I don’t doubt that Pullman objects to the idea of damnation, but in the case of Susan, what he’s protesting is the grounds for damnation, not damnation itself. Bree’s vanity is a minor flaw in an otherwise good character, and Uncle Andrew’s pride runs much deeper than just a preoccupation with appearances. Although Susan is not yet damned and still has the chance to “mend,” the implication, in both Lewis’s novel and the letter to his child reader, is that if she keeps on as she has been, preoccupied with feminine nonsense, this alone will be enough to bring her to a bad end. And that prompts a question: Why does Lewis consider an interest in lipstick, nylons, and invitations such an especially pernicious form of silliness? What makes these amusements so much worse than pipes and beer and “bawdy” with your buddies at the pub? Why is feminine triviality so much worse than its masculine counterpart?
Lipstick-obsessed flibbertigibbets like Susan or the fiancée from “The Shoddy Lands” were not the only sort of female Lewis found untrustworthy. In the Chronicles, two of the most memorable villains are women: the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (later revealed in The Magician’s Nephew to be Jadis, the empress of the lost world of Charn) and the Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, who keeps Caspian’s son, Rilian, an unwitting prisoner in her underground kingdom. Both of these witches are very beautifuclass="underline" the White Witch in the frosty tradition of the Snow Queen, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, or the Green Witch, in the merrier spirit of Celtic sorceresses. These two are after more than just party invitations; they want power. Vain, silly women may be annoying distractions for men who have better things to do; the witches are seducers.
Although the tools the White Witch uses to corrupt Edmund are juvenile enough — enchanted candy and the prospect of lording it over his older brother — the scene in which she ensnares him swims with sensuality; there is the witch’s pale skin, her furlined sleigh, and the hot drink she conjures out of nothing (“sweet and foamy and creamy”). A friend of mine remembers being deeply unsettled by this episode as a boy; the witch, though frightening, was also alluring in some way he didn’t entirely understand. Soon the initially resistant Edmund becomes ridiculously pliable to her demands, red-faced and sticky and preoccupied with getting another taste of Turkish delight.
For her part, the less Freudian Green Witch, with her “voice sweeter than the sweetest bird’s song” and “the richest, most musical laugh you can imagine” bewitches Rilian into a perverted form of chivalric servitude. She erases all memory of his former life and grooms him to be the figurehead general of a slave army. Like the knights of the romances Lewis wrote about in The Allegory of Love, men who proved their virtue by fulfilling the directives of their ladies, Rilian pronounces himself “well content to live by her word.”
Lewis objected to the gyneolatry of some chivalric romances at least as far back as The Allegory of Love, and with the Green Witch he got the chance to portray it as an outright evil. In writing about Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, he called the devotion of Lancelot to Guinevere “revolting” for its tendency to “ape religious devotion.” The sin, as he sees it, is primarily Guinevere’s; his antipathy toward her has an oddly personal tone. True, she does demand impossible feats and perfect obedience from her lover — but that is her role. Guinevere is the taskmaster whose rigor enables Lancelot to demonstrate that he is the ideal knight. In real life, she’d be a monster, but this is the realm of medieval romance, as Lewis is usually so eager to remind us, not the psychological domain of the modern novel.
Nevertheless, Lewis can’t resist treating Guinevere as if she were a character in a realistic novel; he refers to one of her tall orders as an example of the queen taking yet “another opportunity of exercising her power.” He even sets aside his own admonitions to think medievally long enough to compare Guinevere and other chivalric heroines to twentieth-century ladies who drag their men on shopping trips, expecting them “to leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold,” whenever they are bidden. If chivalry was not yet dead, Lewis certainly wished it so; abolishing it was one form of modernization he could wholeheartedly endorse. In The Silver Chair, Rilian declares that upon his return from the underworld, “I shall do all by the counsel of my Lady, who will then be my Queen, too. Her word shall be my law.” Jill retorts, “Where I come from … they don’t think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.”
This was a persistent theme for Lewis, who wrote in Surprised by Joy that “the two things that some of us most dread for our own species” are “the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.” He so resented the intrusion of his friends’ wives into his social life that he once wrote, “A friend dead is to be mourned: a friend married is to be guarded against, both being equally lost.”
Not a terribly remarkable attitude in a hidebound bachelor, perhaps. And a repressed professor is just what Lewis was, according to popular opinion, before the most famous event in his personal life: his late, happy marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham. Their romance has been richly idealized, first by Lewis in his memoir of Joy’s death from cancer in 1960, A Grief Observed, and later in the biographical radio play and film Shadowlands. In its pop culture incarnations, theirs is the sentimentally irresistible story of a tweedy, middle-aged don awakened to the bliss of romantic love at a stage in life when most people believe such things are behind them. (“He thought that magic only existed in books, and then he met her” was the movie’s tagline.)
Gresham was an American divorcée, a former communist, and a Jew who converted to Episcopalianism, inspired in part by Lewis’s apologetics. She wrote him fan letters and brought her two young sons with her to meet him when she visited England in the mid-1950s, most likely with the intention of deepening their epistolary friendship. The role religion played in their relationship makes their love story especially appealing to Lewis’s Christian admirers. I heard a lot about it when I visited the Kilns, the cottage in the Oxford suburb of Headington where Lewis lived for the last half of his life. Today the Kilns is maintained by the C. S. Lewis Foundation, an American group dedicated to “enabling a genuine renaissance of Christian scholarship and artistic expression.”
As we walked from room to room, the wholesome young woman who gave me the tour was able to tell me what Joy had done in nearly every corner of the house. I meekly interrupted every now and then to remind her that I was really only interested in what the place was like when Lewis wrote the Chronicles, before he met Joy Gresham. (That was no simple task. The Lewis brothers had allowed the house to lapse into squalor, and although the C. S. Lewis Foundation has restored it to impeccable condition, it has painted the ceiling of the sitting room a dirty yellow, in commemoration of the tobacco smoke residue that once coated it.) As we poked our heads into one oddly configured downstairs room, I asked what it had been used for around 1950, when Lewis was in the thick of inventing Narnia. No one was quite sure … perhaps they could check … but then, oh yes, that’s it: they were pretty sure that room had been Mrs. Moore’s.