To Drive All The Woman Out Of Me

Self-Knowledge and Gender Dysphoria in Till We Have Faces

“. . . by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me.”

There has been no shortage of discussion on gender in Lewis’s works in recent years. In Lewis, some find a conservative, some a misogynist, some a progressive, and some a man who cannot figure out his thoughts on women at all. Sprawling and often misleading as those rabbit tunnels may be, few have dealt much with gender in Lewis’s best and final work of fiction, Till We Have Faces. How is gender portrayed there?

For those unfamiliar, Till We Have Faces is Lewis’s retelling of the Psyche and Cupid myth, with some unique spins and alterations. Set in the village of Glome, Orual narrates her accusation against the gods, “especially the god of the mountain.” Those who would benefit from an overview of Lewis’s final and best work of fiction can find a good one here. 

Orual, our narrator and central character—protagonist is too kind a word—undergoes a dramatic transformation over the course of the narrative. For most of the pages of the journey, she grows increasingly self-deceived. Chad Walsh, among other critics, calls Orual’s self-deception “the central psychological theme” of the book.¹ As her self-deception increases, her person steeply degenerates. On the one hand, Lewis portrays this as a kind of phantomization of the self. “It was as if my whole soul had been one tooth and now that tooth was drawn. I was a gap.”² In this way, Lewis is a good Augustinian, “to whom [his] own glad debts are incalculable,”³ depicting evil as non-being. And yet, on the other hand, Lewis has a more concrete way of symbolizing Orual’s inner self-deception: her outward masculinization.

Lewis depicts Orual’s masculinization in Martial terms. That is, as it relates to the god and planet Mars in the ancient and medieval imagination. In The Discarded Image, Lewis introduces us to the Martial character. “Mars makes iron. He gives men the martial temperament, ‘sturdy hardiness,’ as the Wife of Bath calls it.”⁴ Orual’s increasing masculinity, we will see, is more particularly her increasing Martiality.

Orual’s growing martiality is riddled throughout the book: the sword training with Bardia, the impaling of the pig, the duel and slaying of Argan, and so on. But there is one passage which especially illuminates the symbolic connection between Orual’s outer Martiality (masculinity) and her inner self-deception. Soon after her return from The Grey Mountain, Orual writes,

As soon as my wound⁵ was well enough I returned very diligently to my fencing lessons with Bardia. I did it even before my left arm could bear a shield, for he said that fighting without shields was also a skill that ought to be learned. He said (and I now know it was true) that I made very good progress. My aim was to build up more and more of that strength, hard and joyless, which had come to me when I heard the god’s sentence; by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me. Sometimes at night, if the wind howled or the rain fell, there would leap upon me, like water bursting from a dam, a great and anguished wonder—whether Psyche was alive, and where she was on such a night, and whether hard wives of peasants were turning her, cold and famished, from their door. But then, after an hour or so of weeping and writhing and calling out upon the gods, I would set to and rebuild the dam.⁶

Notice how this passage reads like a stream of consciousness. There is no paragraph break between the changing of topics from fighting and shields to the bursting in of self-knowledge at night, as through a breached dam. In part, the stream of consciousness form shows that Lewis is playing with the tools of literary modernism. By it, Lewis suggests the connection (even in Orual’s own mind) between her martial activity, and her efforts of repressing self-knowledge. This passage immediately follows the point in time when Orual’s self-deception experiences a sharp increase. “Then I locked the door and put a seal on it. And, as well as I could, I locked a door in my mind.” (This is in reference to Orual’s loss of Psyche, her “great central sorrow.”) 

After “rebuild[ing] the dam,” Orual abruptly returns her attention to more Martial activities: “Soon Bardia was teaching me to ride on horseback as well to fence with the sword. He used me, and talked to me, more and more like a man. And this both grieved and pleased me.” “Ride on horseback” and “fence with the sword” are both associated with warfare, connoting Martial symbolism. Even more directly, Orual recalls that Bardia begins to relate with her as a fellow man, a cause of both grief and pleasure to the presently transmogrifying Orual. These elements, by their adjacent position to “rebuilding the dam,” show the reader what exactly is suggested. It means not only returning to her work of suppressing self-knowledge, but also to its apparent result: her masculine self-transformation. For Orual, self-suppression is the unfortunate result of self-deception.

Orual can make no plainer that she intends to suppress all that is feminine about her. She is climbing a steep curve of masculinity. She fights like a man, works like a man, learns like a man. Of learning, she writes, “I questioned [the Fox] about what he called the physical parts of philosophy, about the seminal fire, and how souls arise from blood, and the periods of the universe; and also about plants and animals, and the positions, soils, airs, and governments of cities. I wanted hard things now, and to pile up knowledge.”

There is our summary statement, the phrase that interprets and orients the rest: “I wanted hard things now.” What are the effects of the Martial influence? “Sturdy hardiness.” Manliness. And in case we missed the notion suggested by “hard things,” she unfolds it more directly for us a few lines down. “My aim was to build up more and more than strength, hard and joyless . . . by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me.”

So we see that Lewis portrays Orual as an increasingly self-deceived figure. As she plunges down this path of self-deception, she becomes increasingly masculine. What’s the point? What is Lewis doing with this thematic-symbolic relationship in his final novel? 

Lewis symbolizes self-deception with a masculine woman. And this may be among his most prophetic impartations to the modern age. 

What are the lessons for our own day? I’ve half a mind to end here with, “let the reader understand.” Or perhaps like the judge in the God’s court, command “Enough,” and invite the reader to linger in silence for some time. Perhaps in the silence, we will find along with Orual that we also have been answered.

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