Susan, Orual and Joy: the file "Lewis misogynous" reopened, evidence in hand

• Key piece: Susan, hierarchical marriage, female priests, a line from Father Christmas.
• Other pieces: Lucy, Jill, Aravis, Polly and Orual.
• Women in his life: Flora Hamilton, Janie Moore, Joy Davidman, and intellectual friends like Dorothy L. Sayers.
• An evolution visible after meeting Joy.

Key piece 1: Susan

In The Last Battle, Susan is no longer “a friend of Narnia”; she is only interested in “nylons, lipstick, and invitations.” The writer Philip Pullman saw this as a condemnation of a girl discovering her sexuality; Neil Gaiman wrote a short story based on it, The Problem of Susan. Other readers point out that Lewis condemns not femininity but an obsession with being grown-up, and that he wrote to a young reader that Susan’s story was not over and that she could find her way.

Key piece 2: Orual

And then there is Orual, the narrator of The Silver Chair (1956): an ugly, warrior queen, a skilled politician, who sues the gods and discovers in writing her own shadow side. She is one of the most complex female characters in 20th-century literature, written by a man, and with the help of a woman: Joy Davidman reviewed and inspired the novel.

Other key pieces

• Marriage. In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis defends the hierarchy of the husband in the couple, following a traditional reading of Saint Paul.
• Female priests. In 1948, he published an essay against the ordination of women, based on liturgical symbolism rather than on female inferiority, but his arguments shock many today.
• War. Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe says that battles are ugly when women fight in them.

Other key pieces

The heroines of Lewis are often the strongest characters. Lucy, the youngest, is the one who sees Aslan when the others cannot, and is right against everyone; it is she who heals. Jill, initially fearful, becomes an intrepid scout who shoots a bow in The Last Battle. Aravis is a runaway princess who refuses a forced marriage, braver than Shasta. Polly is more sensible than Digory. Researchers, such as the French Anne-Frédérique Caballero, have shown that Lewis’s work goes far beyond the stereotypes of his time.

Context

Lewis was a man born in 1898, educated in all-male boarding schools, trenches, and Oxford colleges where only men lived as bachelors. The Inklings were an exclusively male circle. It would be surprising if he had escaped the prejudices of his generation. The real question is elsewhere: did he content himself with them, or did he evolve?

The women in his life

• Flora Hamilton, his mother, a mathematics graduate, who taught him French and Latin. Her death when he was nine years old is the founding wound.
• Janie Moore, with whom he lived for thirty years (see “The Kilns household”).
• Joy Davidman, poet, novelist, former communist, who equaled him in intelligence and whom he could not beat at chess or in debate.

Friends

Lewis corresponded and debated as equals with remarkable women: the novelist and Dante translator Dorothy L. Sayers, whom he admired; the poetess Ruth Pitter, whom he considered one of the best poets of his time; sister Penelope, an Anglican nun from Wantage, with whom he exchanged long letters on theology; Stella Aldwinckle, founder of the Socratic Club, which he presided over. The only female critic whose arguments he publicly acknowledged as having forced him to rewrite a chapter was the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.

An evolution

Many biographers note a change after meeting Joy. The Lewis of the 1940s, who was ironic about learned women, is not quite the same as the one who wrote The Four Loves and A Grief Observed, in which he speaks of his wife as his equal in all things: “my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign.”

Our verdict

Lewis was not a feminist in the modern sense, and some of his lines have not aged well. But to reduce him to a misogynist would be unfair: Lucy, Aravis, and Orual, his friendships and his life with Joy tell another story. The case remains open; it is up to each reader to judge, texts in hand.

See also

• Joy Davidman and "A Severe Mercy"
• The Kilns household: Warnie, "Minto," and Maureen, the family Lewis chose
• The Last Battle
• Mere Christianity
• The Problem of Pain
• Lewis on trial: criticisms of Narnia and his own responses in his writings
• Susan Pevensie
• Lucy Pevensie
• Aravis Tarkheena
Till We Have Faces
• Miracles