Felix Kent’s last PERFECT piece for The Toast was Descartes Goes To Stockholm To Teach Queen Christina Philosophy At Half-Past Five In The Morning, And The Early Rising Kills Him.
“The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that — so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.”
–From That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis
I can’t have been more than ten when I went through my copy of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes with a bottle of Wite-Out and felt pen, determined to, at any point when Petrova’s appearance was mentioned, change the text. In the book, or at least in my mind, she was ugly, and not in the ugly-duckling way of so many children’s book characters (Sylvia’s views on her interesting looks notwithstanding), but straightforwardly un-pleasing to look at. She was also the only character available for me to identify with. I lacked the talents of Posy and the charm of Pauline. And I was damned if I was going to think of myself as ugly.
I did not finish this task, being lazy and also left-handed and not able to write small enough in the book to make it look nice, which drove me nuts.
In my early teens I read C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I loved Out of the Silent Planet. Perelandra I found too anxiety-provoking to really enjoy; I can’t handle books where the drama comes from one character hovering for much of the book on the verge of making a terrible mistake.
“Don’t read That Hideous Strength,” my mother said. My mother is a great C.S. Lewis fan, also a believer, in the religious sense. One of my best sources for what to read. And a woman who grew up in the Fifties and became an academic. Became, like Ransom, the trilogy’s main character, a philologist.
“Why not?” I said.
I don’t think my mother used the word “yucky” in her reply, but that was more or less what she meant. I went ahead and read the book anyway.
It’s my favorite of the series; it’s probably the C.S. Lewis book closest to my heart, in that it’s the one that I think about the most when I’m not intentionally thinking about anything. I am not one of those people who have read all of C.S. Lewis; I tell you that because you may be one of the people who has. I’ve read the Narnia books, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and the Space Trilogy. I read bits and pieces of Til We Have Faces, which my mother says is the best. I saw the movie Shadowlands, and I cried and I cried and I cried.
I am not pretending to expertise here.
It’s my favorite despite the fact that Jane, the main character, is not altogether a likeable female character. She condescends to Ivy, whose husband is in jail, and Mrs. Dimble, who is Christian and does not pretend to academic attainment. (Jane is a graduate student who has recently married an academic.) Also she is not as smart as she thinks she is.
I like it partly because it is so painstakingly accurate in so many things. This, for example, is the single best description of looking at things from a moving vehicle that I’ve ever read:
And in between the stations things flitted past, so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it: a house backed with a group of haystacks and wide brown fields about it, two aged horses standing head to tail, a little orchard with washing hanging on a line, and a rabbit staring at the train, whose two eyes looked like the dots, and his ears like uprights, of a double exclamation mark.
I can’t even tell you how many times I have felt like I needed to get out of the car immediately and start a brand new life for myself because of exactly that phenomenon, and I have never seen it put into words so perfectly anywhere else.
And then there’s the coziness that comes from having most of the main characters in a tiny island of safety while the world falls to pieces around them and there’s the toasted cheese and there’s academic politicking leading to the triumph of evil and there’s Merlin and there’s a bear.
But I really want to talk about the dresses. Towards the end of the book, as good is triumphing over evil, most of the non-evil female characters gather together in a room called the Wardrobe. They have been instructed to choose dresses. They are not given any mirrors with which to see how they look in these dresses.
Each of them tries on only one dress, chosen for them by the others. The dress chosen is always perfect, captures their essence. Camilla, who likes weather and horses, wears “a long slender thing which looked like steel in color though it was soft as foam to the touch. It wrapped itself close about her loins and flowed out in a glancing train at her heels. ‘Like a mermaid,’ thought Jane; and then, ‘like a Valkyrie.’”
Jane, who is the main female character, on the other hand, “could see nothing specially appropriate in the robe which the others agreed in putting on her. Blue was, indeed, her color but she had thought of something a little more austere and dignified. Left to her own judgment, she would have called this a little ‘fussy.’ But when she saw the others all clap their hands, she submitted.”
When I read this book I longed to be Camilla, just like when I read The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford I longed to be Linda. Which of course rules me out from being a Camilla or a Linda; Camilla would never dream of wanting to be anyone but herself, a little like Diana Mitford thinking in prison how lovely it was to be herself, but without the Nazism.
The quality of wanting to be somebody else is a quality that Jane has in spades. “Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Mark and Mother Dimble, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was?”
If you haven’t read the book, and were starting to wonder where the yucky parts come in, this is where they come in.
The sweet-and-fresh business didn’t bother me much at the time I first read the book. Probably because I grew up in a world and family where I felt interesting and important and also it was assumed I would have to get a job one day to support myself. But the part about the fussy dress, that ate at me a little bit.
I asked my mother, trying not to tip my hand, which of the dresses she thought I would have been assigned, if I had been there in the room. This was in the old days, when there were no Buzzfeed quizzes to answer these questions for you, and so you had to open your soul to people in that pathetic kind of way.
She said that she thought I would be given Jane’s.
I said, tentatively, if she thought I might be really more like Camilla. My mother is kind. She didn’t laugh at me. Maybe, she said, maybe.
Not too long ago. I went shopping for a dress to wear at my wedding. I had to try on a lot of dresses. There was no magic dress that revealed the essence of my soul. I tried on a lot of dresses. Some I looked better in than others.
In every C.S. Lewis book I’ve read there are things that stay with me and then there are things that I vehemently disagree with. That’s nothing special to C.S. Lewis — one of my favorite all time books, D.H. Lawrence’s Studies In Classic American Literature has this to say about women: “The very women who are most busy saving the bodies of men, and saving the children: these women-doctors, these nurses, these educationalists, these public-spirited women, these female saviours: they are all, from the inside, sending out waves of destructive malevolence which eat out the inner life of a man, like a cancer.”
(I would much rather be send out waves of destructive malevolence than sit there being sweet and fresh, but that’s just personal preference.)
What I find so difficult about reading C.S. Lewis, though, is that he really fights any attempt to take the parts you like and leave the rest. He’s really down on that. You get one dress, and you don’t get to choose that dress for yourself. You don’t even get to see yourself in the mirror once you’ve got the dress on. You don’t get to take out your white out bottle and rewrite things to suit yourself.
And probably that’s also part of what I love about That Hideous Strength. Because there’s always a fascination in having someone else tell you who you are, even when it’s horrifying.
Once I was fifteen and on the shuttle that takes you from the airport to the longterm parking lot with my mother. We were on our way back from Seattle and our flight had been delayed and I was busy freaking out over not getting my homework done. I was whining. A middle-aged guy with his wife across from us looked at my mother indulgently. He said that I reminded him of one of his two daughters. One of his daughters was very organized and didn’t procrastinate and didn’t panic, and the other one was just like me. I hated that man. I still hate that man twenty some years later. I want to tell him that he didn’t know the first damn thing about me.
But of course, just like Jane, I worry that he was right about me all along, that all those unpleasant voices, some external and some coming from inside the house, are right about me. There’s not a damn thing to be done about it. I put on my dress, look at myself in the mirror. I think I look pretty good.
Tags: books, c.s. lewis, felix kent, i’m into hard sci-fi, science fiction
Oh dear. I have…so many thoughts about this book. They are…not happy thoughts. I guess I’ll pick out the one that bothers me the most. Merlin condemns Jane for using birth control and preventing the birth of some kind of savior-figure in contravention of God’s laws. A god who, by the way, was not stopped by Mary’s virginity, but a diaphragm? Yeah, that was too much for God to overcome. (I mean, that is only part of what is wrong with that scene). Also: the monstrous lesbian policewoman and her “giggling girls.” (!) Also the whole JANE YOU MUST SUBMIT TO MALE AUTHORITAH THAT IS WHAT WIMMIN ARE FOR plot. Now, I loved Lewis for a long time, during my days as a Christian desperately seeking something more intellectual than Janette Oke romances, but I have to tell you, he was a seriously misguided individual where women were concerned.
However, this scene, with the dresses, was pretty interesting. Lewis had a real THING about clothes not being uncomfortable, even if they were your “good, fancy” clothes. I think he spent too many years sweating it out in celluloid collars as a boy.
That Hideous Strength is one of the few books I hate-read, for the items that emjbee outlined above.
That may have kept me from seeing the “be true to your whole nature” parts that were powerful for you, Felix.
I do actually think most of us have more than one thing going on in our natures, and that the several people a person wants to be are important, and so are the several people they currently are, and the several people they may be afraid to become.
I could not agree with both of you more about how troubling a lot of the book is, esp. the lesbian police officer bit, which is loathsome. And the “be true to your whole nature” part is not actually something I’m endorsing, because he’s saying that Jane needs to give up being the things that she actually wants to be to be more womanly. And I hate that. What I find really tough about reading C.S. Lewis, though is that there are things, even in this one, that ring really true, like how Mark is always trying to get into the inner circle and how destructive that is. Which I guess is something I struggle with reconciling with the parts that make me cringe.
Also there’s the coziness part — maybe I just really wish I was a British academic of that era.
I mean, as readers it behooves us to look at the things that compel us whether or not we approve of them, and how our approval and fury and fascination intertwine.
I think Lewis was fairly smart about all of those things, actually, and about human vulnerability. But it’s almost like his solution is, “Become less human! Become an archetype!” and because he doesn’t seem paid very much attention to women as layered humans, his archetypes for them are more stereotypes.
That’s a really interesting way to think about what goes wrong with women in Lewis; thank you for it.
Ugh, Mark’s straining to become part of the inner circle is so very uncomfortable for me. Oddly enough when I was younger I worried that I was becoming too Marklike, bumbling around and being focussed on status and compromising my ethics.
Well, he knew all about academic infighting, so he was good on that. And my theory was that Till We Have Faces was much better on women because he had lived with a woman and come to know her as a human being. (TWHF is a really odd book; it fails in lots of ways, but you can almost see it being good).
I’ve found myself fantasizing about being a British academic in that era too, and I have to remind myself that men like Lewis would have fought very hard to keep me from doing that.
There’s a section in A.S. Byatt’s Paris Review interview where she talks about the character of Beatrice Nest in her novel Possession that I think is very illuminating of the world that Lewis inhabited. She says, “I feel immense sympathy for her. She really suffered from being put down by male English departments. The one where I taught was well-known for excluding the women members by conducting all its business over beer in the pub. And as late as 1964, women were not allowed in the senior common room. They could only go in the women’s senior common room, which was known as the Margaret Murray Room. Beatrice was the generation who was told that because she was a woman she must work not on Randolph Ash, but on Ellen Ash—it’s disgusting to want to work on Randolph, he was a man.”
I love that book SO MUCH Sredni. And the movie was so disappointing. I need to read it again soon. I would also recommend Three Times Table by Sara Maitland, which has a similar (but feistier) academic woman of that time, her radical feminist daughter, and her granddaughter who has a secret involving dragons. It is really enjoyable.
I also ADORE Possession, so clearly I need to search for Three Times Table. Thank you for recommending 🙂
Ah yes, Fairy the molest-y abusive policewoman. That was the part where I got the squeams. I love many of his books, but Lewis is dreadful at writing about women — barring, oddly, Til We Have Faces, where I suppose writing an ugly unsexual woman allowed him to realize some humanity in a female character.
More or less my exact reaction when I reread it; I liked it the first time through, even while parts of it niggled at me – and, as above, Lewis will not let you take what you like and leave what you don’t. When I reread it, I gnashed my teeth several times, until the line “You will have no more dreams; have children instead,” at which point I caved and threw the damn paperback across the room with a partially-satisfying scream of rage.
But… for all that, the dresses. And Camilla, on weather, and, yes, the man has a gift with writing. Mark’s scene in the jail is a scene I still paraphrase when I’m trying to explain why the afterlife is not the important part of Christianity (I find both Heaven and Hell very hard to believe in, for different reasons). Because it doesn’t matter if good wins, that’s no damn reason to choose evil.
Uh. That LINE. I haaaaaaaaaaaaaate it.
Maybe if he’d phrased it like “No more nightmares, embrace life”?
Amen
I have my issues with Lewis, but the man clearly knows prom shopping.
Aside from not getting to use a mirror!
I dunno how your posse did things, but my friends dissected every dress in the Juniors section with an eye to “do you have lipstick that matches this skirt?” and “too femme?” and “you’re a winter, right?” before I was ever allowed to see the One True Gown.
You are totally right; I take it all back!
I loved this, and I am also very like Jane, and I worry a lot about whether those Other Voices are right about me, and I think I should go re-read the Space Trilogy, stat.
(Perelandra is my favorite, though. Chapter 11 was a big push for me to acknowledge that I was a believer.)
If I stopped worrying about whether Other Voices were right about me, my overall worrying would go down by about 95 percent.
I think Perelandra is my least favorite by a whisker, but that first chapter, with the walk down the country lane, has one of the best descriptions of the uncanny that I’ve ever read, and I still think of it when the term comes up.
(I also enjoy the caves, but purely for their fantastical vividness.)
I went into it expecting more stand-up space-dolphin riding and got…whatever it was THS was about. I think I blocked it out.
Bears! Heads in boxes! Merlin! Academic committees as a mask for true evil!
The trick is that the mask is EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE FACE UNDERNEATH
I credit That Hideous Strength with my inherent distrust of bureaucracy. Belbury reminds me of our current government.
I am pretty sure the Toast commentariat is staffed entirely and wholly by Jane, in various degrees of resignation, right up until we turn into 3Jane.
I love how you write about Lewis, how parts of his books stick with you. It’s the same for me, in That Hideous Strength it was the sentence where Mark looks at his hands as he’s being hauled off for execution, and realizes he’s “looking at the hands of an imminent corpse.”
*shivers*
I appreciate your outlook on this, though. SO resonate with the “I am NOT sweet and pretty, I am fierce and amazing!” but, as you mention at the end, there IS something to be appreciated in how I am naturally. My dress is kickass too.
The scene that stays with me from That Hideous Strength is always the one that culminates in “Adore.”
*shivers*
I really like this. Lewis is one of those writers who is so compelling and has lots of great humanist ideas, but also his ideas about women are so messed up, and it’s really good to look at what is compelling in his books, and if maybe the gross messed up ideas can also be compelling as well.
Tangential: has anyone read Lewis’s stream-of-consciousness short story? The narrator enters a woman’s mind, and finds that in her mental landscape the only things that appear with clarity are cut flowers, jewels, women’s clothes, and handsome men’s faces. At the center of her mind is her own naked body, and the narrator spends a lot of time talking about how it’s been blown up to grotesque proportions and also tan lines are disgusting. It’s . . . an interesting read.
Yes that story so awful so awful SO AWFUL. I want to unread it but it never even dims in memory. “The Shoddy Lands.” Because a woman that is conventionally beautiful and follows the social rules cannot have a mind, but must instead have a consciousness full of junk and vanity.
“The Shoddy Lands”. Yep yep yep. It can be argued (successfully or not) that the narrator is only seeing inside the mind of one specific woman, who just happens to be a self-obsessed fashion victim, but I think it’s also pretty clear from his other writings that Lewis had issues with adult women. Of course it could also be argued that, pre-Joy, Lewis had known very few Real Women, and the one he spent most of his adult life with was, erm, pretty much a piece of work.
What I found kind of fascinating is that I started reading some of Lewis’s collected letters when I was writing this, and there are a surprising number where he writes to actual women with warmth and sincerity and depth, and then he’ll be writing to his friends complaining about how in visiting some other friend the wife wouldn’t go off and leave them to their drink or what have you.
“Cuckolded by a woman? How extraordinary!”
CS Lewis on hearing that a male acquaintance’s wife had eloped with Vita Sackville-West. (No, the man was not Denys Trefusis.)
Yes, The Shoddy Lands. I read that when I was much too young, and it made a huge (totally negative) impression on me. My previous experience of reading Lewis was the Narnia books, which I adored, so he had a lot of credibility with me.
Yes, that story and “Ministering Angels”, which was collected with it, were what finally convinced me that Lewis really did have a problem with writing women. (Being more of a Lucy myself, or at least identifying more with her, Susan’s fate didn’t strike me as troublesome until I was much older.) The rather loathsome bits about birth control and being a proper wife in That Hideous Strength didn’t help either. I had actually forgotten about Fairy Hardcastle until this blog entry, which is rather a feat now that I think of it.
Lewis does have lots of great humanist ideas. I think this is actually why I can’t read him anymore (and THS is the book that broke the camel’s back.) He writes movingly and insightfully about people, and then says something almost off the cuff that makes you realize he doesn’t include women in that definition.
When I read THS I felt vastly diminished in spirit afterwards. I have to disagree with the author here about where the yucky parts come in as well (although I appreciate her essay a great deal.) I think the yucky parts start immediately, as soon as we meet Jane, and the authorial voice begins its belittling of her. As I recall, she is chided even for keeping her old schoolbooks in the house in an effort to remain intellectually engaged with the subjects she studied in university. Merlin shouting at her about how her use of birth control prevented a second Christ from being born is just the cherry on top of a horribly misogynistic sundae.
You’re completely right about where the yucky parts start — I think the second sentence is something about Jane not having a very original mind. And that’s when I realize that if I actually met Lewis he’d mostly want me out of the way so that the men could smoke and talk and do the important things.
There are part of This Hideous Strength that read like Shirley Jackson’s best, especially the bit you quote about getting out of the car and starting fresh right where you’ve stopped.
As a girl and then woman who spent too much of my own life devaluing traditionally feminine traits in myself and others, I can even appreciate some — some — of the value of accepting one’s own sweetness, prettiness, gentleness, even if it collides with one’s desired persona. But the obtuse smugness with which Lewis assigns women to the tiny boxes of gender-essentialist roles makes his writing infuriating.
Well, and I feel like that obtuse smugness reinforces my own uneasiness with accepting the traditionally feminine parts of myself, because the book turns it into such an all-or-nothing proposition. You can be Miss Ironwood or you can be Mother Dimble, but you can’t be a little bit of each.
Exactly! I am strong and soft and smart and silly and kind and tough. I am many, many things. I am complex. I do not need to be shrunk down to fit into the boxes Lewis is so fond of.
Thank you for writing about this book! I read it in college when I was desperately in love with Lewis. I grew up with him and was so excited to discover how much more he had written than Narnia when I got there. But That Hideous Strength… I hate that book. I hate it so much. It made me feel, as your mother implied, yucky. It’s still good though, objectively well written and interesting despite Lewis’ ignorance about the humanity of women. It’s one of those books that I can’t re-read because of how squidgy and uncomfortable I get. I couldn’t even deal with references to cheroots in other things for a long while after reading it the first time because of Hardcastle.
What I really want to say though is I thought I was the only one who had taken white-out to a book in a desperate need to change it! I tried to take the father out of Keeping Barney for Reasons. I turned him into an aunt, but like you never finished my edits.
Man, for years it made me feel bad to stare at the half-whited out pages of one of my favorite books.
Funny, I was just remembering the other day how we read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in elementary school, and the teacher had us underline various Symbolic and Meaningful things in the text, one of which was when Santa gives Susan a bow but then tells her not to use it in battle, because “battles are ugly when women fight.”
This piece gives me some context for why C.S. Lewis would write such an obviously nonsensical thing!
Remember also that Lewis was born in 1898, was not a particularly progressive member of his generation, had a very strange long-term relationship with what seems like a very trying woman, and focused his academic research on medieval literature, especially courtly love.
And that he lived through two world wars (and fought in one), neither of which allowed women in infantry.
I mean, yeah, sure. It’s not at all surprising that he thought women shouldn’t fight. It’s surprising to me that this character argued specifically that women shouldn’t fight because it makes battles ugly (in some way or to some degree that they aren’t already ugly). To me, the idea of women as archetypes of goodness explains that particular orientation much more than the biographical facts of being born in 1898, having a particular type of girlfriend or living through horrific wars. I’ll give you the courtly love bit, though.
” very strange long-term relationship with what seems like a very trying woman” — I never knew this about Lewis and I want to know more!
Yes, it’s not very well-known – I’d been reading Lewis’ writing, and writing about Lewis, for YEARS before I found out about her. Her name was Jane Moore, and she was the mother of his best school friend, and they lived together for decades.
I only found out about her a few years ago, when my dad gave me The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs ;. Jacobs is a religious guy, but he doesn’t shy away from the uniqueness of their relationship.
Thanks so much for writing this! I thought I was the only person under fifty who had read this book; I should have known the Toasties would prove me wrong.
I enjoy the Space Trilogy quite a lot, but I always thought That Hideous Strength was sort of laughably different in tone and content from the other two. The first time I read it I kept checking the cover to make sure it was the right book. It really is compelling in a way that Lewis’ other works are not (and I say this as someone who has a huge emotional attachment to Lewis’ writing). I think it may be because he’s turning the things that upset him about his contemporary life into grotesqueries. That takes so much emotional energy that it has to just come through.
(Fun fact: I read somewhere that 1984 was inspired by/written as a response to That Hideous Strength. Sadly, I’ve not read it yet, so I can’t speak to similarities.)
I’m going to try to say something intelligent about Jane and the actual blog entry in a bit, but my dinner was unexpectedly delayed by 2 hours and I’m not sure how much longer my coherence is going to hold out. So food first.
Ok, I’ve eaten now so let’s see how this goes.
I’m so glad that the first thing I’ve read about this book in a while is about Jane. I don’t think I’m particularly like her, but the weird morphology of Lewis’ writing about women is that NO ONE is particularly like his women, and yet he was still good enough at observing human nature that recognizable bits still slip through. The bit at the beginning, where Jane cleans up the apartment after Mark leaves (whut?) and then feels lost for a few minutes while trying to get down to work? I think anyone who’s tried to work from home has had that feeling at least once. It was so interesting reading about Jane from someone who gets more of those points of contact or recognition. So thanks again!
I don’t want to excuse Lewis in any way but so much of the writing of his contemporaries is equally sickening about women. I almost don’t want to read any fiction written by men from 1930 to 1960 because it’s so prone to imagine women as ingenues or frumps or harridans or drying-up tentative spinsters or suffocating mother-figures etc etc. etc. You almost feel any hope of your humanity seeping away as you read.
I really hate, e.g., Lucky Jim. At least Lewis is not obsessed with running down women for the sin of not being fuckable.
Maybe it starts even earlier, with D.H. Lawrence’s influence?
Even for all that, for Jane and birth control and the gender essentialism of the Mother and the Dwarves, and so on… it’s still, in hindsight, Fairy Hardcastle that makes me want to curl into a little ball and sob. When I was a teen-person, around the time I read this, I used to wonder what Lewis would think of me, if we’d met. (Yes, of course I’m Jane on the inside.) The older I got, the more I knew that, unless I’d managed to pass as male, I would be the most loathsome creature as far as he could tell. I credit Lewis with a lot of the self-loathing that came with finally coming out to myself.
…and still adore his writing, and TWHF is still in my top five-ten books in the whole world. And would still bend reality to meet him, even knowing how it would turn out.
I relate so much to this — I spent so much of my teen years trying to figure out whether I would be saved or damned under Lewis’s schematic and that moment where it’s like, yup, I wouldn’t make the cut but there’s still so much there that moves me.
I still catch myself doing it, every so often. It’s mildly wrenching.
Oh, Fairy Hardcastle’s character is so painful to read, the most reductive and caricatured person in the book, and a specific kind of stereotype induced by the writer’s (and society’s) ungrounded anxieties about homosexuality. I’d kinda blocked her out of my memory — it’s been such a long time since I read the books, and even then Fairy Hardcastle stood out as a cartoonishly broad peek into the writer’s certainty about How Women Should Be, and what happens when we don’t conform.
It wasn’t until I reread the book as an adult that I realized why Fairy says “bucking” so often. I’d just assumed it was some odd period slang.
I did try to say “bucking” once, and got in trouble, so obviously my mother could figure out the euphemism.
“She was, as Bill Blizzard had complained, uncorseted.”
I wish I didn’t remember that line so vividly. Women don’t even WEAR corsets anymore, and haven’t in so long, and yet, somehow, it still stings. Buck you, Bill the Blizzard. Women didn’t wear corsets in Merlin’s druidic tradition either.
“The older I got, the more I knew that, unless I’d managed to pass as male, I would be the most loathsome creature as far as he could tell. I credit Lewis with a lot of the self-loathing that came with finally coming out to myself.
…and still adore his writing, and TWHF is still in my top five-ten books in the whole world. And would still bend reality to meet him, even knowing how it would turn out. ”
Forget meeting him–this comment makes me want to necromancy Lewis out of his grave just so I can punch him on your behalf, Ivkra. No one’s literary heroes should make them feel that way. >:(
Oh man, this book upset me so much when I read it as a teenager, so good to hear other people with the same reactions to it. And it seemed like Lewis was making some attempt to get it when he describes Jane’s fear of being objectified and then he turns around and does all the diminishing and limiting of women that goes along with objectification. Ugh, and the way Ransome doesn’t allow her to be involved unless she asks Mark’s permission.
I noticed my little sister reading Out of the Silent Planet last time I was home, I can’t help worrying a bit at the thought of her reading THS.
I HIGHLY recommend “Till We Have Faces.” It’s fascinating in light of the facts that a) C.S. Lewis had been mulling on this story back when he was an atheist, so there’s a push-pull of ideologies going on and b) he started actually writing it when he was with his wife, Joy Davidman, who gave him plenty of feedback and became the inspiration for the protagonist. The primary storyline is the relationship between two sisters, and the main character is physically plain, becomes queen, and kicks ass with a sword. Definitely Needs More Love.
That was how I felt too. I have a journal entry from college in which I specifically worried about how Lewis/Aslan/Jesus would feel about me and my queerness. It was not good for me. There was so little queer representation in anything I read as an adolescent, and to have one of the only examples be Fairy Hardcastle burning Jane with cigarettes… gosh, I just hate this book.
Yes, it's not very well-known – I'd been reading Lewis' writing, and writing about Lewis, for YEARS before I found out about her. Her name was Jane Moore, and she was the mother of his best school friend, and they lived together for decades.
I only found out about her a few years ago, when my dad gave me The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs ;. Jacobs is a religious guy, but he doesn't shy away from the uniqueness of their relationship.
"Fairy Hardcastle burning Jane with cigarettes" — I STILL haven't read this book and the more I am learning about it through this comment section, the more "WTF" it becomes.
There's not only a lesbian (?) woman named FAIRY HARDCASTLE (BEST EVER BURLESQUE NAME???) she is a sadist who burns people with cigarettes??? O.O What the eff, Mister Lewis?