A darker ignorance: C. S. Lewis and the nature of the fall

An alternate model of the process of growing up is implied elsewhere in the Narnia series. At the end of Prince Caspian, for example, Peter tells Edmund and Lucy that he and Susan will not be returning to Narnia because "'[Aslan] says we're getting too old'" (215). Though the idea strikes the younger children as unbearable ("'What awful bad luck. Can you bear it?'" Lucy asks Peter), Peter's own comment suggests that he is acquiring a different understanding: "'It's all rather different from what I thought. You'll understand when it comes to your last time.'" When Lucy and Edmund are themselves "too old" to return to Narnia, readers are privy to their conversation with Aslan and thus get a fuller picture of the transition they are beginning to undergo:

"You are too old, children," said Aslan, "and you must begin to come close to your own world now. [... T]here I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." (Voyage 215-16)

The final words of Aslan suggest very strongly that the children are not expected to reject or forget Narnia as they grow, but they are instead meant to grow into a more adult understanding of who Aslan is and of what their experiences in Narnia have taught them, much as the King and Queen of Perelandra have developed a more mature understanding of their own innocence without leaving it behind.

Writings external to the Narnia books suggest that Susan's current rejection of childish things is a normal part of growing up, but significantly, not a final stage. In the dedicatory letter to Lucy Barfield prefaced to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis tells his goddaughter, "I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still" (iii). He confidently expects that the non-fictional Lucy will become "too old" for Narnia just as her fictional namesake does. Just as confidently, however, he expects this to be a transitional stage, not a final destination, for he continues: "But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down [...] and tell me what you think of it."

Lewis's view of growing up is presented still more explicitly in his essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children." Responding to the idea that an adult who enjoys fairy tales is to be "scorned and pitied for arrested development," Lewis argues that it is the scorners and pitiers who are arrested:

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being an adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. (25)