Seven months before The Last Battle was published, C.S. Lewis had a short story appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was called “The Shoddy Lands,” and—believe it or not—it and another short story are key pieces in understanding what exactly is happening with poor Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. Our next article in the C.S. Lewis Reread is going to be about “the problem of Susan” so first, we need to take a little detour and explore these two stories.
In 1953, Lewis received a letter from a man named William Anthony Parker White. He was an author who wrote under the pen name Anthony Boucher, and he was also the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He asked Lewis if he’d be willing to submit a story to the magazine, and offered him a year’s free subscription regardless.
Lewis was still writing Narnia at the time. He would finish The Last Battle that year (though it wouldn’t be published until 1956), and was continuing work on The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy. He was also re-discovering his love of science fiction (or, as Lewis still called it at the time, scientifiction). He had been in correspondence with Arthur C. Clarke (Lewis enjoyed Childhood’s End) and found Ray Bradbury much to his liking. Indeed, he told Boucher that he enjoyed what he had read of Boucher’s work, as well.
Still, Lewis felt he didn’t have time to write a story for Boucher. He wrote back, “All my imagination at present is going into children’s stories. When that is done, I may try another fantasy for adults, but it wd. be too quiet and leisurely for your magazine.”
A few years later, however, he managed to fire off a story to Boucher, called “The Shoddy Lands” (see page 68 at the link if you’d like to read it). A couple years after that, Lewis wrote another, this one called “Ministering Angels.” Both of them touch on Lewis’s views on women, gender, and philosophy, and I have to be honest… I don’t particularly care for either of them. But that’s the whole point of this reread! Let’s get in there and see what we can find.
First, let’s lay to rest the question of whether “The Shoddy Lands” is sexist. I think we can agree that it is and set the topic aside. (I suspect Lewis would disagree and tell us that he likes women perfectly well, that it’s only certain kinds of women who give him trouble. But it’s not really the most important aspect of the story for our purposes.)
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In the story, a curmudgeonly Oxford don invites a student up to his quarters, only to be disappointed to discover that the student has brought his fiancée, Peggy. While the don and his student have a lot in common, and the student and Peggy have a lot in common, the three of them have nothing to talk about together but the weather and the news. The don, quickly bored, finds himself staring at Peggy and then—through a mysterious metaphysical event—finds himself somehow in Peggy’s mind. (There is some hedging about this at the end of the story, and I think there are some other interpretations we could throw out to put the story in another light.)
In Peggy’s world, anything not specifically centered on her is “shoddy.” Trees are green blobs. People are indistinct unless she finds something of particular interest; some men have detailed faces, some women have clothes that are detailed. The only flowers that look like flowers are the kind that could be cut and put in a vase for her. Store windows are marvelously detailed. At the center of it all is a Gigantic Peggy—although more conventionally beautiful than Peggy herself—in a bikini at first, and later fully naked. The don is horrified by her body, partly because of her size, and partly because it seems artificial to him, and partly because (and I am not making this up) he really dislikes tan lines.
Toward the end of his time there, we hear two people “knocking” on the door of Peggy’s life. One is her fiancé, and the other is presumably God. The don awakes in his chambers, suddenly thankful for the details in the world around him, and apparently terrified of what might happen if someone were to enter his own mind.
Lewis’s point here is that Peggy has become focused on things of lesser importance. It’s not that flowers and bikinis and jewelry are wrong, it’s that they have become the definitional “things” of her reality. And it’s not that she sees herself wrongly overall—Lewis (ahem, I mean “the don”) recognizes her, after all. It’s that she had made her own self too large, and that she is overly focused on her body image, on her appearance, and on looking like a woman in a magazine. The don finds this “idealized” version of Peggy repulsive and even bemoans the fact that as Peggy seeks this idealized self, she must not even realize that she’s making herself into something that is less attractive, not more.
As a result, Peggy has put herself in the center of the world. The only things that interest her are centered on her, or tools she finds useful in some way—jewelry and flowers and her body. The only faces of men that interest her are those that look at her with appreciation. She hears but has not answered the requests of her fiancé to “let me in.” She hears but has not responded to God asking to be let in “before night falls.”
Lewis’s point here certainly appears to be that Peggy’s emphasis on these few things is actually getting in the way of what she most wants: a loving relationship with her fiancé. And, though she may not know it, it’s also a barrier between her and God. Note that the don, for his part, falls into very similar patterns as Peggy: He couldn’t care less about things like clothes and jewels and no doubt they would be unclear in his own mind. And he cares very little for people either, as is evidenced by the way he talks about Peggy and her fiancé. He cared about them purely to the degree he thought he was about to have an entertaining conversation. They weren’t people to him any more than he was in the imagined world of Peggy’s mind.
Peggy (and the don’s) issue is literally one of focus. They are preoccupied with trivialities, preventing them from true relationships, whether mundane or divine.
Keep this in mind when we talk about Susan in the next article.
Lewis had one other short story published while he was alive, “Ministering Angels.” This is from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as well, the January 1958 issue.
In this story, a Mars mission made up completely of men is surprised to receive an unexpected rocket from Earth. In addition to the men who crew the rocket, there are two women… or, as Lewis calls them, the Thin Woman and the Fat Woman. The Thin Woman is a sort of stereotyped 1950s feminist (lacking in “femininity,” the sort of woman likely to “wear trousers” and speak endlessly about a new sexuality—all things mentioned in the story) and the Fat Woman is a worn-out sex worker in her seventies who is “infinitely female.”
The women (one of the characters calls them the “horrors”) have come to Mars because the new psychology has assured everyone that the men can’t survive three years in space without sex. They’ve been sent to service the men. The men, by and large, are horrified. The Captain is married and wants desperately to be back with his wife. The meteorologist thinks of himself as “the Monk,” and is on Mars because he thinks of it as a new sort of hermitage.
The story wraps as some of the Mars mission, grossed out at the thought of sharing the Mars base with these two women for six months, steal the rocket and return home early. The “Monk” sits and reflects on the Fat Woman and how maybe God has sent her there so he can help her, and also so that he can learn to “love more”—by which he means being kind to this woman, not that he should have sex with her.
So. That’s a story, I guess.
Reading this story definitely feels like a grotesquery. It’s a “What are you doing, C.S. Lewis?” kind of moment. It’s not a good story, and it’s full of weird stereotypes, unkind moments, and unpleasant philosophies.
Which, it turns out, is largely Lewis’s point.
This isn’t a short story at all.
The characters aren’t characters.
The sexism is, in this case, deliberate.
“Ministering Angels” is an argument. It’s a satire poking fun at another work. It’s meant to be grotesque, and it’s actually a critique of a certain point of view about human sexuality and space travel. In fact, it’s a fictional response to a controversial article published a couple years before.
The article was called “The Day After We Land on Mars,” and it was written by Robert Richardson. Richardson was an astronomer who also wrote science fiction under the pen name of Philip Latham. Richardson originally wrote the article for The Saturday Review, and then expanded on it for The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Much of the article is about what it would be like to colonize Mars. Then, at the end, he gets into sex. His basic argument (simplified) goes something like this: Of course we can only have men on Mars, because all the scientists and whatever are men. But men need sex or everything will fall apart, because without sex they’ll fight and destroy each other, and we’ll waste billions of dollars. So the only solution is to radically change our sexual mores as a culture, and send some “nice girls” to have sex with them and “relieve tension” and “promote morale.”
After the article was published in The Saturday Review, Richardson expanded the article to answer some of his critics who had said things like, “Uh, maybe they’ll just masturbate?” and also, “Men can have sex with each other, you know” to which he answered, essentially, “I think we’d all prefer to have some nice girls come have sex with us,” along with a dubious argument about Maasai culture. He also assured everyone that part of what he meant by changing our sexual mores included seeing the nice girls as still nice girls after they had sex with the Mars crew.
There was predictable outrage at Richardson’s article. In fact, science fiction authors Poul Anderson and Miriam Allen deFord each wrote excoriating essays in reply, both of which were included in the May, 1956 issue, which you can read here.
Anderson points out that you could, for instance, send equal teams of men and women scientists. Or send married couples. Or use drugs to lessen sex drives. Or just expect men to deal with it, as they often have done while exploring Earth and throughout history.
But if you want ten minutes of joy, read deFord’s response. She starts out with, “I am going to tell Dr. Robert S. Richardson a secret. Women are not walking sex organs. They are human beings. They are people, just like men.” She then proceeds, at length, to systematically demolish his article with the kind of precise rage and perfect reason that is a delight to behold. And she ends with the words “extraterrestrial bordello,” which made me laugh out loud.
This is the context of “Ministering Angels.” It’s not a story, it’s an argument—a response to Richardson’s article.
So, why is Lewis’s Mars base completely inhabited by men? Because that’s how Richardson set it up in his article. Why are these two women sent to Mars to have sex with the men? Because that’s what Richardson told us was the solution to men needing sex.
The characters aren’t characters, they’re arguments.
The Monk is Lewis arguing, “there are some men who may seek Mars as a place of solitude and won’t want sex.” The Captain is Lewis arguing, “There are men who will be in committed relationships and desire to stay committed, even over the course of years.” Then there’s the question of what kind of woman would want to go to Mars to live on rations and sleep with strangers. These two women are Lewis’s answer to that question. The Thin Woman is a “true believer” in Richardson’s philosophy, and the Fat Woman is a sex worker, we’re told, who can no longer find clients on Earth. The Thin Woman becomes the personification of Richardson’s article and—although one crew member attempts to have sex with her—she can provide only a strange and unsatisfying sort of comfort that’s more about Richardson and less about comfort or pleasure.
Some men won’t want or need sex, he’s telling us. And those who may want it might discover they don’t want the kind of women who could be convinced to go. One of the few named characters is clearly meant as a dig at the author—Dickson rather than Richardson—and the argument appears to be “I don’t think you actually want what you’re arguing for” as Dickson ultimately chooses to leave rather than stay on Mars with Richardson’s solution.
The women are purposely not named to throw Richardson’s commodification of women as sexual objects into sharp relief. There is only one woman named in the story, the Captain’s wife, Clare, who he misses for a variety of reasons, only one of which is sex. She’s a human being, while Thin Woman and Fat Woman are merely functions of Richardson’s misogynistic “new morality.” So the grotesque sexism in the story is, in some sense, the point of the story. It’s intended as a critique, a mirror to and deconstruction of the original essay.
Lewis does briefly attempt to humanize these women, despite the roles they play in these two stories. At the end of “Ministering Angels,” the Monk reflects on the Fat Woman and does not see her as a horror or (only) someone to be fixed. He feels compassion for her and sees within her an “utterly different loveliness” than one created by sexual desire, something he feels determined to direct her toward, because he sees that she is ignorant of her own loveliness as a person, not as a sex object.
Lewis’s propensity for letting his characters become arguments or philosophical stand-ins will be important as we return to The Last Battle. That’s happening with Susan Pevensie, too. With this in mind, we’ll take a much closer look at Susan in two weeks!
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
Thank you for this insight, though I shudder to think of the comments
“could care less”
*twitch*
could NOT care less
Very interesting! I’d never read either of these, so the links were much appreciated.
One typo: the character that thinks of himself as “the Monk” was the meteorologist, not the botonist.
@2 and 3: We’ve updated the post–thanks!
I have to admit, every time I read “Ministering Angels,” the sheer absurdity of it causes me to laugh. Looking beyond the apparent sexism (etc.), it has an extremely comical resolution.
Fascinating article, Matt. I had read those stories before, but without the context, which makes a world of difference. Those were a couple of real doozies, Clive Staples!
If I recall correctly, that theme of how men on Mars would have to have sex or die was revisited in a rather homophobic little story by Larry Niven some years later, in which the Martian base fails because the screaming queens set all those red-blooded American boys at one another’s throats (or do I mean thoats). I have mercifully buried the title in the oubliette of years. At least Lewis avoided that particular unkindness.
@1/aslanscompass. Don’t worry the mods at Tor are top notch!
@2/wiredog. American incoherent English is gaining ground! In 100 years some kid in a VR world is going to be correcting some Brit about how it should be “could care less.” ;)
@3/mathbard. Oof, you’re right! Thanks for the catch.
@4/mods. You’re seriously the best.
@5/aethercowboy. I have to admit that I never knew the context of the story until I wrote this article, and I get that it’s meant to be funny now!
@6/Dung Beetle. I agree, the context changes things. I suspect it may also be that Lewis just does better exploring his ideas in longer forms.
@7/silenos. YIKES. I don’t think I ever read that one.
I really appreciate the transition Lewis was gesturing toward at the end of “Ministering Angels,” where the Monk is making an effort to see the Fat Woman as a person, both for his own sake and for hers. These stories’ artistic failings, I think, are because they fail there in not treating their characters as people. I think Lewis would say Richardson’s ideas – and a lot of contemporary philosophy – also fail there, in treating people as a collection of urges and impulses (like the sex drive) and not as full people.
Unfortunately, Lewis fell into the same failing in “Shoddy Land,” without the excuse of responding to someone else’s philosophy. None of the characters feel like actual people, and Peggy definitely doesn’t. Maybe he might say he was showcasing Peggy’s degeneration as a person? I’m remembering the passage in Great Divorce where he questions whether one Ghost is still “a grumbler” or has degenerated to just “a grumble.” But to truly show that well, you’d need to show that there’s still a person (however stretched and blinkered) in there. I don’t know how that could be done in just a short story, but unfortunately it looks like Lewis didn’t even try.
@9/Evan p.
I think it’s entirely possible that Lewis *means* for us to realize that the scholar is hypocritical, self-focused, and vain in a very similar way as Peggy. There are a couple little hints at that throughout the piece, and in the last couple paragraphs when he keeps pointing out “there might be another theory for what happened” I think it’s fair to guess that he might be trying to tell us this is an unreliable narrator. Which is to say, maybe Lewis meant us to recognize the sexist thought process of the prof.
If that’s what he was going for, I just don’t think he quite pulled it off, because another easy reading is that Lewis’s own biases were on display here. I honestly think short stories may just not have given him enough room to get his thoughts out with clarity to some (or at least people like me) among his readers.
@10/Mike Mikalatos Thanks for doing this series! I’ve enjoyed reading along. The last sentence in “The Shoddy Lands” (“And how if, some other time, I were not the explorer but the explored?”) does suggest to me some level of awareness on the part of the narrator (and the author?) that his mental picture of the world likely has its own lacunae. Still, ick! I have a hard time not reading this story as presenting Lewis’s own views in all their sexist glory. I seem to recall a non-fiction piece, maybe The Four Loves, where he made similar comments about how women destroyed conversation, although there I think he at least acknowledged that the problem was women’s lack of access to higher education, rather than some inherent lack of rationality. As for “Ministering Angels”, I wish he had made his argument as an argument, rather than trying to dress it up as a story. Dickson’s haste to get away is kind of hilarious, though!
If anyone is interested in a more sympathetic take on what it would be like to see other people’s mental representations of the world, try “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula Le Guin.
@@@@@10/Mike Mikalatos , if that’s the case, I don’t think Lewis pulled it off either. I never thought of that reading till you suggested it. Like you say, he seems to have done a lot better with longer works than with short stories. (Though, a lot of his nonfiction essays are good.)
@@@@@11/Miriam G , yes, I just looked up that part from the Four Loves chapter on friendship. On reread, it’s better than I remember it. Lewis explains right up front that “Where men are educated and women are not… where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about. But we can easily see that it is this lack, rather than anything in their nature, which excludes Friendship; for… where men and women work side by side… such Friendship is common.” Unfortunately, he then goes on to belabor the shortcomings of trying to force such friendship without common topics. I remember one biographer who speculated it might’ve been inspired by Edith Tolkien, who wasn’t interested in scholarly pursuits and never really got along with her husband’s academic circles. I would’ve hoped Lewis’s marriage with Joy Davidman would’ve showed him otherwise, but presumably he deemed her one of the exceptions since she was in fact educated (with a Master’s in English Literature).
One of my wife’s earliest memories is of the day she came home with a proper pair of glasses and realized, to her shock and delight, trees had individual leaves on the tops and weren’t just large green blobs,
Perhaps Peggy just needs to visit her optometrist? ;)
In all seriousness though, I have to say both these stories, context or no, get a big ole YIKES from me.
@7 I believe you are thinking of “How the Heroes Die”, summarised here.
Heterosexual, but unluckily named, John Carter kills Lew Harness for making a homosexual advance on him, risks the life of everyone else in the base in order to escape, successfully kills Alf Harness to avoid vengeance, and plots to murder everyone in the base to cover his crimes, only to be defeated from beyond the grave by Alf. Perhaps we should accuse Niven of Heterophobia.
A subsequent story suggests that the survivors of this little incident were killed in a surprise attack by the native Martians: At the Bottom of a Hole.
I just read “Ministering Angels” for the first time through the link above. The the explanatory paragraph there is very helpful, I don’t think I would have understood it very well otherwise, so can understand the reaction of those who didn’t have this context and are very critical of it.
Personally I thought it an hilarious and biting response to the silly argument Robert Richardson made. I think we need more social commentary like this that can make you genuinely laugh out loud.
Thanks for posting these Matt, I found them genuinely interesting. Particularly the commentary on tan lines :)
And then there’s Lewis’s observation in one of his letters to his brother, that he had, he believed, come to understand why the deity for sexual love in all mythologies is always a woman. It’s not because “all the books were written by men.”
Nope, it’s because (he claims to have realized): when a man thinks about sex, he thinks about a woman’s body. But when a woman thinks about sex, she doesn’t, symmetrically, think about a man’s body, Lewis declares. No, he says: get this: she thinks about her own body.
So the sex god is a goddess, Venus, not because she is a projection of men’s fantasies but “simply because she is.” And then he adds, “What a world we live in!”
This would seem to have some connection to the grotesque image of Peggy you describe in The Shoddy Lands, which I haven’t read.
Funny how Lewis knew perfectly well that there is also a male god of sexuality (Eros) in classical mythology, yet this does not seem to intrude on this striking discovery and insight he is describing to his brother.
It’s obvious that Lewis’s early life gave him very few opportunities to get to know women as people. It’s pretty clear also that it took him a long time to grasp the simple fact that women are as different from each other as men are. Even his gradually increasing acquaintance with female colleagues whose intellect and learning were comparable with those of his male colleagues — even his relationship with Joy Davidman — did not really uproot the long habit of regarding women as some kind of alien species whose minds were simply different from men’s minds and whom men (the normative humans) could only gaze at and analyze with a disconcerting combination of puzzlement, irritation, condescension and enthrallment.
I appreciate the mention of Richardson’s work as the context behind “Ministering Angels.” Regarding “Shoddy Lands,” I think there’s something of a parallel in The Great Divorce, but from a different angle, as well as involving male vanity as opposed to female. The Tall Man is the arrogant projection of a much smaller man-like creature, who is connected to him by a leash or chain. (Who’s leading whom?) In the ensuing conversation with his wife, she’ll only speak to the small man, who — as it turns out — is the “real” person. The vain imposter is analogous to Peggy’s grotesque reflection, and — like her — elicits disdain from others.
“The characters aren’t characters, they’re arguments.” But the male arguments have names, rudimentary personalities and distinguishing characteristics. The women are caricatures. “Infinitely female“ apparently means fat, boozy sex worker. The “Thin woman” is a caricature of “feminist because she can’t get a man”. I don’t believe the (gay?) crewman wants to have sex with her; he wants a sympathetic ear, and she’s so obsessed with herself that she can’t provide one. There’s also a nasty slap at “women in trousers” who authorized the extraterrestrial bordello.
Ugh. It’s not an argument, it’s a sexism smorgasbord. Very big of the Monk to think the “fat woman” might take a place alongside one of Jesus’ leading disciples, “the” Magdalene – not even a name for her ….
I’d like to add my appreciation for Matt to provide the context for Ministering Angels.
Knowing about the circumstances under which stories originated can sometimes be interesting but here it really puts the story into an entirely different light!
@18
And the “girl” — supposedly the ideal Christian — in The Screwtape Letters is completely one-dimensional and unbelievable. Of course you have to allow that all the characters are described by Screwtape, who is not inclined to flatter them; and the “patient” who is Wormwood’s intended victim does not come across as particularly likeable either. But “the girl” he falls in love with is much worse. Lewis is trying to make her more than the object of romance; he has Screwtape refer to her satirical wit as well as her piety. But it all falls flat.
In general, Lewis’s characters in the Narnia books are far more fully drawn, and far more sympathetic, than the characters in his imaginative writing for adults. That’s true across the board, come to think of it, not just about the female or the human characters.
Certainly, who, after reading That Hideous Strength, ever really thinks again about Jane Studdock? But Jill, or Polly? They’re still real in my memory. And so are Reepicheep, Jewel, Caspian, and so many others. But even his Christ-figure Ransom? Meh. Flat as a pancake.
@10/Mike Mikalatos I think there’s a good argument to be made that Lewis knew he was sexist, regretted the bias, but had no idea how to deal with it.
(I know it’s jumping ahead, but my main argument against the Problem of Susan being *chiefly* about sexism has always been That Hideous Strength. Mark Studdock has a hyper people-pleasing/social climbing personality that reflects Lewis’s interest in people-pleasing and social climbing, and Mother Dimble dismisses the ability of even the wisest single man to understand women and marriage, and suddenly one can easily imagine Lewis knowing that he was failing miserably at translating his own flaws to a feminine context but not knowing enough to correct that failure. The sexism was a translation problem, not a foundation problem; the foundation was probably mea culpa.)
Heinlein alluded to this story in his —All You Zombies—. The relevant bit is:
Can’t wait to read what you have to say about Jane Studdock.
@@@@@22 Steve Morrison
According to Wikipedia, “All You Zombies–” was “written in one day, July 11, 1958,” and published in F&SF in March 1969, which would be about the correct time for it to be a reference to “Ministering Angles”., and I thoi8ght of the same exact quote when learned of the Phillip Latham article as the context for “Ministering Angles”. But nothing in AYZ specifically calls out or identifies MA, I’ll have to check Grumbles from the Grave.
It seems that “feminine matters” were the hardest thing for C.S. to articulate. (A sad thing, for a writer.) I agree with the commenters who say that at his heart, he didn’t *intend* any harm, but perhaps his thoughts weren’t always best communicated. (And may I just say that to even picture our beloved professor and childhood storyteller talking so candidly about sex and nudity is a shocking experience. Remember when you got old enough to understand things your parents said? Yeah, it’s like that.)
Now, while I haven’t gotten a chance to read the two stories in question, from all analysis, it seems that C.S. was actually trying to do ladies a bit of good. The context on “Ministering Angels” certainly points to an argument against objectification, and the narrator’s closing terminology in “The Shoddy Lands” lends itself more to the idea that all people are capable of being incredibly shallow in our way. It just didn’t really help his case that his example was a woman. I admit that even I catch myself “blurring out” aspects of the world around me that simply don’t interest me.
And finally, I’ll say that in my reading so far of Narnia, I haven’t felt disrespected whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve felt understood. From Susan to Jill, I’ve felt representation is pretty good for 1950’s fairytales. (I happen to be of the camp that Susan’s love of cosmetics wasn’t what kept her out of Narnia, but more on that in the Susan Article.) These girls are far more active and decisive than say the Cinderella or Princess Aurora of the era. I mean, you have girls who go to battle, and are also allowed to show emotion.
Truly, I didn’t realize how much debate there was until I started hunting Narnia content on the internet. But am I ever glad I did; my search led me here! This is by far my favorite series of articles around!!
I read the shoddy lands as a pretty and somewhat narcissistic 21 year old. Has stayed with me ever since to my benefit.