I was reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to my 5 year old this weekend and I came across something that piqued my grammar nazi. Curious if you guys have ever noticed it...
Source link:
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/LionWitchWardrobe_CSL.pdf“Mr Tumnus! Mr Tumnus!” said Lucy in great distress. “Don’t! Don’t!
What is the matter? Aren’t you well? Dear Mr Tumnus, do tell me what
is wrong.” But the Faun continued sobbing as if its heart would break.
And even when Lucy went over and put her arms round him and lent
him her hand kerchief, he did not stop. He merely took the handker-chief
and kept on using it, wringing it out with both hands whenever it
got too wet to be any more use, so that presently Lucy was standing
in a damp patch.
Note that Tumnus first gets a nongendered pronoun "it" to describe him in the paragraph, and then Lewis switches to the gendered pronoun "he." Perhaps this is because he recycles "it" to now refer to a handkerchief rather than the faun. To my recollection, it's bad form to use the same pronoun to refer to multiple/different things in the same paragraph. "He" should only refer to one male person, "it" should only refer to one particular object, and so on.
However, on page 4, this is our description of Mr. Tumnus:
He was only a little taller than Lucy herself and he carried over his
head an umbrella, white with snow. From the waist upwards he was
like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s (the hair on them
was glossy black) and instead of feet he had goat’s hoofs. He also had
a tail, but Lucy did not notice this at first because it was neatly caught
up over the arm that held the umbrella so as to keep it from trailing in
the snow. He had a red woollen muffler round his neck and his skin
was rather reddish too. He had a strange, but pleasant little face, with
a short pointed beard and curly hair, and out of the hair there stuck
two horns, one on each side of his forehead. One of his hands, as I
have said, held the umbrella: in the other arm he carried several
brown-paper parcels. What with the parcels and the snow it looked
just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a Faun.
And when he saw Lucy he gave such a start of surprise that he
dropped all his parcels.
100% consistency in using a gendered pronoun here.
But then page 5 (one paragraph later) switches to nongendered impersonal "it."
"Good evening,” said Lucy. But the Faun was so busy
picking up its parcels that at first it did not reply. When it had
finished it made her a little bow.
However it doesn't appear that Lewis has chosen to make a perspective-biased distinction here, where because the faun is not human, it doesn't merit a gendered pronoun (this is the chapter where we get all the "sons of Adam" and "daughters of Eve" exposition). Because on page 6 he switches back to giving Tumnus "he" again.
They had not gone far before they came to a place where the ground
became rough and there were rocks all about and little hills up and
little hills down. At the bottom of one small valley Mr Tumnus turned
suddenly aside as if he were going to walk straight into an unusually
large rock, but at the last moment Lucy found he was leading her into
the entrance of a cave. As soon as they were inside she found herself
blinking in the light of a wood fire. Then Mr Tumnus stooped and took
a flaming piece of wood out of the fire with a neat little pair of tongs,
and lit a lamp. “Now we shan’t be long,” he said, and immediately put
a kettle on.
I haven't yet gotten to any of the beavers, the dwarfs, the centaurs, Aslan or other animals in the story or found any other inconsistencies, but we're only 2 chapters in so far. I'll keep my eyes open for it for sure... but can anyone explain a grammatical rule as to why a creature such as Tumnus would merit pronoun switching like this? In general, it's considered distasteful to use "it" to refer to a human or a conventionally gendered sentient creature. In most literature, it's dehumanizing and intended to be used on repulsive/horrific things. This is why the whole genderfluid crowd doesn't accept "it" as a pronoun and want to commit atrocities upon the word "they", or invent whole new words for gender pronouns. Lewis is very generous and kind to Tumnus through the book from my recollection of reading it many years back, and isn't one to demean the creature by labeling Tumnus as "it."
Can any of you shed light on the pronoun soup here? I'm kind of surprised at this observation, given that Lewis is a reknowned essayist. I would expect him to strive for greater clarity than this.
