In That Hideous Strength (1945), the third volume of his Space Trilogy (1938-1945), C. S. Lewis follows the diverging paths of newlyweds Mark and Jane Studdock as they become embroiled in the cosmic forces battling for and against the overthrow of humanity. Materialistic, secular, and blinded by thoughts of success and independence, both Mark and Jane are woefully inadequate humans. As the story progresses, their assumptions about good, evil, and God are not the only things challenged and changed; they realize how much they need each other, selfish and confused as they are. This need itself brings them to the realization that the love they need to give and receive is sacrificial and dependant.
Since experiencing the defects and faults of our closest family and loved ones often results in frustration and disappointment, Lewis’ book can serve as a reminder how necessary these inadequate people are for us—and how necessary our own inevitable inadequateness is for them.
Although Mark Studdock is a apparently brilliant academic, the unfolding events of the book demonstrate his shortsightedness, thoughtlessness, and gullibility. A little bit sensuous, Mark simultaneously combines a mild contempt for Jane’s limitations with a desire to impress and please her. “Mark was not as a rule very sensitive to beauty, but Jane and his love for Jane had already awakened him a little in this respect.”
Yet, without knowing it, his marriage to Jane has changed Mark deeply, albeit in ways that will only manifest themselves in his ultimate confrontation with evil.
Taking for granted Jane’s loyalty and presence, Mark discovers that his love for her must be freeing for her and not grasping. In the final pages of the book, he realizes “he must give her her freedom.” Immature though both of them are, yet they discover that their rather shallow relationship has deeper roots than either of them suspected:
It would be quite unjust to think that his love for her had been basely sensual. Love, Plato says, is the son of Want. Mark’s body knew better than his mind had known till recently, and even his sensual desires were the true index of something which he lacked and Jane had to give. When she first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.
Lewis’ particular master stroke of theological-fiction in That Hideous Strength is depicting how trust, understanding, friendship, affection, and sexual love are inseparable in any healthy marriage. Each of these need to exist, and yet cannot be isolated from another, flowering and expressing themselves in company with the rest.
For her part, Jane struggles to hold on to her own independent life, not allowing marriage or children to “get in the way” of her intellectual pursuits. “She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married: that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time yet”. At the heart of the novel—and at the hearts of Mark and Jane—is the realization that such independence can be nothing but utterly fictional. “She was at least very vividly aware how much a woman gives up in getting married. Mark seemed to her insufficiently aware of this. Though she did not formulate it, this fear of being invaded and entangled was the deepest ground of her determination not to have a child—or not for a long time yet. One had one’s own life to live.”
Despite not being a very original thinker, Jane wants “adult independence” rather than being condemned to housewifery, which she perceives as meaningless tedium. When the down-to-earth Dimbles, “backwards” colleagues of Mark, find “her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important”, she is furious. “Even when she had discovered that she was going to marry Mark if he asked her, the thought, ‘But I must still keep up my own life,’ had arisen at once and had never for more than a few minutes at a stretch been absent from her mind.”
As Mark discovers that his own ignobility has no right to Jane and he must let her be free, this “freeing hold” is what will reverse Jane’s feeling of “resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, for thus invading her life”. When Mark and Jane recognize that their lives are not theirs anymore, they are released from the half-life of independence to live a new life of simultaneous freedom, humility, and obedience together.
When the book opens, the Studdocks are both “young, and if neither loved very much, each was still anxious to be admired.” The idea and experience of patriarchy which has wounded Jane’s psyche, and must be healed before her relationship with Mark can be healed. The simple and unselfish love of the spiritual father Elwin Ransom (hero of the first two books of the Space Trilogy) and his kingship and masculine benevolence begins to heal her patriarchal wound, festering with pride and shallow feminism:
For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. At that moment, as her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house.
Both Jane and Mark have to discover that they need and desire each other’s presence and companionship; and in this need of the other, the other’s need for them. “The beauty of the female,” writes Lewis,
is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness.
Both Mark and Jane discover that love is not love unless it is sacrificial and obedient. Mark’s realization is that he does not “own” Jane, while her realization is, paradoxically, that she is “owned” by Mark; for each, this is a sacrifice. For each, this shift is central to the healing of their relationship. For Jane, this metanoia blossoms as she approaches the cottage where she will meet Mark again after being separated from him for most of the book:
Then she thought of her obedience and the setting of each foot before the other became a kind of sacrificial ceremony. And she thought of children, and of pain and death. And now she was half way to the lodge, and thought of Mark and of all his sufferings.
Ultimately, then, the third volume of the Space Trilogy teaches us that despite the fact that many of us are frail, poor, and badly educated, we need each other. In this need, we are challenged to reform the way we love, basing it on humility and self-sacrifice rather than pride and independence. Thus, the inadequate lover can be transformed into the selfless lover—which is just to say, a successful lover.
Although presented by Lewis in the paramountly important context of marriage, this principle is transferable to other relationships too, whether of siblings, parents, or friends. Dystopian and prophetic of the evils of our own day, reading (or rereading) Lewis’ That Hideous Strength is an opportunity to reflect on and embrace our neediness and inadequacy both as lovers and beloved, in whatever context that may be. We do not have our “own life to live”—only others’ to love.
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