The Collaborator, the Tyrant and the Resistance: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Masculine ‘Middlebrow’ England in the Second World War

Abstract

If we remind ourselves of the wartime circumstances in which C. S. Lewis wrote his first Narnia novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), we can gain a new understanding of the dystopian nature of its early chapters. By the end of 1939, France, Poland, the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia were under Nazi occupation, and Lewis had opened his home to four child evacuees, for whom he began to tell his first Narnia story (Downing, 2005). To imagine Narnia under the rule of the White Witch as the incarnation of the fear of a German invasion of England is to see that the novel betrays a very real contemporary anxiety. The writers of the influential Horizon article ‘Why Not War Writers’, who included Cyril Connolly, Tom Harrisson, George Orwell and Stephen Spender, looked for the Second World War’s equivalent of the First World War poets and have been accused of ‘prescrib[ing] war writing by delimiting the meaning of action, [by] polariz[ing] the war fronts [and] defining war literature as representing combat experience [they] omit the writing of those who merely suffered through the Blitz…and for whom home front and battlefield merged’ (Lassner, 1998: p. 2). ‘“War culture” was pervasive and existed in many forms including documentaries, propaganda films, as well as literature and radio broadcasts. The literature of the period sometimes occupied a marginal position to mainstream culture…because the “war culture” exerted a dominant hegemonic force, to which many writers were opposed, or from which they were excluded’ (Deer, 2009: p. 3).