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Deception and Confusion
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in That Hideous Strength, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Though Mark and Jane Studdock are separated for most of That Hideous Strength, their strained marriage and complicated relationship to gender roles are central to the story. When Ransom meets with the eldils, he reflects that the feminine Venus and masculine Mars represent only two of the divine genders, which transcend biological sex. However, the human characters are often divided along gendered lines that adhere to the traditionally binary view of gender. Jane spends more time with the women of the Manor than the men, and Ransom initially excludes her from the Society because she does not come accompanied by her husband. Meanwhile, the only woman Mark interacts with for most of the novel is the “mannish” Miss Hardcastle. In fact, Miss Hardcastle’s villainy in the novel seems associated with the ways she subverts gender roles, with her lust for more traditionally feminine women unsettling even her fellow N.I.C.E. members. Jane contrasts this by deliberately pushing the boundaries of womanhood while still adhering to foundational gender roles that render her more feminine than Miss Hardcastle. Jane subverts many expectations for women, especially given her preference for scholarship over domestic matters, and her awareness of this makes her feel distant from her own femininity. At the same time, she loves fashion and socializing, which are stereotypically feminine traits, and the culmination of her character arc sees her embrace her role as a Christian wife.
To modern readers, the novel’s presentation of gender might seem outdated and sexist, though it’s worth noting that there are ways in which C. S. Lewis attempts to be subversive in how he portrays gender. Jane’s womanhood is defined by her relationship to her husband and a male God, which perpetuates the notion that women are defined by their relationship to men rather than on their own as individuals. But on the other hand, Mark’s masculinity is also defined by his relationship to God and his role as a husband. He fears more than Jane that he is unworthy of their marriage, but because Jane doesn’t share these fears, it gestures to the sexist idea that women are simpler (and therefore purer) than men. That Hideous Strength thus seeks to emphasize the importance of mutual respect between men and women, but it also reinforces stereotypes that undermine this project and leave little room for self-expression or individuality.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Gender and Marriage ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Gender and Marriage appears in each chapter of That Hideous Strength. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Gender and Marriage Quotes in That Hideous Strength
Below you will find the important quotes in That Hideous Strength related to the theme of Gender and Marriage.
Chapter 1
Quotes
She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds––clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety––and because of this preference she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs. Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said: “Hullo, dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.”
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“How lovely it’s looking!” said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.
“You’d better take a good look at it then,” said Dr. Dimble.
[…] “[P]oor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jane.
“Your own college is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.”
“Oh, Mrs. Dimble!” exclaimed Jane. “And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.”
“There you are!” said Mrs. Dimble. “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr. Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality––”
“Mark never talks to me about College business.”
“Good husbands never do,” said Dr. Dimble.
Chapter 3
Quotes
This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like […] the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? […] Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way?
Chapter 5
Quotes
The resentment which had been rising and ebbing, but rising each time a little more than it ebbed, for several minutes, had now overflowed. All this talk of promises and obedience to an unknown Mr. Fisher-King had already repelled her. But the idea of this same person sending her back to get Mark’s permission––as if she were a child asking leave to go to a party––was the climax. For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike. She saw him, and Mark, and the Fisher-King man […] simply as Men––complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women were children or bartering them like cattle. […] She was very angry.
Chapter 7
Quotes
“[Y]ou do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
[…] “I thought love meant equality,” she said […]. “I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely; “that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes––that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. […] Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. […] It is not your fault. […] No one has ever told you that obedience––humility––is an erotic necessity.”
Chapter 11
Quotes
And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess––the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled.
Chapter 14
Quotes
But there it was––solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before.
