Is there any deeper significance to Lucy's thought of what if "men started going wild inside" in our world?

Question

In Prince Caspian, the group of Pevensies and their D.L.F. are attacked by a bear, which Trumpkin quickly shoots dead. Susan was slow to shoot, wondering if it might have been a Talking Bear. While the boys and Trumpkin are skinning the bear for its meat, Lucy and Susan have the following exchange:

"Such a horrible idea has come into my head, Su."

"What's that?"

"Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you'd never know which were which?"

"We've got enough to bother about here and now in Narnia," said the practical Susan, "without imagining things like that."

Any comparison between events actually happening in the story in Narnia and imagined equivalents in our world immediately makes me think of the allegorical aspect of the Narnia stories. Does this paragraph refer to anything metaphorically? Perhaps something that Lewis believed was already happening, or at risk of happening, in our world?

Answer 1

Lewis, a devoted Christian, had a long interest in moral relativism and the importance of "natural" morals. In fact, he wrote a text on the subject, called The Abolition of Man, which began with a critique of the teaching of subjective morals in schools and moved on to a wider discussion of the subject. Lewis' conclusion is that without a set of objective moral values, we will become something less than human - humanity will have become "abolished".

He frames this as a possible dystopian future, something which he explores in greater depth in his later science fiction novel That Hideous Strength.

It is not hard to see echoes of this sentiment in Lucy's quote. The "men" she imagines could be representative of people who, without a shared moral compass, have stepped outside our common set of values and become, as Lewis might put it, something other than human. In this case, he is specific to suggest that their behaviour is "animal", making clear his disdain for this choice.

Following this thought to its logical conclusion, we could suggest that Lewis imagines these people have lost their souls.

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis proposes that some who have lost their moral compass would use this as an opportunity to seek power and control over others. It was published in 1943, and it is not hard to believe that Lewis was making veiled references to the authoritarian regimes that had caused such terror in Europe at the time, resulting in the Second World War.

Prince Caspian was published in 1951 and it could be that Lucy's thought here is a direct reference to The Holocaust and other atrocities committed by authoritarian governments. If so, it makes Susan's dismissal of the thought particularly dangerous and worrisome, and links to her later character developments as someone who is eventually shut out of "Aslan's Country".