- Chapter 5
For me, Peter crosses the line by avoiding the immediate-and-answerable in terms of criticizing Edmund for his behavior towards Lucy and instead embracing the distant-and-vague when he accuses Edmund of "being beastly to anyone smaller". This is an un-categorical statement that probably isn't true, certainly isn't specific, and also involves a very strong personal attack. (Chapter 6 will also see more name-calling from Peter and will have him yelling at Edmund to "shut up".)
Conflict strategies that involve digging up past behavior and using it as vague ammunition to fling at someone in an argument invariably strike me as bullying because Edmund isn't really given a chance to defend himself in a meaningful way, simply because Peter has gone on this incredibly broad attack. Does Edmund derail from the topic at hand (Lucy) to point out that he isn't beastly to EVERYONE smaller than Edmund?? He's in a pickle, from a conflict stand-point.
Furthermore, since Peter has not (from my interpretation of the reading) apparently been to Edmund's (boarding?) school, his possession of any knowledge of Edmund's previous actions is suspect -- has Mom and Dad been reading Edmund's "does well in math, but bullies the younger children a bit" report cards out loud at the dinner table? Has Peter been listening at doors? Either way, Edmund is sure to be embarrassed and to feel that this topic is not Peter's place to throw in his face at this moment.
In short, Edmund is being criticized for some vague, unverifiable, unanswerable attack on some behavior that may or may not have occurred in the past and which Peter probably doesn't have direct first-hand knowledge of. And the only way he can get out of it is to offer an un-categorical apology for everything he's being accused of, and he has to offer it to someone who is being hostile and name-calling.
Little wonder that Edmund doesn't respond well. A much better conflict approach would have been for Peter to avoid being hostile, to keep the conversation to the immediate and fixable, and to approach Edmund as a friend instead of as an enemy. That Peter doesn't do this doesn't SURPRISE me -- he's a kid after all -- but that Edmund responds poorly to what I consider to be bullying behavior doesn't surprise me either. *I* wouldn't have rolled over and said, "You're right, Peter, about everything -- I'm sorry," with an attack like this, either.
(Then again, I'm stubborn.)
"If Lewis treated all his children as equally fallible and showed their
failings having a variety of consequences, then I'd buy the idea hat
he's interested in showing how Christ saves us all from our sins. But
when he singles out certain children to be anti-favourites, only
acceptable after they've been sufficiently punished and brought back
into line, after which they show the same hearty pluck as all the
others, while at the same time showing his favourites as almost without flaw, then I just don't believe it. If you believe we're all flawed but forgiveable, your characters should be all flawed and in need of forgiveness. But with Lucy and Peter, there's nothing to forgive."
I think this is why Voyage of The Dawn Treader is my favourite Narnia novel - all the heroes of that book are shown to have flaws and temptations. Caspian and Edmund get very angry, and nearly come to violence, arguing over the lake that turns things to gold; Lucy is tempted by the magician's spell book (and suffers as a result of using the eavesdropping spell); Eustace bullies Reepicheep and it's implied that his greed when confronted with dragon-treasure is what causes him to become a dragon. The characters succeed by resisting or overcoming these temptations, but Lewis also shows how easily any one of them could have fallen. (I hated it when the Voyage of The Dawn Treader movie introduced that weird green-mind-control-mist - it took away the lovely fallibility of the characters by implying that they'd NEVER EVEN BE TEMPTED if it weren't for this "evil island" and its magical emanations)
You can often find rose water in International Food markets catering to Middle Eastern cuisines.
About the Turkish delight... The books are set (and written) during war-time, when sugar (and hence candies) were strictly rationed. There's a lot of food-lust-writing in this book... see the latter scene where a marmalade pudding is the crowning glory of a meal (marmalade being foreign/scarce oranges + rationed sugar).
The sweet water at the end of the world is definitely miraculously sweet, not just fresh-water sweet. It's Lewis getting mystical again (which is more to my taste than Lewis getting cosy, at least).
It's water that tastes like "drinkable light." After drinking, the travelers no longer need to eat, but they feel "almost too well and strong to bear it." They've been sailing through a bright, hot, tropical sea, but after drinking, "They could look straight at the sun without blinking. They could see more light than they had ever seen before. And the deck and the sail and their own faces and bodies became brighter and brighter and every rope shone."
It's the water that Jesus promised: " whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
It's the water that Isaiah speaks of: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters...he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail."
We're meant to compare that kind of sweetness to the enchanted Turkish Delight, which doesn't satisfy or sustain, but chokes its victim with his own appetites.
The Queen's Turkish Delight is a pretty clear symbol of sin, and by the
doctrine of Total depravity, every human is essentially mind-controlled
into sinning
It's not so much that humans are mind-controlled into sinning, as that they can't, by their very nature, not sin.
But if this story is an allegory, this scene with Edmund and the Queen is analogous to the moment when Eve took the apple. It's the source of the Total Depravity. It's the act which delivered the human race into Satan's hands.
So it does seem unfair that Edmund is trapped by the Queen's magical food and then blamed for it. At least Adam and Eve had been warned.
Perhaps the point is that he shouldn't have accepted anything from the Queen in the first place. When he first meets her, in a moment of anger, "she rose from her seat and looked Edmund full in the face, her eyes flaming; at the same moment she raised her wand. Edmund felt sure that she was going to do something dreadful..." Maybe Edmund's first sin is getting into the sled in the first place-- after that warning he should have dared to disobey.
Which seems like a lot to expect of a child alone in a frozen wilderness, to turn down the offer of warmth and rescue. But that's Lewis for you.
the Home Owners Association DEMANDS shrubbery
and you must cut down the tallest tree in the forest
with
a herring!
Nick:
How would the Witch know what "Turkish Delight" is?
On the one hand, she can do magic, so maybe she just took it straight out of his head; on the other, she visited London in the Magician's Nephew.
Not all of our American desserts are worse than British ones! Really!
Are we talking "desserts" or are we talking "commercially packaged candy"? Because I'll match a peach cobbler or a New York cheesecake or a devil's-food cake against any pudding or trifle you care to name. Candy, on the other hand...it pains me to admit it, but the British chocolate is better. (Although Ghirardelli's pretty good.)
Or maybe it's like British TV: we only see the good stuff over here, and the home market is probably flooded with cheap crap?
Legacy of empire: a few days ago, we were shopping in a grocery store in New Jersey's "India on the Raritan." And there in the Subzi Mandi, among the chutneys and the dal and the chappattis and the fennel candy-- hey, they have real Cadbury's! And digestive biscuits! Also, a cricket bat.
Why we need a cricket bat, when no one in this house plays cricket, or is ever likely to play cricket, I do not know. But now we have one.
Edited because I fail HTML.
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