Women and C.S. Lewis

What his life and literature reveal for today's culture

Carolyn Curtis, Mary Pomroy Key

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780745956954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Sexism in Narnia? Or Screwtape? Or amongst the Inklings? Many critics have labelled C.S. Lewis a sexist, even a misogynist. Did the life and writing of the hugely popular author and professor betray attitudes that today are unacceptable, even deplorable? The younger Lewis was criticized for a mysterious living arrangement with a woman, but his later marriage to an American poet, Joy Davidman, became a celebrated love story. As a writer he, along with J.R.R. Tolkien, formed a legendary literary group, the Inklings - but without women. In this collection of short essays, opinion pieces, and interviews, academics and writers come together to investigate these accusations. They include Alister McGrath, Randy Alcorn, Monika Hilder, Don W. King, Kathy Keller, Colin Duriez, Crystal Hurd, Jeanette Sears, David C. Downing, Malcolm Guite, and Holly Ordway. The resulting work, Women and C.S. Lewis, provides broad and satisfying answers.

SECTION FOUR

Lewis, the influencer – how his life and literature impact the twenty-first century discussion about women

Gender issues and attitudes have changed over the years. How men with Lewis’ personal and professional background thought about, spoke of, and treated women in his day might be considered quite unenlightened today. To extrapolate Lewis’ attitudes and actions, we review comments from his correspondence and published works plus observations by Lewis authorities.

The chapters in Section Four provide detailed analyses – both scholarly and from the contributors’ personal perspectives. Following are snapsnots of his views from 1926 to just before his death in 1963.

In C.S. Lewis: A biography of friendship, Colin Duriez tells of a philosophy class conducted by Lewis in 1926 at Lady Margaret Hall with only women students (before Oxford was fully coeducational). Duriez writes, “Contrary to some accusations of misogyny, Lewis seems to treat male and female students as equals.” Lewis’ diary entry for that date reveals his enthusiasm for the brightness of his women students, noting several by name, a progressive attitude by an Oxonian in the 1920s.

Lewis’ view of women would develop more over the years. In Plain to the Inward Eye, Dr Don W. King notes: “Those who think that Lewis is misogynist are either wearing blinders or have not taken the time to do exactly as Van Leeuwen does in this chapter: investigate the facts about Lewis’ relationships with women.” King is referring to a work of deep scholarship by Dr Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, The Sword between the Sexes, and specifically to his critique of her fifth chapter, which he characterizes as one of her book’s strongest and one that “has long needed to be written.” In it, Van Leeuwen discusses Lewis’ reaction to TIME magazine’s story about him, published on 7 September 1947. Writing about it to one of his American correspondents, Lewis complained, “Who said I disliked women? I never liked or disliked any generalization.” (Lewis emphasized the last word.) Van Leeuwen added that “…although Lewis sometimes wrote what Dorothy L. Sayers referred to as ‘shocking nonsense’ about women, his actual relationships with women students and colleagues were in the main quite laudable.”

On 10 January 1952, C.S. Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope: “…there ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man,” adding: “I can’t bear a ‘man’s man’ or a ‘woman’s woman’.” On 5 August 1955, he wrote to his friend Dorothy L. Sayers that he didn’t care for the ultra-masculine or ultra-feminine – he just preferred people, emphasizing the word. These comments came long after his conversion to Christianity, but it’s worth noting that for many years “in matters of scholarship, Lewis was alert to erudition and blind to gender,” as Dr Alister McGrath wrote in C.S. Lewis, A Life.

One of Lewis’ most quotable essays is also his last. According to Walter Hooper, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” was written as an article for The Saturday Evening Post shortly before his death on 22 November 1963. Addressing what someone asserts as their “right to sexual happiness,” in this case meaning extra-marital relationships, Lewis warns, “A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women… Where promiscuity prevails, they will therefore always be more often the victims than the culprits.” He adds, “… though the ‘right to happiness’ is chiefly claimed for the sexual impulse, it seems to me impossible that the matter should stay there. The fatal principle, once allowed in that department, must sooner or later seep through our whole lives… And then… our civilization will have died at heart, and will – one dare not even add ‘unfortunately’ – be swept away.”

* * *

Section Four opens with Dr Monika Hilder’s stunning chapter, “Jack, the ‘old woman’ of Oxford: sexist or seer?” She cites the names of individuals who have accused C.S. Lewis of being sexist and turns their arguments upside down by asserting: “It’s not Lewis who’s sexist: It’s us.” Her piece is built on questions she poses as she unpacks her theory that rather than being sexist, Lewis was a visionary who transformed Western gender paradigms as they relate to heroism in literature.

Chapter two is “A generation longing for C.S. Lewis” by Brett McCracken, who jumps right into the twenty-first century with commentary on why people of his (younger) generation need and seek Lewis’ written truths and personal example. His explanation of how universities sometimes fall short is fascinating.

Dr Mary Poplin offers chapter three, “From feminist to mere Christian,” in which she discusses, from personal experience, the issue of abortion. She tells of the journey many women have made from following the more radical feminist ideals to following Christ.

Women in the pulpit? In chapter four, “Lewis as teacher and servant… and my respectful disagreement on women as priests,” the Revd Dr Jeanette Sears takes on Lewis and his still controversial essay on a subject she is uniquely qualified to discuss, as one of the first women priests ordained in England. She also examines ways in which Lewis’ attitudes and conduct toward women inspire her.

Like Sears, Kathy Keller was inspired by Lewis from an early age. She sought his advice in her letters from America, becoming one of the British author’s child pen pals. “On women’s roles in the Church: Lewis’ letters to me as a child lit my way” tells how she and her husband, Tim Keller, live out their complementary gender leadership model at Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian church. Chapter five is also based on Lewis’ essay, “Priestesses in the Church?”

What could a man of Lewis’ background and generation, who was a bachelor until his fifties, have to say about love and sex that’s relevant today? A great deal, argues Dr Holly Ordway in her unflinching chapter six, “C.S. Lewis on love and sex.”

Dr Michael Ward also unpacks Lewis’ views on sexual matters in our seventh chapter, “Mistress for pleasure or wife for fruit?” He carefully analyzes shifts in cultural attitudes and church doctrine during Lewis’ lifetime, including how he responded as a scholar and an author.

We close Section Four with a deep and delightful look at how C.S. Lewis and his feisty friend, Dorothy L. Sayers, were “Comrades against the zeitgeist” in chapter eight. Kasey Macsenti shows how Lewis and Sayers conspired against a new attitude of their time which still influences us today.

CHAPTER ONE

Jack, the “old woman” of Oxford: sexist or seer?

Dr Monika B. Hilder

The hottest question on C.S. Lewis today is whether or not he was sexist. Did he hate women? Did he soften over time? Or, was he not sexist but prophetic? And seriously, is this even an important discussion? In view of huge world crises – terrorism, ecological disaster, nihilistic greed – why under heaven should we spend time thinking about our answer? What possible relevance does Lewis’ view(s) of gender have for personal and global challenges?

Lewis was sexist, right?

Jack, as he called himself, was sexist, right? Born in 1898, spending his life in the male-dominated British academic world, how could he not have been? Let’s remember, this is a world that had only recently admitted females, as many have pointed out (Fredrick, McBride 4, 12). Lewis admitted to sado-masochistic fantasies as a young man (Sayer 55–56; Lindskoog 370). His close friend Owen Barfield said he hated women in a theoretical sense, although not in his everyday life (quoted in Green and Hooper 213–14). Sounds like Jack was a bit muddled, but who isn’t?

Lewis had plenty of what Peter Bayley called “tough masculine clubbability” (176) and once said he enjoyed nothing so much as “male laughter” (W.H. Lewis 14). He believed in male headship in marriage (Mere Christianity 99–100; Four Loves 97–98); said wives were prone to “fidgetiness” (Four Loves 54);¹ thought mothers tended to unfairly defend their families (Mere Christianity 100); and worried that females might “banish male companionship” (Four Loves 71). Need we more proof? (There’s a bit more.) Let’s face it: Lewis was sexist! But so were most men and a lot of women too in earlier times, so why bother discussing this?

All right, the answer to the question might be more nuanced. Surely, Lewis might have changed. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen maps this idea carefully. But Walter Hooper (50) thought it unlikely that it took Lewis fify-eight years to figure out what life was about.

With Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, we would of course expect to see the increasing work of the Holy Spirit. Also, plain aging and his later marriage to Joy Davidman likely softened him.

Point: he wrote his last novel, Till We Have Faces, in the first person voice of a female character. That’s big. Or maybe Lewis did it without changing his sexist views of women? But shall we forgive him in view of the much he did so well?

Who cares?

Scores of people. Philip Pullman (quoted in Ezard) and J.K. Rowling (quoted in Grossman 40) denounce his “sexism” in Narnia. Kath Filmer believes he was a misogynist throughout his life. Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride (xiv–xv) worry about his “Christian sexism” and “disturbing misogyny” for its likely impact on teaching Christians that we ought to perpetuate “restricted gender roles.” So, if they are right, Lewis’ sexism is not only relevant but poisonous.

What we think about one thing affects how we think about everything else. If this is true, then Lewis’ supposed sexism is not an isolated problem. Take it from Pullman, who believes that Lewis was not only sexist but racist and a lover of violence (quoted in Ezard; Pullman, “Darkside”). It makes sense: if Lewis sinned as a sexist, why would he have stopped short of other forms of domination, even violence? Barfield says it this way: “somehow what [Lewis] thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” And Owen Barfield insisted that Lewis was always thinking about “the moral aspect of any question” (5, 122).

So whether or not Lewis hated or just thought females inferior, it matters: it affects everything he stood for.

How can we say Lewis was not, for the most part, sexist?

We have ample evidence that Lewis affirmed females, the “feminine,” throughout his life, and disdained, if not males per se, the “masculine.” For example, he called British schoolboys “coarse, brainless” (Letters I 59; age 15), and praised men who “blubbered like school-girls” (Letters III 432; age 55). From the old matriarch in Dymer (written years before he became a Christian), to Lucy in Narnia, and Psyche and Orual in his last novel, Till We Have Faces, Lewis portrays strong moral females. From the lustful youth Dymer, and treacherous Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, to the leaders of the scientist conspiracy in That Hideous Strength, Lewis portrays treacherous males.

Then, surprisingly, Lewis calls himself (Letters III 521) the “old woman” of Oxford! In The Problem of Pain (124), Lewis also said he didn’t mind being thought of as an “old maid”! (Meaning?! I’ll get back to this.)

And Lewis favorably compared pregnant women and women who worked both inside and outside the home to soldiers (Letters III 105, 310–11); cleaning women to poets (“Christianity and Culture” 24); authors to pregnant women (Letters II 555; Letters III 328); housewives to college professors (Letters II 855) – the last one, because the work is never-ending. And he should know; he did plenty of both.

Lewis’ writings are one long testimony of his affinity with the “feminine.”

If Lewis was not sexist, why is it so hard for us to understand this?

Is a hero self-reliant? Can a hero be passive? How we answer these questions has to do with which of the two Western heroic paradigms we see life by – classical or spiritual heroism.

The classical hero of ancient Greece and Rome prizes qualities such as activity, self-reliance, and pride. This is the brawny and sometimes brainy hero: Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules. He fights hard and conquers under his own steam. Passive? Never. Proud, self-reliant? Always. The classical hero is the Superman whom the Western world (and arguably, the rest of the globe) places on a pedestal and applauds. George Bernard Shaw predicted that the twentieth-century would worship him most (136–37). John Milton in Paradise Lost identified the classical hero as ultimately satanic: the fallen angel declares, “To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (1.262–63).

The spiritual hero of Judeo-Christianity prizes qualities such as passivity, dependence, and humility – such as these underdog heroes of the Bible: the poor widow who trusts God’s prophet and is rewarded with food for life; the teenager David who slays Goliath by trusting the Lord; Mary who agrees to become pregnant with God. Passive, dependent? Yes, in the sense of waiting and relying on God. Humble? Yes, in the sense of giving up ego in obedience to God. Christ’s submission to the incarnation and to death on the cross is the ultimate example of the spiritual hero. In Paradise Regained Milton described Christ’s victory over classical heroism: “By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: / His weakness shall o’ercome Satanic strength” (1.161). The spiritual hero is the one who is, apparently, least understood. He illustrates the “foolish weakness” of God that Paul talked about (1 Corinthians 1:25).

And gender? We have gendered these heroic paradigms. We tend to think of classical qualities as masculine and the spiritual as feminine: the active male and the passi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTIONS
• SECTION ONE: Lewis, the man – and the women in his life
• SECTION TWO: Lewis, the fiction author – how girls and women are portrayed in his novels
• SECTION THREE: Lewis, the poet – surprises from his poetry
• SECTION FOUR: Lewis, the influencer – how his life and literature impact the twenty-first century discussion about women
• SECTION FIVE: Lewis, the mentor – how his views on women impact mine
• CONCLUSION: What do Lewis’ life and literature reveal for today’s culture?
• Questions for Reflection and Discussion
• Endnotes