Why You Should Care That Aslan Is a Woman

As if we were lacking for outrage, a new front in our unending culture wars opened this week when director Greta Gerwig announced that she had cast a woman (specifically: Meryl Streep) to voice Aslan in Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew—her upcoming film adaptation of the sixth book in the globally beloved Chronicles of Narnia series.

In case you’ve never stepped through that famous wardrobe door and into C.S. Lewis’s magical world, you should know that Aslan is a lion and the King above all High Kings in Narnia. Why, then, would anyone mind if Streep—a lioness and the Queen above all High Queens of Hollywood—gives the big cat a new purring sound?

The usual pop pugilists, still licking their wounds from the fight over Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in The Odyssey, rose to offer the usual arguments. Gerwig, growled the culture warriors on the right, is feminizing a quintessentially male figure; they could overlook her decision to turn Ken into a bumbling bobo in Barbie, her previous film, but giving the mightily maned lion a bit of gender reassignment surgery is a step too far. Relax, cooed their counterparts on the left, this is Meryl we’re talking about here and, really, there’s no one that woman can’t brilliantly portray.

It was tempting, listening to the discussion drone on, to tune it all out and worry about weightier things. Except that, sadly, this one matters: Gerwig’s decision is neither a stroke of brilliance nor a microaggression against conservative America. It’s something much more profound and dangerous: an offense in a war not of culture or politics but of ideas and convictions.

To understand why, it helps to first know Aslan.