I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces for the third time in my life. The first time, I was a young teenager and did not understand it to be anything other than a darkly interesting story. The second was last year, when I was nearly undone by Orual's undoing, the crawling filthiness that I found in myself as the gods showed her her own filth, and the beauty and rest and glory that she found in the end that (I sometimes remember) I am finding in my life and death.
This third reading has made me marvel at Lewis' understanding of women. I wonder where he learned it? His first-person narrative of Orual more honestly portrays the sins of my feminine heart than I could have written myself. All that I think of as noble, and all that I think of as evil, are in Queen Orual. The way she thinks makes sense to me at the core - so much so that I dislike reading the book. Her motivations - both good and ill - are the same motivations I have, and the same as what I see in every girl I know, to some extent at least. I've rarely read a book by a woman that managed to etch such a painfully fine engraving of my insides. I've never read a book with a male protagonist that hit so close to home. How did he do it?
Maybe my pet theory - that a good deal of masculinity and femininity comes less from our sex and more in context of our varying relationships - might not be completely off-base. In most of my friendships with other women, we do not meet each other as the same kind of woman. One of us is more masculine in the relationship, one more feminine. Sometimes (in the best friendships) we take turns - not consciously, but as need requires.
[For example - I once had a counselor point out to me that a disagreement my sister and I were having came from the fact that I was viewing something as a man would tend to, while she was viewing it with a text-book woman's opinion. Yet in other situations, I've used frustrated words to describe a friend that sound very like what you stereotypically hear wives bring against their husbands.]
So then, Lewis might have been able to write as a woman thinks ("You also are Psyche" - the bride of the god of the mountain) because of his femininity in being part of the Bride of Christ. Femininity to masculinity is at least somewhat like us (mankind) to God. I wonder.
One of the most unearthly - and most earthly, too - things I ever saw was a man praying to God outside where he thought no-one saw him. He had his eyes open and was talking while looking skyward. I didn't realize he was praying at first, but something about his face caught me. I realized the look in his eyes, played out on his smile and even in the movements of his neck and arms, reminded me of something - what was it?
A little girl looking at her adored father, or a young woman memorizing the face of the grown man that loves her with his life. Don't get me wrong - this guy was in no way girly - that's not what I mean. This male femininity was one of the most fitting things I've ever seen. When I realized what made his face look like that, I had to leave, because it was beautifully private and holy.
And it made me realize truth in the language of Christ as the lover and us as the beloved that I'd only slightly imagined before. Probably now I'm not really understanding it any more than then. But I'm intrigued, I tell you!
Posted by tuggy at 01.16.05 23:36I've wondered about that for a very long time! You just vindicated my wonder! Thanks.
But seriously now, folks, where do all of these distinctions come from? Can we play all of Lewis' characterization of Orual off as being merely that of a human, as if we only label it feminine because the character was female? I think no. But I don't want to say that his characterization job is completely peculiar to the femininity of Orual, because I find bits of myself in her, as well. It's striking how accurate it is, Tuggy, but I'm pretty much a male. (I don't want to jump to conclusions or anything, but I'm pretty sure I'm not a woman.)
So maybe what we see when we read that book is Orual the human. And for her, being human means being a woman. For me being a human means being a man, but gender is still a sub-set of humanity.
But that still leaves me wondering why I (like you) label certain behaviors masculine and certain ones feminine... Should I use other adjectives like dominant or compliant? Hmm.
By the way, you were right to leave that fella with his privacy. It takes a lot of safety for a guy in our sex-charged culture to break down and show some male femininity. Good call.
(that was a long "comment" and it's really late. hope it made sense.)
Posted by: bob at 01.18.05 01:31Contemplating it more, I think that the thing that Lewis hit on was the way of dominating by manipulation, to the extent that hate thinks it is love and jealousy thinks it is support. Not that only women do this - but I think it is a temptation inherent in the feminine life. It's part and parcel of the peculiarity of the struggle to figure out how on earth being "submissive" and "helper" could possibly be positive.
Posted by: tuggy at 01.18.05 11:11C. S. Lewis liked to portray the self-preserving love in contrast to the self-forgetting love. In The Screwtape Letters, I think that he refers to devils as consumers of others. They must feed on and destroy the freedom, the individuality, the personality of others in order to meagerly preserve any hollow shell of their own self. Since devils are a-gender (though Lewis uses masculine pronouns with which to refer to his demonic characters), I think that Bob is right in stating that Lewis is portraying humanity rather than femininity. Yet since becoming anything other than a female participant in my perspective on the world is extremely difficult, my experience of manipulative destruction-of-others is largely female.
Posted by: funkefreak at 01.19.05 08:34For your fourth read through the book, if you want a change of pace, I have a copy of a dramatization of the story which a Covenant College English major did for her SIP my second year at Covenant. It was incredible to see the story performed, and all the actors wore masks during their lives in the play. The masks were only removed at death, or when confronted by the gods, or perhaps in a moment of candor or honesty.
Posted by: thejollyswan at 01.19.05 21:15