In addition to tending to Minto and Warnie, Lewis kept up an exhausting correspondence with the strangers who began writing to him after his apologetics gained a wide audience. He seemed to regard all of the inconveniences imposed by others as lessons in humility and submission. In a letter written to Arthur just after Warnie moved in, he complained that he wasn’t getting enough solitude and then corrected himself: “what we call hindrances are really the raw material of spiritual life.” His relationship with Mrs. Moore was the most immediate and pressing of all these interruptions. You would think he’d be more understanding of Chrétien’s Lancelot; both knight and don subjected themselves to the command of an exacting lady as a way of serving a greater principle, chivalry in Lancelot’s case and Christianity in Lewis’s.
Only a saint (or an allegorical knight) could endure this sort of thing without anger, so it’s no wonder Lewis wrote waspishly of Guin-evere. She provided a safe target for the rage he must have felt toward Janie Moore. It’s unlikely he recognized the likeness consciously, or that he would ever have acknowledged it. For one thing, his own sacrifices had the Christian virtue of being entirely selfless; Lancelot enjoyed erotic fulfillment with Guinevere. Lewis once shared this with Minto, but by the time he wrote The Allegory of Love their relationship was quasifilial. It offered no sensual pleasure as compensation for all those hindrances. Still, who knows if he would have shouldered such a burden in the first place if he had not, long ago, fallen in love?
The beauty and desirability of women troubled Lewis even more than their frivolity. Guinevere’s beauty, as well as the attractions of the fiancée in “The Shoddy Lands” and of the domineering twentieth- century shoppers he snipes at in The Allegory of Love, are sources of illegitimate power. Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn’t ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it’s going to be tempting, and from there it’s only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked. It is certainly the cause of endless trouble in Narnia, even when its possessor means well. The spell that Lucy finds in the magician’s book, the one promising to “maketh beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals,” also foretells the consequences of such beauty: terrible wars among Lucy’s princely suitors that leave “nations laid waste.”
Those who wish to defend Lewis against charges of misogyny often point to the many heroines in the Chronicles. Besides Lucy, there’s Jill Pole, Polly, and Aravis from The Horse and His Boy — all sensible, stouthearted girls. But the first three are still children whose sexuality and physical allure have yet to emerge, and Aravis is a tomboy, in full flight from the womanly fate of marriage to a husband chosen by her Calormene father. While Aravis and her friends are attempting to escape the city of Tashbaan, she encounters a childhood friend, the Tarkheena Lasaraleen, who embodies all the feminine foolishness that Aravis has so wisely rejected.
Lasaraleen simply can’t fathom why Aravis would reject her prospective groom — a sniveling elderly sycophant, but also a rich and powerful vizier. Nevertheless, finding the whole intrigue “perfectly thrilling,” she agrees to help her old friend escape. Getting Lasaraleen to focus on practicalities, however, proves difficult. She takes forever to pick out an outfit and prattles on about court figures when they ought be on the move. The exasperated Aravis remembers how “Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming.”
The menace threatening Narnia in The Horse and His Boy is an invasion from Calormen. The story takes place during the reign of the Pevensie siblings, and it’s the only Chronicle in which we get to see much of them as adults. A party from Narnia, led by Edmund and Susan, makes a state visit to Tashbaan to consider a marriage proposal Susan has received from Prince Rabadash, the son of the Calormene potentate, the Tisroc. Now grown-up, Susan has become a great beauty, and her judgment has already begun to weaken.
As Rabadash’s true character becomes apparent, Edmund marvels that his sister could ever have entertained the idea of marrying him. Susan says that the prince had deceived her by behaving very “meekly and courteously” while in Narnia. (It’s hard to imagine that the arrogant, hotheaded Rabadash could have been very convincing at this.) The Narnians, suspecting that Rabadash won’t take no for an answer, are then forced to leave the city by stealth. Afterward, the enraged prince urges his father to invade Narnia: “I cannot sleep and my food has no savour and my eyes are darkened because of her beauty,” he wails. “I must have the barbarian queen!”
At best, in Lewis’s view, a taste for “clothes and parties and gossip” makes a woman useless and annoying; at worst, the snares of sex lead to danger, war, and devastation. We expect a children’s book to avoid depictions of sex, but Lewis takes this further by surrounding almost every approach to the subject with contempt or fear — for what are “clothes and parties and gossip” if not tools in the art of meeting and attracting a mate? Grown women are the chief agents and arbiters of this unfortunate business. Without them around, men can concentrate on the adventures that delighted them as boys, albeit on a larger scale — just as Lewis might have spent far more time on reading, writing, and drinking with the Inklings if he hadn’t succumbed to the charms of Janie Moore in the waning years of the Great War.
Girls, of course, aren’t necessarily excluded from adventures in Narnia, but they must learn to be less girly first. They ought to abandon feminine wiles and concerns. Lucy, in contrast with her sister, is a paragon in this department. When she turns up, armed with bow and arrows, for the climactic battle in The Horse and His Boy, a character remarks that she’s “as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy. Queen Susan is more like an ordinary grown-up lady.” Instead of helping to win the war, Susan causes it.
It took me quite a while to recognize the trap in this. I didn’t have much use for clothes or parties myself until I reached my twenties, and I’m still no aficionado of gossip. But unlike Lucy, who apparently dies a virgin, I eventually faced the paradox that confronts most heterosexual women: revel in girly stuff and you’re viewed as shallow; reject it and you’re unattractively mannish. The best you can hope to be is “as good as a boy,” and the worst is a man-eater, a time-waster, a “hindrance” or perhaps, as Janie Moore would discover, the occasion for someone else’s martyrdom. The only way out is to remain a child forever, as Lucy does, but somehow even this is much easier for men — nostalgic bachelors like Warnie Lewis — to pull off. Besides, I wanted to grow up, didn’t I? As a child, I’d always believed that Lewis was on my side in that. As a young woman, I realized he’d disappointed me again.
Chapter Thirteen
Blood Will Out
The Natural History of Make-Believe by John Goldthwaite is a little-known “history of the world’s imaginative literature for children,” a passionate and partisan work, full of fiery tirades against several titles that are usually published with the words “The Beloved Classic” stamped on their covers. It was recommended to me by Philip Pullman, who said that he’d encountered one of the best articulations of his own criticisms of Lewis in the work of Goldthwaite, an American academic. Pullman thought I’d find The Natural History of Make-Believe particularly interesting because Goldthwaite is a Christian, and his animus toward Narnia can’t be summarily written off as anti-theist prejudice, the way Pullman’s often is.