The White Witch and the Concept of Tyranny: Teaching Power and Justice Through Fantasy

Fantasy might seem like pure escape, but in the classroom it can serve as a springboard for exploring moral growth, responsibility, temptation, creation, justice, and the dynamics of power—if the right book is chosen. The Narnia saga is unusually rich in such material, and there is one thread in it that I return to often with my classes: the White Witch as a study in tyranny.

What makes Jadis so useful in the classroom is not simply that she is cruel. A cruel villain can frighten a reader, but a reader learns little from being frightened. What makes Jadis remarkable is that, across these two books, we watch her defend her power in three different ways—and each of them is a way of getting out from under judgment. In Charn she argues: challenged to her face, she answers with a calm, coherent theory of why the ordinary rules do not apply to her. In Narnia she no longer needs to argue, because she rules: her power has become a government, and there is no longer anyone in a position to object. And when at last she comes for Edmund, she does something more unsettling still—she reaches for the law, and turns the deepest rule in Narnia to her own purpose.

Three strategies, one aim: to place the person who holds power beyond the reach of the judgment that falls on everyone else. Lewis gives each of them room to show itself, and—this is the gift for a teacher—he does not editorialize. Students are not told that the Witch is wrong; they are shown how she exempts herself, and left to find the flaw in it themselves.

Reading The Magician’s Nephew first and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe second lets students watch this unfold in sequence: first the doctrine stated in words, then the regime that no longer needs them, and finally the law bent to serve the very power it should have restrained. (Both novels reward teaching for far more than their villain, of course; I make the wider case for each in the pillar articles on the themes of The Magician’s Nephew and on why to teach The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.)

Before we watch Jadis escape judgment in any of her three ways, Lewis shows us what her escaping it has already cost. Charn is the result before the reasons—and it speaks first. Digory and Polly arrive in a world that is not merely empty but airless, and Lewis is careful to distinguish this emptiness from the one they have just left:

“This place was at least as quiet as the Wood between the Worlds. But it was a different kind of quietness. The silence of the Wood had been rich and warm (you could almost hear the trees growing) and full of life: this was a dead, cold, empty silence. You couldn’t imagine anything growing in it.”

(The Magician’s Nephew, ch. 4)

It is worth pausing here with a class before any explanation is offered. The Wood between the Worlds is also silent, also without people—and it is full of life. Charn is silent in a different way. The distinction Lewis draws is between a quiet that holds growth and a quiet in which nothing can grow, and it does a great deal of work in the two chapters that follow: whatever Jadis is about to say in her own defense, we have already seen the result.

Then Jadis speaks. Pressed by Polly about the people of Charn—the ordinary ones, the women, the children, the animals—she answers Digory rather than the girl who asked, and lays out her position in full:

“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”
“It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,” said he.
“I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”

(The Magician’s Nephew, ch. 5)

This is the passage the whole article turns on, and it rewards being read slowly with a class, almost line by line. Jadis is not raving but building an argument, and the argument has parts that can be named.

First, she reclassifies people as instruments. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?The question is rhetorical because, within her premise, it answers itself: subjects exist in order to serve. Notice that she does not deny killing them, but denies that the killing counts as wrong—which is a different move, and a far more dangerous one.

Second, she disqualifies the objector. I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? She does not answer Digory’s objection; she dismisses his right to raise it, on the grounds that someone so ordinary cannot be expected to understand. This is worth naming for students, because it is a move they will recognize from ordinary life long before they meet it in politics—the response that dismisses the person instead of the point.

Third, she claims an exemption. What would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. Here is the heart of it: Jadis does not argue that destroying Charn was good, but that the categories of right and wrong which apply to ordinary people do not apply to her. Two moral standards, sorted by rank.

Fourth, she justifies the exemption by burden. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. This is the most seductive part of the speech, and the part students find hardest to answer. The claim is not that she wants freedom from the rules but that her responsibilities require it: the greater the burden, the greater the license. Stated as she states it, it can sound almost noble.

Fifth, she wraps the whole in the language of fate. Ours is a high and lonely destiny. Not a choice, then, but a calling—and a lonely one, which invites pity as well as awe.

Five sentences, and a complete apparatus for placing oneself beyond judgment. What I find most valuable about this passage in the classroom is that no one has to editorialize. The speech is not a caricature; it is genuinely persuasive in its own terms, and students feel the pull of it. The work of the lesson is to locate exactly where it fails—and the answer is not far away, because we have already stood in the silence of Charn and seen what the argument costs when someone acts on it.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Jadis no longer argues, because she no longer has to. The theory has become a government, and where there is no one left to answer, there is nothing left to explain: there is no Digory to object, and no one in Narnia in a position to press the question. This is the second way power escapes judgment—not by reasoning its way past an objection, but by making objection impossible. What in Charn was a doctrine stated in words is now simply the air the country breathes. The exemption Jadis claimed for herself—that the rules binding ordinary people do not bind her—has hardened into the ordinary condition of Narnian life: her rule suppresses joy, spreads fear, rewards informers, and turns those who resist to stone. Lewis compresses the whole of it into a single much-quoted phrase—that under the Witch it is always winter and never Christmas.

What makes the phrase so exact is that it names tyranny by what it prevents rather than by what it inflicts. There is no atrocity in it, no violence; there is a season that will not turn. Nothing arrives, nothing changes, nothing is celebrated. Set beside the description of Charn, the two passages make the same observation in different keys: the mark of this kind of power is not that it destroys things but that it stops things from growing.

One further scene deserves attention, because it shows the third and strangest of the Witch’s escapes from judgment—and complicates the picture in a way middle schoolers are ready for.

When the Witch comes to claim Edmund, she does not come as a bandit but as a claimant, invoking the Deep Magic and the right it gives her over a traitor’s life. This is the reversal that makes the scene so useful. In Charn she placed herself above the rules; here she plants herself on one, and it holds her weight. She is no longer arguing that judgment does not apply to her—she is using the law’s own machinery to put judgment on her side. And within the terms of that law she is correct: Aslan does not dispute her claim but satisfies it.

This is a genuinely difficult scene to teach, and worth the difficulty, because for students who have spent two chapters watching the Witch trample every rule in sight, the sight of her holding one up is disorienting. It opens one of the oldest questions in ethics in a form a twelve-year-old can hold: can something be lawful and still be unjust? Aslan’s answer is the subtle one. He does not deny the law or simply carry it out; he satisfies its demand himself, in Edmund’s place. His authority works in the opposite direction from the Witch’s—hers hoards, his is spent; hers takes, his gives. (Just how far to read Aslan as a figure of Christ is its own question, and a vexed one; I take it up in a separate article on Aslan, allegory, and Lewis’s intentions.) What the scene shows, and does not have to state, is that justice can require more than obedience to a rule—sometimes it asks something of the one who upholds it. It is a demanding idea to leave with a class, and one that reaches well beyond Narnia, into much of the other literature students will read about power and its limits.

If you teach the two novels together, these are the questions I have found open the richest discussion. They follow the three strategies traced above, and each moves from the text outward, toward the world students already half-recognize. Taken together they amount to a piece of real civic thinking: Jadis’s speech is a working definition of the very thing constitutional government exists to prevent—the claim that authority exempts whoever holds it from the rules that bind everyone else—and a student who has taken that speech apart has understood something that no amount of vocabulary drilling could teach.

On the argument (Charn). Jadis never actually says that destroying Charn was a good thing to do. What does she say instead? Why might that be a harder claim to argue against than “it was right”? And—setting the book aside—have you ever heard someone defend themselves not by saying “I did nothing wrong” but by saying “the normal rules don’t apply here”? What makes that kind of claim so hard to answer?

On the burden (Charn). Jadis says that those who carry “the weight of the world” must be “freed from all rules.” When might it be reasonable to say that an important responsibility changes what someone is allowed to do—and when does that same claim become dangerous? Where is the line?

On rule by force (Narnia). In Narnia the Witch no longer argues; she simply rules. What has changed between Charn and Narnia that lets her stop explaining herself? What does it tell us that a tyranny, once it is secure, no longer bothers to justify itself?

On law and justice (the Deep Magic). When the Witch claims Edmund under the Deep Magic, she is following the law. Can something be lawful and still be unjust? Can you think of a real example—and if a rule is just but leads to an unjust result, what should be done about it?

That last question—whether something can be lawful and still be unjust—is one that literature has been asking long after and long before Lewis, and it offers a natural way to open the reading outward. Narnia sits comfortably beside several middle grade texts that examine the concentration of power, and even a single lesson drawing the comparison can sharpen a class’s reading of both. Below I suggest a few—most of which you will likely already know, though perhaps not all:

Even a single lesson setting one of these beside Narnia can sharpen a class’s sense of how tyranny recurs across very different stories—and of how the questions Jadis raises are older and wider than any one book.

Thank you for reading! I hope these ideas help you explore Narnia in fresh ways with your students. Reading The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together gives students something rare: the chance to watch a tyranny defend itself from every side—reasoning its way past objection, silencing objection altogether, and finally turning the law itself to its purpose—and to work out, for themselves, where each defense breaks down.

For more practical ideas, activities, and interdisciplinary projects, explore the rest of the blog. You can also visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store for resources on these novels, including chapter introductions, analyses, crosswords, quizzes, and biblical comparisons:

Wishing you an inspiring teaching experience,

Chiara