I’ve gotten quite a bit of blog-linkage for an essay I wrote about Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, hailed by liberals and hated by evangelicals for its anti-Christian themes. What I found was that the books were hardly anti-Christian: they feature angels who wage a war in heaven, as well as a God. The only anti-Christian part of the books, as far as I could tell, was Pullman’s condemnation of how the Church has (sometimes violently) crushed children’s budding sexuality.

What creeped me out about the books was the way his endorsement of sexual freedom hinged on women’s subjugation to men. In fact, the trilogy can be read as the story of how a brave little girl — Lyra, the main character in the first book — must learn to become a second class citizen in order to grow up. When the third book ends, she has just gone through puberty and had angel-blessed sex with a boy who has taken over her former leadership role on their adventures. Once she has sex, she loses her one super power (reading a golden compass of truth), and she has to return to her own dimension where women can’t attend Oxford University and must instead go to an inferior women’s college. That’s just fucking great. So Lyra has killed God, but patriarchy lives on.

Read my essay.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 6:23 pm.
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