Susan’s Disempowering Portrayal in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and its Source Text

Abstract

Films are often motivated to correct social anomalies, and some recent movies have sought to empower women through the depiction of strong, foregrounded female characters whose voices and actions would otherwise fade into the background. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) [1] is a film adaptation of a 1951 children's novel. The film delivers the plot differently from its source and institutes substantial changes. Particularly, Susan Pevensie's character is portrayed in a more empowering manner in the film. Using the qualitative method, this study aims to demonstrate that while Susan's character is more empowered in the film than in the original novel, her treatment in the film does not achieve gender equity. This study utilizes Trites's [2] agency theory, Hall's [3] representation theory, and Bordwell and Thompson's [4] elements of film analysis to identify the differences in the actualization of Susan and the male characters and to comparatively analyze her agency, voice, and power in the source novel and the studied film. The results of the investigation reveal that Susan's standing in the film is not very different from her positioning in the novel as inferior to the male characters. Some mise-en-scènes still represent the patriarchal system in gender-stereotyped portrayals that are counterproductive to the film's effort to empower Susan.