If you think C. S. Lewis was sexist, read the last chapter of That Hideous Strength. Just as Jane Studdock is experiencing an epiphany, so is her husband Mark.
Last week was about Jane’s epiphany. It came from a dream of a giant woman and gnome-like little men and fire that does not burn what it touches but instead sprouts vegetation. In the Bible, sex outside of marriage is a fire that burns. But as Mark and Jane Studdock discover, inside of marriage it yields sweet smells and bright fires, with food and wine and a rich bed. We see this at the close of That Hideous Strength. Here’s Lewis telling Mark’s story:
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His mind was not at ease. He knew that he was going to meet Jane, and something was beginning to happen to him which ought to have happened to him far earlier. That same laboratory outlook upon love which had forestalled in Jane the humility of a wife, had equally forestalled in him, during what passed for courtship, the humility of a lover.
He tried to shake it off. They were married, weren’t they? And they were sensible, modern people? What could be more natural, more ordinary?
But then certain moments of unforgettable failure in their short married life rose in his imagination. He had thought often enough of what he called Jane’s “moods.” This time at last he thought of his own clumsy importunity. And the thought would not go away. Inch by inch all the lout and clown and clod-hopper in him was revealed to his own reluctant inspection; the coarse, male boor with horny hands and hobnailed shoes and beefsteak jaw, not rushing in—for that can be carried off—but blundering, sauntering, stumping in where great lovers, knights and poets, would have feared to tread. An image of Jane’s skin, so smooth, so white (or so he now imagined it) that a child’s kiss might make a mark on it, floated before him. How had he dared? Her driven snow, her music, her sacrosanctity, the very style of all her movements . . . how had he dared? And dared, too, with no sense of daring, nonchalantly, in careless stupidity! The very thoughts that crossed her face from moment to moment, all of them beyond his reach, made (had he but had the wit to see it) a hedge about her which such as he should never have had the temerity to pass. Yes, yes—of course it was she who had allowed him to pass it: perhaps in luckless, misunderstanding pity. And he had taken blackguardly advantage of that noble error in her judgement; had behaved as if he were native to that fenced garden and even its natural possessor.
All this, which should have been uneasy joy, was torment to him, for it came too late. He was discovering the hedge after he had plucked the rose, and not only plucked it but torn it all to pieces and crumpled it with hot, thumb-like, greedy fingers. How had he dared? And who that understood could forgive him?
Well, he would release her. She would be glad to be rid of him. Rightly glad. It would now almost have shocked him to believe otherwise. Ladies in some noble and spacious room, discoursing in cool ladyhood together, either with exquisite gravity or with silver laughter—how should they not be glad when the intruder had gone?—the loud-voiced or tongue-tied creature, all boots and hands, whose true place was in the stable. What should he do in such a room—where his very admiration could only be insult, his best attempts to be either grave or gay could only reveal unbridgeable misunderstanding? What he had called her coldness seemed now to be her patience. Whereof the memory scalded. For he loved her now. But it was all spoiled: too late to mend matters.
Suddenly the diffused light brightened and flushed. He looked up and perceived a great lady standing by a doorway in a wall. It was not Jane, not like Jane. It was larger, almost gigantic. It was not human, though it was like a woman divinely tall, part naked, part wrapped in a flame-coloured robe. Light came from it. The face was enigmatic, ruthless, he thought, inhumanly beautiful. It was opening the door for him. He did not dare disobey (“Surely,” he thought, “I must have died”) and he went in: found himself in some place of sweet smells and bright fires, with food and wine and a rich bed.
Lewis closes with Jane half-way to the lodge. She’s thinking only of Mark and of all his sufferings. “When she came to the lodge she was surprised to see it all dark and the door shut. As she stood at the door with one hand on the latch, a new thought came to her. How if Mark did not want her—not tonight, nor in that way, nor any time, nor in any way? How if Mark were not there, after all? A great gap—of relief or of disappointment, no one could say—was made in her mind by this thought. Still she did not move the latch. Then she noticed that the window, the bedroom window, was open. Clothes were piled on a chair inside the room so carelessly that they lay over the sill: the sleeve of a shirt—Mark’s shirt—even hung over down the outside wall. And in all this damp, too. How exactly like Mark! Obviously it was high time she went in.
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Obviously C. S. Lewis was not sexist. He describes Mark as a lout, a male boor with horny hands. I was a pastor for eight years and during that time did a fair amount of marital counseling. Many a wife used similar terms in describing her husband’s sexual advances. I wish I knew then what I know now: the gospel of “bridal beds and marriage.”
I also wish I knew it back then when I counseled those not married. I would have recognized that abstinence requires something incredibly wondrous to fill the vacuum, “something flaming, like Joan of Arc,” wrote G. K. Chesterton. Next week we’ll discover what in heaven’s name Chesterton meant by that.
