Dr. Crystal Hurd on the Implications of a Female Aslan
The recent Aslan casting rumor has sparked lots of discussion around the NarniaWeb community for the past several weeks. We reached out to several C.S. Lewis scholars and asked them for their perspective on the issue, and Dr. Crystal Hurd kindly agreed.
Dr. Crystal Hurd is an educator, poet, and researcher from Virginia. Her doctoral research focused on C. S. Lewis as a Transformational Leader. She previously served as Reviews Editor for Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal. Her articles have appeared in SEVEN, Christian History Magazine, Inklings Forever, Perichoresis, and The Faithful Imagination.
She contributed a chapter on Flora Lewis for the book Women and C. S. Lewis: What His Life and Literature Reveal for Today’s Culture (2015). She is also the author of Thirty Days with C. S. Lewis: A Women’s Devotional (2014) as well as The Leadership of C. S. Lewis: Ten Traits to Encourage Change and Growth (2022). She is currently conducting research on the spiritual and artistic influence of the Lewis and Hamilton families titled Bookish, Clever People. For this project, she was awarded the 2020 Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant by the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. She serves as a Visiting Professor for Northwind Seminary’s Doctorate in Theology and Ministry for Inkling Studies and Romantic Theology.
In 2025, she launched the YouTube channel, That Lewis Lady.
Opinion by Dr. Crystal Hurd
With the recent news that award-winning actress Meryl Streep was being considered for the role of Aslan in the new Netflix series, I felt two very conflicting emotions: one, that a female Aslan would work very well for The Magician’s Nephew and two, continuity with Streep as the voice would cause some inconsistencies (not to mention controversy) in the character. Here, I want to investigate both positive and negative impacts if Gerwig decides to cast Streep as Aslan’s voice.
Positive Aspects
One important aspect to remember is that the Chronicles of Narnia, although deeply beloved, is at root a fantasy story.
Lewis mentions this fact in the preface of another book The Great Divorce, so people would not react hastily as they did with The Screwtape Letters (readers accused him of sympathizing with the devil). At the end of the day, this is make-believe, not a bible tale. It cannot be held to the same standard as catechism. Unbridled imagination is what led Lewis to write the series in the first place, and Lewis admits that he did not set out to write an overtly Christian tale:
“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord”
Sometimes Fairy Stories Say May Best What’s to be Said, 46
There are other female characters that shine in the series (Lucy, Susan, Polly, Jill, Aravis), but particularly in The Magician’s Nephew. Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of the story is that the eventual queen of Narnia, a working-class woman plucked from obscurity, is based upon Lewis’s wife. Queen Helen is directly inspired by Helen Joy Davidman Lewis, the poet and former communist who came to faith through Lewis’s writings. It is a fictional redemption of the woman who drew much criticism in her own life but who is now immortalized as a queen in a children’s fantasy story for generations.
The Magician’s Nephew chronicles Aslan singing Narnia into existence, delegating duties to varied characters, and giving Digory the instructions needed to retrieve the apple that will heal his mother. It is no stretch of imagination to consider a female character “birthing” one of the worlds or nursing a sick person back to health. Lucy’s gift from Father Christmas, the cordial that restores health, is an echo of this action.
These are, in fact, very “feminine” qualities according to convention. Both Egyptian and Hindu mythology feature lionesses as symbols of power, community, and fertility. In ancient mythologies, this is nothing novel or extraordinary.
Similarly, contemporary fantasy features a menagerie of strong, fierce female characters who have built a following on their own popularity. Perhaps this is why the Netflix series is reconsidering Aslan’s voice as a female, to align with this trend. Think of women fantasy writers who continue to dominate the best-seller lists (this week): Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Carissa Broadbent, and Callie Hart to name a few. Their female protagonists are witty and wise. Recent publication data shows an exponential increase in women reading fantasy and romantasy (romantic fantasy).
Now more than ever, women are reading fantasy and hoping for more depictions in the media that they consume. Installing more females in the story could attract more girls and women to watch the series.
Negative Aspects
However, the issue lies with series continuity. Does Gerwig intend to film all seven books? If so, this would present problems for many fans. For example, while The Chronicles of Narnia isn’t strictly allegorical, C. S. Lewis mentioned in his correspondence that Aslan is influenced by Jesus, not a direct one-to-one comparison, but a “supposition.”
For spiritual fans who interpret Aslan as a Jesus figure, this change would present theological inconsistencies. A female would be sacrificed on the stone table, while other female characters are not directly involved in physical violence or combat.
For fans with no religious preconceptions, this change wouldn’t matter, but those who have already established Aslan as a Christ figure would certainly be upset. These associations cannot be untangled now. One cannot alter religious representation and not anticipate some negative feedback. This tramples into the territory of irreverence for many moviegoers (versus a hero with no religious affiliation).
Creatively, changing gender (or any fundamental aspect) of a character is irritating to audiences who have already established a particular voice or personality. We have all experienced this when an actor/actress leaves a show or passes away.
Many women, myself included, want to see more representation on screen in legitimate roles as main characters, not males recast as females (a la Marvel). As a comics fan, I prefer Wonder Woman to Captain Marvel; Wonder Woman possesses her own origin story, her own talents, skills, and foibles. She is well-rounded and equally as principled and developed as her male counterparts.
Personally, it is hard for me to fathom anyone other than Liam Neeson doing Aslan’s voice because I have come to enjoy his interpretation of the character. I adored The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe twenty years ago. I wept when Aslan was sacrificed at the Stone Table. There is a part of me that will always cherish that film and Neeson’s specific interpretation, even as time and directors make changes.
While I am a firm believer that good art is subject to interpretation, I also found myself wondering what Lewis would have thought. I have spent the last eleven years researching and writing about Lewis’s early life and family. Why did he choose a lion?
Most likely, he selected a lion because his youth and adulthood were filled with images of lions. Lewis was born and raised in the sectarian conflict of Belfast, Northern Ireland. His maternal grandfather, Reverend Thomas Hamilton, was an Anglican minister at St. Mark’s Dundela. The symbol of St. Mark is a winged lion. In fact, the door to the rectory featured a bronze doorknob bearing the head of a lion. Every time a young Lewis attended church or visited his grandparents, he was surrounded by images of proud lions.
In his maternal ancestry, Lewis is descended from the Scottish king Robert the Bruce (Robert I). The Lion Rampant (a red lion on its back paws featured on a yellow background) was established as the royal standard of Scotland. It served as the banner for the King of Scotland for centuries. Robert led the first war against England for Scottish independence between 1310 and 1314; he is remembered with great fondness in Scottish history. On Robert’s tomb in Dunfermline Abbey is an image of the mighty king with a lion poised at his feet.
Similarly, Lewis’s father—police court solicitor Albert Lewis—was an early proponent of Home Rule, the idea that Northern Ireland should remain loyal to English control. The male lion is the longstanding symbol of the English monarchy.
Later in his life, Lewis argued—quite apologetically—that leaders in the church should be male. Lewis was, in no way, a misogynist in his values but more of a traditionalist. His own mother Flora was a brilliant mathematician who attended two different universities, earning top honors. Her gender denied her a degree, but C. S. Lewis always admired his mother for her wisdom, wit, and intelligence despite her short life. Historians call her a “pioneer” of early co-education. For Lewis, it was not a lack of respect for women, but the use of a widely-popular historical symbol that young children would recognize.
Final Words
A final consideration: what would be the point of gender-swapping Aslan? Would it benefit the story or is it simply an experimental move to reimagine the character? I agree with Lewis in his essay “On Stories”:
“It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character”
Sometimes Fairy Stories Say May Best What’s to be Said, 3
Ultimately, Lewis argues that Story is paramount. This is what the audience expects (and paid for), not a sermon or lecture. Although it can provide instruction, the primary purpose of Story is entertainment. When changes remove the essential magic from a story, it leaves the audience hollow and unsatisfied. Lewis continues, in the same essay, about this very same phenomenon:
“I was once taken to see a film version of King Solomon’s Mines. Of its many sins–not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three adventurers wherever they went–only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard’s book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land.
The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not ‘cinematic’ and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it.
But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined. Ruined, at least, for me.
No doubt if sheer excitement is all you want from a story, and if increase of dangers increases excitement, then a rapidly changing series of two risks (that of being burned alive and that of being crushed to bits) would be better than the single prolonged danger of starving to death in a cave. But that is just the point.
There must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement or I should not feel that I had been cheated in being given the earthquake instead of Haggard’s actual scene.
What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death)–the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead. You may, if you please, say that Rider Haggard’s effect is quite as ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ or ‘sensational’ as that which the film substituted for it.”
Sometimes Fairy Stories Say May Best What’s to be Said, 5-6 (emphasis added)
Lewis expected a certain fidelity with the original story or the adaptation is, in essence, “ruined.” No matter what age, what culture, what generation experiences the story, there is an anticipation that certain facets will be preserved. This can be tricky, as these aspects will vary for different individuals. Does a cinematic change “ruin” the story or does the change serve the story well? This is what we should be asking ourselves. Characters are at the heart of every story, and Narnia is no exception.
Adapting a beloved story is a difficult task; Gerwig certainly has her hands full. But our love of story perseveres, and we must try (and try and try) to revisit those stories we love, to reinvent them without disturbing the magic within. Lewis himself said it best, “Art, indeed, may be expected to do what life cannot do: but so it has done…But I think it is sometimes done–or very, very nearly done–in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making” (“On Stories” 19).
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An excellent, thoughtful essay. Dr. Hurd is the kind of scholar who neither succumbs to ideology nor shuns questions of contemporary relevance. A note worth adding: Lewis made much of details in a story–to change even small ones bothers children to no end. If the story isn’t consistent with its inner facts, it violates the world building imagination in young audiences.
Just ,”no”.
I enjoyed that… it’s got me thinking. Thanks for sharing, @ImpendingDoom.
This was a thought-provoking read, I must say. But I’m pretty sure most Narnia fans would agree that Aslan as a male is a pretty intrinsic detail to the story.
On a side note, I didn’t know Lewis was a Robert Bruce descendant! I believe William Moseley (aka Peter the Magnificent) also shares in that lineage. Quite fitting. (And I actually have the lion rampant flag hanging in my room right now!) I wonder if that had some connection to Lewis’ description of the Narnia flag as having a red lion rampant as its emblem.
In the Last Battle, Lewis makes it explicitly clear that Aslan IS Jesus by another name in another world. It’s not ambiguous. Gerwig’s gross misunderstanding of the source material ought to disqualify her from the job out of the gate.