I could not make it through tonight’s shift at work. I was just so tired. And then I began to crave chocolate. More specifically, chocolate over that jelly-goodness called Turkish Delight.
A couple weeks ago, I composed three blog posts about Turkish Delight—the real stuff which is a wee bit different than the Nestle candy bar edition. These posts were for one of the blogs I run called Mere C.S. Lewis. I spent that week working through quotes from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In that novel, one of the four children, Edmund loves Turkish Delight and this becomes his downfall.
There is a theory about Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia—that each of the seven books presents one of the seven deadly sins. C.S. Lewis scholar Don King argues that,
Edmund Pevensie, personifies gluttony, the sin of excessively using things in themselves legitimate, normally associated with the appetite, and, in effect, making one's belly the god he serves (Phil. 3:19).
Jadis, the White Witch, exploits Edmund's weakness when she meets him in a snowy woods, offering him a warm drink and Turkish Delight, his favourite candy. From the first bite, he is hooked, for each "piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious." As she pumps him for information regarding his brother and sisters, he readily replies, driven by an insatiable hunger for more and more Turkish Delight: "At first Edmund tried to remember that it is rude to speak with one's mouth full, but soon he forgot about this and thought only of trying to shovel down as much Turkish Delight as he could, and the more he ate, the more he wanted to eat, and he never asked himself why the Queen should be so inquisitive" (32; all references to the Narnia stories are from the Collier edition, 1970).
You can see these quotes in more detail and illustrated at my C.S. Lewis blog: Turkish Delight posts at Mere C.S. Lewis. Or if you would like to see Don King’s full essay, it is titled Narnia and the Seven Deadly Sins. For my own part, I’m continue to work away at clipping quotes from the Narnia books as we countdown to the new movie Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in just 22 days!
While I have not written about the seven deadly sins in connection to The Chronicles of Narnia, I have, by the way, written about them in connection with… Gilligan’s Island! Seriously, it looks to me that each of the seven castaways on Gilligan’s Island was cast to represent one of the seven deadly sins. Many people have written about this and posted their ideas on the Internet—they are mostly wrong. Often it is claimed that the Skipper is the one who is guilty of gluttony, but this is based on the rather simplistic observation that he is a bit fatter than the others. Here’s the deal: the sin of gluttony is about an insatiable appetite; it is about living for the belly.
Everyone on the island expects Gilligan to serve them. The Howells offer him money to do things, but that doesn’t motivate him. The Skipper orders him or gets angry at him. Ginger uses her sexual power to convince Gilligan to do whatever she wants, sometimes merely the promise of a kiss will do it. Of course, even that spell is broken on Gilligan when Mary Ann comes along offering Gilligan a coconut cream pie. For that creamy pie, he will do anything. And when Gilligan is doing it for Mary Ann’s pie, nothing can break him of that spell—he would do anything for that pie and that is what makes him guilty of gluttony. You can check out Gilligan and the rest of the seven deadly sins and castaways at my Squidoo lens: Gilligan's Island and the Seven Deadly Sins by Ken Symes.
It’s after 4am… I guess I made it through the night shift! Thanks to Turkish Delight and the mere temptation to gluttony rather than the full blown gluttonous lifestyle. I’ll be sure to stop thinking about Big Turks now and not eat another one this week, at least for this week ;)
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