The trip to Womanbrain
C. S. Lewis once wrote a short story [pdf] hinting at how he viewed women. It’s a fantasy, in which an Oxford academic (which Lewis was) is visited by a former student – male of course – and, to the narrator’s annoyance, a woman the student is engaged to. Suddenly everything goes queer, and the narrator finds himself in an unfamiliar landscape.
My first idea was that something had gone wrong with my eyes. I was not in darkness, nor even in twilight, but everything seemed curiously blurred. There was a sort of daylight, but when I looked up I didn’t see anything that I could very confidently call a sky. It might, just possibly, be the sky of a very featureless, dull, grey day, but it lacked any suggestion of distance. “Nondescript” was the word I would have used to describe it. Lower down and closer to me, there were upright shapes, vaguely green in colour, but of a very dingy green. I peered at them for quite a long time before it occurred to me that they might be trees. I went nearer and examined them; and the impression they made on me is not easy to put into words. “Trees of a sort,” or, “Well, trees, if you call that a tree,” or, “An attempt at trees,” would come near it. They were the crudest, shabbiest apology for trees you could imagine. They had no real anatomy, even no real branches; they were more like lamp-posts with great, shapeless blobs of green stuck on top of them. Most children could draw better trees from memory.
The sunlight was similarly vague; so was the grass underfoot.
The full astonishment of my adventure was now beginning to descend on me. With it came fear, but, even more, a sort of disgust I doubt if it can be fully conveyed to anyone who has not had a similar experience. I felt as if I had suddenly been banished from the real, bright, concrete, and prodigally complex world into some sort of second-rate universe that had all been put together on the cheap; by an imitator. But I kept on walking toward the silvery light. Here and there in the shoddy grass there were patches of what looked, from a distance, like flowers. But each patch, when you came close to it, was as bad as the trees and the grass. You couldn’t make out what species they were supposed to be. And they had no real stems or petals; they were mere blobs. As for the colours, I could do better myself with a shilling paintbox.
He kept going.
I reached the light sooner than I expected, but when I reached it I had something else to think about. For now I met the Walking Things. I have to call them that, for “people” is just what they weren’t. They were of human size and they walked on two legs; but they were, for the most part, no more like true men than the Shoddy Trees had been like trees. They were indistinct. Though they were certainly not naked, you couldn’t make out what sort of clothes they were wearing, and though there was a pale blob at the top of each, you couldn’t say they had faces.
He struggled on, and came to a shop.
Here I had a new surprise. It was a jeweller’s, and after the vagueness and general rottenness of most things in that queer place, the sight fairly took my breath away. Everything in that window was perfect; every facet on every diamond distinct, every brooch and tiara finished down to the last perfection of intricate detail. It was good stuff too, as even I could see; there must have been hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of it. “Thank Heaven!” I gasped. “But will it keep on?” Hastily I looked at the next shop. It was keeping on. This window contained women’s frocks. I’m no judge, so I can’t say how good they were. The great thing was that they were real, clear, palpable. The shop beyond this one sold women’s shoes. And it was still keeping on. They were real shoes; the toe-pinching and very high-heeled sort which, to my mind, ruins even the prettiest foot, but at any rate real.
And then he stumbled into the presence of a gigantic woman, and is suitably repulsed. After a bit more shock-horror-repulsion he finds himself back in reality again, and offers his guess at what had happened to him.
My view is that by the operation of some unknown psychological—or pathological—law, I was, for a second or so, let into Peggy’s mind; at least to the extent of seeing her world, the world as it exists for her. At the centre of that world is a swollen image of herself, remodelled to be as like the girls in the advertisements as possible. Round this are grouped clear and distinct images of the things she really cares about. Beyond that, the whole earth and sky are a vague blur.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say Lewis didn’t think much of women.
Well, at least it’s a clear, specific, understandable description of what a man might mean when he says he “feels he is a woman.”
Isn’t it just.
Lewis’ view of women is not a particularly happy issue, but to be fair, it wasn’t static and it wasn’t static because he spent much of his life struggling with it. It is notable that his books, which are otherwise an overt attempt to construct a Christian mythology, have real female characters in central roles. The arc sort of mirrors his personal life, and the role of women (and girls) in it, which became more and more complex. His later books cast women very differently, in a much less traditional ‘good girl’ mold. ‘The Shoddy Lands’ is a later work, as he is trying to recast his understanding of women (all women?) in a period of real rethinking – within two years, he writes ‘Till We Have Faces’.
Contrast that with his close friend Tolkien, whose discomfort is so profound that there is really only one female character in his novels.
Funny, that last paragraph reads like a Freudian slip.
I’ve only read his Narnia series in which women and girls are treated as shit, and portrayed very unfairly.
They are punished for their rash actions, while the male characters are lionized for being impulsive and manly, even when their actions lead to disaster. When women act impulsively they are punished repeatedly.
My understanding is that both he and Tolkien were very conservative in their understanding of gender roles.
Naif, sure, whatever – I still think it’s interesting that Lewis had at any time such a massively dehumanizing and disgusted idea of women, and was willing to put it in writing and publish it.
And, agreed about Tolkien. His all-male world is creepy af.
I suppose that if a woman today had written the above passages about one of the more vacuous female celebrities (Kardashian, perhaps) then it would read as satire, a send up of women ( and presumably men) who are over-concerned with superficial appearance and status. I can imagine Lewis making a similar point — not women in general, but people like ‘Peggy’ — but given the time and Lewis’ other work, it’s unlikely that his point was quite so focused.
That doesn’t work for the actual Lewis story, though, because the narrator doesn’t know anything about Peggy. He’s annoyed that his former student brought Peggy along without spelling out that he was doing so, and the three of them exchange empty conversation because two of them are strangers to each other. Peggy could be a brilliant cosmologist for all the reader can tell. He spells out that he thinks she’s ugly, but that’s all.
This isn’t really relevant, but reading the story made me chuckle, as the student’s name is Durward, and I immediately thought of the great Agnes Moorehead in the role of Endora on “Bewitched”, who regularly called Darrin “Durwood”.
In terms of women in Lewis’ works, the story echoes the fate of Susan, the older of the two Pevensie girls in the Narnia stories. She is written out in the last book with a brief note of contempt, because she dares to start the complicated process of growing up and becoming a woman. Neil Gaiman wrote a short story from adult Susan’s perspective, and I think he did a pretty good job.
Lewis’s attitude towards women is that they are half-educated nuisances who get in the way of male intellectual conversation. It’s a very Oxford view of women in his time. It was a male club, barely beyond the celibate Fellows permanently living in rooms. When he later married a woman who he did admire intellectually his friends were annoyed he wanted her to join in the intellectual conversation, when he had spent so much time snubbing their wives.
Till We Were Faces has claims to being a feminist novel, quite a good one. He also wrote well about Jane Austen.
The Shoddy Lands may have an irritating view of women, but the general thesis – that we only half see the world – isn’t a bad one. Also it does end with the sentence “How if I were not the explored but the explorer” i.e. which of us has a mind that can observe the world without ego and actually look at things?
KBPlayer, that’s part of the problem. I know a lot of men who think women are boring, stupid, dull, half-educated nuisances…but exclude several of the women they know who are not like that. They assume these women are the exception, rather than considering the possibility that they might be as common as interesting, intelligent men.
And some women spend a lot of time playing the game for men. Very few people know how smart my mother and sisters were, because they “played dumb” in order to capture and keep traditional men.
KBPlayer – well but we only half see the world because we can’t focus on everything at once – our brains just can’t do that. But Lewis makes it VERY clear that the way Peggy sees the world is sharply different from the way he does – he seems to think everything in fact is in sharp focus to him, The Clever Man With The Male Brain. He didn’t pause for a second to realize that when he walks in a landscape most of it is blurry to him too. Quite stupid of him.