Aslan a Lioness?
Gender, Divine Metaphor, Poetic License Adaptation, and CS Lewis.
I drove my fifteen-year-old daughter home from school this afternoon.
“Have you heard the rumor about the Netflix Narnia series, that Greta Gerwig is in talks to cast Meryl Streep as Aslan?”
“Uuuugh. I don’t like it,” she said. “Aslan is a metaphor for Jesus. It probably shouldn’t be a woman.”
“Okay,” I said, “so imagine if Aslan were not a metaphor for Jesus. What would you think about it then?”
“Yeah. I could see that,” she said.
“So it doesn’t matter to you whether Aslan is portrayed as a lion or a lioness?” I asked.
“Whaaaaattt!” she yelped. “Why would they have a man lion with Meryl Streep’s voice? It would obviously be a lioness.” And she continued unprompted. “What would they do, have her talk in a lower register? …That’s just wasted potential! As an actress, Meryl Streep is usually so centered and focused as a woman. No …no.”
I wanted to test out the recent rumors on my teenage daughter, but it turns out the question was a bit more loaded than I expected because I’d forgotten that two of her favorite movies are Mamma Mia! and The Devil Wears Prada. As soon as she started waxing lyrically about Streep’s acting, I heard a memory of my daughter’s voice blasting from her upstairs bedroom:
The winner takes it all
The loser standing small
Beside the victory
That's her destiny
If you know, you know.
My daughter grew up on The Chronicles of Narnia, just as my wife and I did. It’s as nostalgic to her as it is to anyone. But her reaction to the female casting of Aslan did not echo the grievances airing on X and Reddit. And unlike most, she assumed that it wouldn’t just be Streep’s voice we’re hearing.
“As an actress, Meryl Streep is usually so centered and focused as a woman.” By this, she didn’t mean that Aslan therefore should not be a lioness. Instead, she meant that is Streep is going to be Aslan’s voice, then Aslan definitely should be a lioness. This is a different take than those that I’ve heard, and it prompted me to think about it further.
To be sure, there’s a lot of speculation getting ahead of itself. Will Aslan be a lioness, or will she just be voice acting? Will it make Aslan gender-ambiguous? What about his mane?
Indeed, what about his mane?
Along with his voice (which is obviously up in the air at this point), Aslan’s mane is the most biologically masculine aspect of his character. Lucy rubs her face in it and takes comfort from its smell. It’s a symbol of the sun and also of the Son.
The prophecy reads:
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again
And when the White Witch orders his mane to be shaved, it’s not just symbolic of the stripping of Jesus before his crucifixion. It’s also emasculating, biologically speaking.
“Stop!” said the Witch. “Let him first be shaved.” Another roar of mean laughter went up from her followers as an ogre with a pair of shears came forward and squatted down by Aslan’s head. Snip-snip-snip went the shears and masses of curling gold began to fall to the ground. Then the ogre stood back and the children, watching from their hiding-place, could see the face of Aslan looking all small and different without its mane. The enemies also saw the difference.”
If Aslan is a lioness, will we lose these iconic moments in the story? Still — and this is all predicated on the highly speculative and unconfirmed rumors about Meryl Streep being cast as Aslan — it could only be Streep’s voice that we hear. My daughter quickly shut that option down. A “man lion,” as she put it, with Streep’s voice, that same voice that so movingly sang out to Lady Fortune in hope and fear about which man is her child’s father? Surely not.
I’ll tip my hand. When it comes to adaptive license, I tend to side with artistic freedom.
But I understand the point of view of those who don’t want Gerwig to screw up their favorite children’s series. I feel for Gerwig though. It’s sort of a losing battle, especially given previous attempts to adapt the books to film.
Online debates expectedly focus on gender and theology. Lewis would be the first to remind us that his stories are not allegories for biblical episodes. But that observation is a technical one, and it doesn’t therefore mean that they aren’t deeply metaphorical. The creation of the world in The Magician’s Nephew, the death and resurrection scenes in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the entirety of The Last Battle. The Chronicles obviously are reimagining biblical scenes and theological principles.
And even though by default I side with the artistic license of the person doing the adapting, that doesn’t mean that I think there aren’t consequences. The main consequence of this potential casting decision is obviously about gender. But debates about a female (or feminine, at least) Aslan quickly devolve into arguments about whether God is both male and female, or whether sex/gender is a limitation of our understanding of God that we should move beyond.
The conversation becomes confusing quickly, so …
In the spirit of speculation, let’s disambiguate some of the reasons people insist on a male Aslan.
Gender-Trading Roles in General
Not worth getting upset about … most of the time. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it doesn’t work not because a main character is cast in a different gender but because the film itself stinks. See Helen Mirren as Prospera in The Tempest (2010). She was good. The film … not so much.
A Female Son of God
If that were what is happening, then yes, it’s worth being upset about. But that isn’t what’s happening in this hypothetical scenario. Aslan is a type for Christ, like Moses is a type for Christ, but without the added complication of adapting a story from sacred scripture. Can you have a female type for Christ? Yes. That’s what a type is: a figure who is not the person that points to the person. And it is this same not-the-person-ness that enables them to point to the person himself. Throughout the latter centuries of the Middle Ages dramatists created all sorts of Characters that resembled Jesus in certain ways and were intended to point audiences to him — child ones, irreverent ones, funny ones, carnal ones.
Still, gender is important. Even people who believe that gender is optative think that gender is important, that one’s gender means something. Otherwise, why is it worth fighting about? If Aslan has a woman’s voice, or is a lioness, or is desexualized to whatever extent, that will impact his character and also, by extension, his representation of Christological themes. Here’s where I stand. It’s one thing for a character to represent the maternal traits of God the Father, but it’s another thing to feminize the incarnated Son of God.
Fidelity to the Books
For what it’s worth, yes. If your criteria for a good film adaptation is that it must be as faithful as possible to the books, then you definitely have reason to be upset about a female casting for Aslan. But even here — as my kids would point out with the first Percy Jackson film adaptations — their stronger reactions are to the aspects of the movie that are just bad, compared to the ones that are inaccurate. The fact is that we already have the original Aslan. We’ve already been formed by the books. And a wayward film adaptation can’t take that away.
Exploiting Narnia to make a Cultural Statement
I don’t assume that is what would be happening. But it could be. And I’m okay with it. I will likely disagree with whatever cultural statement requires making Aslan female, but I support the free flow of ideas in art. And I certainly don’t think that the end product should be reduced to that cultural statement — like when people reduce The Lord of the Rings to a reflection on the First World War. When a story is written, it is given to society and posterity to enjoy, understand, learn from, … but also to test, reimagine, disagree with, extend, and inspire. Virginia Woolf invented Shakespeare’s sister to comment on the problem of female artistic genius. Ouladah Equiano used Milton’s Paradise Lost to make a cultural statement about racial slavery. And Milton himself used the biblical story of Samson to criticize the new regime of King Charles II, putting himself in Samson’s shoes. I’m grateful for all three cultural statements, and none of them ruin the original.
Cogency of the Story
Don’t focus your grievance on an interpretation of the cultural statement you think an adaptation is making. Instead, direct your complaint toward the cogency of the story in general … which is another way of asking if the change will result in a good story. And there’s the rub. In the books, Aslan is male, and he possesses female characteristics. See Michael Ward’s discussion of Aslan’s comportment of the goddess Venus in The Magician’s Nephew: “Lewis’s dependence here on imagination arises from his belief that ‘it is rational not to reason, or not to limit oneself to reason, in the wrong place.’” Imagine Gerwig did portray Aslan as a lioness. Would that detract from the wholeness of the story, adjusting for the traits that a female Aslan might offer, traits that were not present with Lewis’s male Aslan. It feels like sacrilege to speculate so, but the imagination is capacious enough.
For me, the biggest risk is in what might be lost in the paternal relationships that Aslan has, especially with characters like Peter, Susan, and Edmund. The regal symbolism of a lion’s mane is less compelling to me (as is present in his relationship with Reepicheep).
I’m reserving my right to be cautiously hopeful that I’ll learn something new about the imaginative and real worlds that Lewis draws on.
I say imaginative and real because I don’t think it’s all that worthwhile to distinguish between the two when a story is overtly framed as fiction. After all, the point of fiction is to create a play between the imaginative and the real.
It turns out that my daughter is rather excited about the prospect of Meryl Streep as Aslan. Streep is a world-class actor. She’s arguably as good as any of the best actors who might be assigned that role. Does she have something to show us about the story that we haven’t thought about?
Who knows if this rumor will materialize. But at least as a thought experiment, it prompts us to interrogate our reactions. Initially, mine wasn’t positive. But when the student-of-literature side of me chimes in, I think I can retain my affection for the male lion with which I grew up and also entertain the ways a female lion might illumine parts of the world of Narnia I hadn’t seen as clearly before.
Nevertheless, while I’ve chosen to be critical of my emotional reaction, I know that there are some good arguments out there for the essential maleness of Aslan. Matt Anderson at The Path Before Us isn’t writing during Lent, but I’m especially curious to hear his take.
…Also, I wonder if my wife will unsubscribe to this Substack after reading this. But YOU should subscribe. It’s free.
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