A passage from A Severe Mercy, A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph by Sheldon Vanauken. The whole book, sentence sentence, is beautifully written. It’s the true story of the correspondence between CS Lewis and Sheldon Vanauken, men who exchanged letters as they lost their wives to terminal illness. Here’s one passage that I thought our readers might be interested in.
He had been wont to despise emotions: girls were emotional, girls were weak, emotions—tears—were weakness. But this morning he was thinking that being a great brain in a tower, nothing but a brain, wouldn’t be much fun. No excitement, no dog to love, no joy in the blue sky—no feelings at all. But feelings—feelings are emotions! He was suddenly overwhelmed by the revelation that what makes life worth living is, precisely, the emotions. But, then—this was awful!—maybe girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering! He checked himself: showing one’s emotions was not the thing: having them was. Still, he was dizzy with the revelation. What is beauty but something that is responded to with emotion? Courage, at least partly, is emotional. All the splendour of life. But if the best of life is, in fact, emotional, then one wanted the highest, purest emotions: and that meant joy. Joy was the highest. How did one find joy? In books it seemed to be found in love—a great love—though maybe for the saints there was joy in the love of God. He didn’t aspire to that, though; he didn’t even believe in God. Certainly not! So, if he wanted the heights of joy, he must have, if he could find it, a great love. But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain—if, indeed, they went together. If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.
by 
Love is great, but requires considerable quantities of patience, kindness, sincerity and maturity, and also gratitude, forbearance, insight, calm, tolerance, generosity, faith, unity, respect and loyalty. Then there’s finding the right person.
I am not liking the condescending sexism! Though for all the beauty of his writing, Lewis was the same and believed the man should be the “head of the house”.
Megan, just wondering what you find sexist in this passage?
“…girls were emotional, girls were weak, emotions—tears—were weakness…”
“But, then—this was awful!—maybe girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering! He checked himself: showing one’s emotions was not the thing: having them was.”
(Good, we wouldn’t want weak women to be getting more out of life! No fair!)
Perhaps he has some revelations over the course of the novel and redeems this initial bias. I may be more sensitive to it because I have read a lot of Lewis, who has the same almost inadvertent sense of superiority.
Thanks, Megan. I am not putting you on the spot, just inquiring so thanks for replying. I have always found Lewis, who is the author of my favourite book Til We Have Faces to show a beautiful harmony and equality between the sexes without falling into the doltish, feminist “we are all exactly the same” political correctness. In the Narnia series you see that the Susan and Lucy playing as big and as adventurous a role as Peter and Edmund and there are many more examples there of women doing the hard work. I have to say, I have never read any element of male superiority over women in CS Lewis, and I have read quite a lot of CS Lewis. Can’t claim to have read it all, but…
With regards to the passage above, I thought it was this man’s personal admission of being idiotic, that he once thought women were frail in their emotions, but now he was moving toward seeing being emotional as a source of strength, something he aspired to, not something he looked down upon. It is phrased, to me, in a self-deprecating kind of way, as in “how could I be so narrow-minded” and that is the tone I took it in, for one could argue that women do experience fuller lives for all the emotions we express more easily, very often, thought not all the time, than men.
As a side note, I am interested, truly, in how we interpret writings of the past with the lens of today. So I fear I put a feminist lens over writings of the past, without realizing it, thereby injecting meaning that simply isn’t there. That’s my fear for myself… I am steeped in feminist thinking, and I’d like at least to be aware of it for myself.
Hope this makes sense.
Ack! Something is wrong with my computer, I think, and half of all the comments are cut off, so I can’t read your reply! Is there something I should install? Adobe or something? This only started happening recently, where the comments seem to run right off the page! 🙁
Megan – I feel your pain. For the last while (weeks?months?) the right hand side of all comments get cut off and run off the page so I cannot read the entire comment. I can read the post i its entirety, but not the comments. Don’t know why?!? 🙁
Hello all: I will make it a New Year’s resolution to fix the comments. It’s a new plug in I installed so I’ll have to fix it! In the meanwhile, I’m sorry!
Hey Andrea,
I can finally read your reply! I agree that the Narnia series contained no elements I found sexist, and now that you mention it, it is easy to read the above passage as being written in a self-deprecating tone. I must have been biased by my recent forays into Lewis, who avers in “Mere Christianity” that the man needs to be the head of the house because a woman is incapable of making judicious decisions due to her inherent and unfair bias against everyone save her own children. I was also thinking of a passage in Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy” which reads, “…in the beehive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species – the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.” I had to laugh, but really, this ticked me off (dread? really?), since he seemed quite comfortable in the male-dominated society (esp. at Oxford) of which he was a part. I love C.S. Lewis, and “Mere Christianity” is one of my favourite novels, because I am able to forgive the ingrained sexism he evinces (which really constitutes only a minor part of the work). For me, his waxing poetic on Christianity and some of the things he says about women constitute a cognitive dissonance, similar to that evident in the life of Marcus Aurelius, who was both wise and ruthlessly cruel at turns.
Hey Megan:
Sorry I let the comments slide for so long. It was a relatively easy fix.
Re. “the man needs to be the head of the house because a woman is incapable of making judicious decisions due to her inherent and unfair bias against everyone save her own children.”
I think I’d like to take a moment and consider whether that is actually true before dismissing it as sexism.
On the second comment, it sounds a bit like an overstated joke–it actually made me laugh.
If CS Lewis were sexist in any fashion, I feel strongly it would show in how he uses women as characters in his novels. This would speak more loudly than comments made in his non-fiction. Ie. Susan and Lucy in the Narnia series would be shown to be weak in some fashion. Instead they are strong role models, guiding, fighting, leading as partners with their brothers.
I am genuinely concerned about how we read everything with a feminist lens today. I don’t want to glibly say something is not sexism, but I also don’t want to read it in where it is not.