That Hideous Strength

Summary

That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element. His wife Jane, six months married and struggling to finish a thesis on Donne, is lonely and troubled by vivid dreams. Bracton sells its ancient Bragdon Wood, where legend places Merlin's Well, to the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, and the worldly Lord Feverstone draws Mark to the Institute's headquarters at Belbury. There Mark is never told what his job is. The vague Deputy Director Wither, the cold Professor Frost, the Italian physiologist Filostrato, the Reverend Straik, and Miss Hardcastle, chief of the Institutional Police, lead him on with hints of acceptance. He writes newspaper accounts of a riot in Edgestow before it happens, and the Institute uses the disorder to take control of the town. Jane's dreams prove to be true visions: she sees the guillotined scientist Alcasan, the murder of the old chemist William Hingest, and a man asleep beneath the earth. Sent by her former tutor's wife, Mrs. Dimble, to St Anne's-on-the-Hill, she meets the physician Grace Ironwood and finally the Director, Elwin Ransom, who has returned from Venus with a wound in his heel that will not heal. His small household includes the sceptic MacPhee, Ivy Maggs, the Dennistons, the Dimbles and a tame bear, Mr. Bultitude. At Belbury, Mark learns that the Head the Institute serves is Alcasan's severed head, kept alive by machines and used as a mouthpiece by dark powers. Arrested on a false charge of Hingest's murder so that he will bring Jane to them, Mark is trained by Frost in the Objective Room, but when ordered to trample a crucifix he refuses, and his old idea of the normal and sane revives. Both sides seek Merlin, whose long sleep under Bragdon Wood is ending. Merlin comes to St Anne's, submits to Ransom as Pendragon of Logres, and receives the powers of the planetary intelligences when they descend on the house. Disguised as an interpreter, he enters Belbury; at its great banquet the speakers' words dissolve into gibberish, the animals of the vivisection laboratory break loose, and the Institute destroys itself. Wither, Frost, Filostrato and Straik die, and Feverstone is swallowed when Edgestow is wrecked by earthquake and flood. Ransom is taken back to Perelandra, and Jane goes down the garden to meet Mark at the lodge. The novel was published by John Lane The Bodley Head on 16 August 1945, with a preface dated Christmas Eve 1943.

Plot or Argument

• Chapters 1-2: Edgestow and Bracton

  Jane's loneliness and her dream of Alcasan; the college meeting that sells Bragdon Wood; Mark's dinner with Curry and Feverstone and his first invitation to the N.I.C.E.

• Chapters 3-5: Belbury and St Anne's

  Mark's evasive interviews with Wither and his drift into Miss Hardcastle's propaganda work; Jane visits Miss Ironwood at St Anne's and learns that her dreams are true; Hingest is murdered and Mark writes riot reports in advance.

• Chapters 6-7: Fog and the Pendragon

  Edgestow falls under the Institute's emergency rule; Jane is seized and burned by Miss Hardcastle, escapes, and meets the Director, who speaks to her of obedience and marriage.

• Chapters 8-10: The Head and the conquered city

  Mark is shown the Head of Alcasan; Jane joins the company at St Anne's; the search for Merlin begins in Bragdon Wood, and Mark is arrested for Hingest's murder.

• Chapters 11-14: Battle begun

  Frost's training of Mark in the Objective Room and Mark's refusal to trample the crucifix; Merlin wakes and comes to Ransom; Jane's encounter in the garden of St Anne's; Mark is set to watch over a tramp mistaken for Merlin.

• Chapter 15: The Descent of the Gods

  The planetary powers come down to St Anne's, the household is filled with their moods, and Merlin is given the strength to act.

• Chapters 16-17: The banquet and Venus at St Anne's

  The curse of Babel falls at Belbury's banquet, the beasts are loosed and the leaders die; Edgestow is destroyed; Ransom departs for Perelandra and Jane goes to Mark.

Characters

• Mark Studdock, protagonist

  Young Bracton sociologist whose craving to belong to an inner ring leads him into the N.I.C.E.

• Jane Studdock, protagonist

  Mark's wife, a doctoral student whose prophetic dreams make both sides want her.

• Elwin Ransom, the Director

  Philologist of the earlier novels, now Pendragon of Logres and head of the household at St Anne's.

• Merlin (Merlinus Ambrosius), awakened magician

  The Arthurian sage, asleep beneath Bragdon Wood, who wakes and serves Ransom.

• John Wither, Deputy Director of the N.I.C.E.

  Rambling, evasive old man whose vagueness hides a will given over to the dark powers.

• Professor Frost, N.I.C.E. leader

  Precise, cold psychologist who tries to strip Mark of all natural feeling.

• Lord Feverstone (Dick Devine), Mark's patron

  Cynical politician and fellow of Bracton who recruits Mark; Ransom's old enemy from the first novel.

• Miss Hardcastle, head of the Institutional Police

  Brutal chief of the N.I.C.E. police, nicknamed the Fairy, who tortures Jane.

• Filostrato, physiologist

  Italian scientist who keeps Alcasan's head alive and dreams of a sterile, lifeless world.

• Grace Ironwood, physician at St Anne's

  Doctor who first interprets Jane's dreams and brings her to the Director.

• Cecil and Margaret Dimble, Jane's friends

  Jane's former tutor, a scholar of Arthurian legend, and his motherly wife.

• MacPhee, household sceptic

  Argumentative Ulsterman at St Anne's who doubts everything but stays loyal.

• Mr. Bultitude, Ransom's bear

  Tame brown bear of St Anne's, captured by the Institute and loosed at the banquet.

Lessons

• The pull of the inner ring

  Mark does almost nothing evil by decision; he slides from one small compromise to the next because he wants to be inside whatever circle is nearest. Lewis shows that the desire to belong, when it governs a man, makes him useful to anyone who offers him a seat at the table, and that Mark's recovery begins only when he refuses something outright.

  • At what point could Mark first have walked away from Belbury, and why does he not?
  • Why is it significant that no one at Belbury will tell Mark what his job is?
  • What finally gives Mark the strength to refuse Frost in the Objective Room?

• Science without the moral law

  The preface ties the novel to The Abolition of Man: the N.I.C.E. treats human nature, animals and even death as raw material to be reshaped. Lewis does not attack science as such; the decent chemist Hingest leaves Belbury in disgust. The novel's target is knowledge pursued as power by men who have discarded the idea of objective good.

  • How does Hingest's attitude to his science differ from Filostrato's?
  • Why does the N.I.C.E. need propaganda as much as it needs laboratories?
  • What does the Head of Alcasan suggest about where the Institute's power really comes from?

• Marriage, obedience and humility

  The book opens with Jane recalling the marriage service and ends with her walking down the garden to Mark. Both spouses must lose a proud self-sufficiency: Jane her fear of being invaded by anyone, Mark his habit of seeing his wife as a possession or an audience. The Director's counsel on obedience is presented as a mutual, shifting order, not a drill.

  • What is Jane afraid of losing when she resists the Director, and what does she gain instead?
  • How does Mark see Jane differently by the last chapter?
  • Why might Lewis frame a novel about a world-threatening conspiracy around one ordinary marriage?

• Babel and its reversal

  The title comes from a Scottish poem about the Tower of Babel, and the climax repeats Babel's judgement: the Institute that sought to master everything can no longer understand its own speech. The small household at St Anne's, which waits and obeys, is given the power to act.

  • Why is the confusion of language a fitting punishment for Belbury in particular?
  • How does St Anne's show a different kind of community from Belbury?

Context

Lewis wrote the novel during the Second World War, when Britain was planning for national reconstruction and when scientific planning, propaganda and state power were matters of daily discussion. The N.I.C.E. joins the language of progressive planning to an older story of Arthurian Britain, which Lewis calls Logres, surviving secretly within the visible nation.

Composition

The preface is signed from Magdalen College, Oxford, on Christmas Eve 1943, and says the story has behind it the point Lewis made in The Abolition of Man, published in 1943. It also acknowledges a debt to Tolkien's then unpublished legends of Numinor and to Charles Williams's Arthurian writing. John Lane The Bodley Head published the novel on 16 August 1945; Macmillan issued it in the United States in 1946. Lewis later prepared an abridged version, published in America as The Tortured Planet.

Reception

Reviewers were divided. George Orwell reviewed it in 1945, admiring its picture of scientists ruled by a lust for power while arguing that the supernatural machinery weakened the story. The novel has remained the most discussed and debated of the three Ransom books, and its themes of technocracy, propaganda and the inner ring are often read alongside Lewis's essays.

Comparisons

• the-screwtape-letters

  Both show damnation working through small, ordinary steps: Screwtape's patient and Mark Studdock are each moved by vanity and the wish to be thought sophisticated rather than by any great crime.

• le-morte-darthur

  Lewis's Merlin, the title of Pendragon, and the idea of Logres all come from the Arthurian tradition Malory gathered; the novel imagines that tradition still alive in modern England.

• frankenstein

  Filostrato's Head, a dead man's skull kept alive by tubes and pumps, revives Shelley's question of what follows when science seeks to overrule death.

• animal-farm

  Orwell reviewed That Hideous Strength in 1945, the year of Animal Farm; both books show how propaganda rewrites events, as Mark's reports of the Edgestow riot are written before it happens.

• on-fairy-stories

  Lewis calls the novel a fairy-tale for grown-ups and cites Tolkien's Numinor in the preface; Tolkien's essay gives the theory of escape and eucatastrophe that the banquet and the reunion at St Anne's put into practice.

• till-we-have-faces

  Jane Studdock and Orual both resist a divine claim on them because they fear being possessed, and both find that surrender is the way to becoming fully themselves.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Every moment Mark feels he is finally being let into an inner circle, from the dinner with Curry and Feverstone in Chapter 2 to his first sight of the Head, and what he gives up each time.
• Jane's dreams of Alcasan, of Hingest's death and of the sleeper under the wood, and how each one is later shown to be true.
• The contrast between the household at St Anne's, with its shared kitchen work and its bear, and the endless committees and corridors of Belbury.
• The crucifix scene in the Objective Room and Mark's sudden sense of a straight, normal world against Frost's crooked one.
• The banquet in Chapter 16, where speech itself collapses, and how it answers the novel's title and epigraph.

Key terms and names

N.I.C.E.

The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, a state-backed research body headquartered at Belbury that aims to remake man and nature. Its harmless-sounding name is part of Lewis's joke.

Belbury

The Institute's headquarters, an ugly country house full of offices where no one ever states plainly what is wanted. It is the novel's picture of a society organized by ambition and fear.

St Anne's-on-the-Hill

The manor where Ransom's small company lives and waits under his direction. It is the counter-society to Belbury, built on obedience, courtesy and common work.

Logres

Lewis's name for the hidden, Arthurian Britain that persists inside the visible nation. Dr. Dimble explains that true British history is a struggle between Logres and Britain.

Pendragon

The Arthurian title for the head of Logres, passed down in secret and now held by Ransom. Merlin recognizes Ransom by it and accepts his command.

Bragdon Wood

The ancient wood belonging to Bracton College, containing Merlin's Well. Its sale to the N.I.C.E. begins the action, and Merlin's sleep beneath it explains why the Institute wants it.

The Head

The severed head of the executed scientist Alcasan, kept alive in Filostrato's laboratory. Its orders appear to come from science but are revealed to come from dark eldils.

Eldils and Oyéresu

In the Ransom trilogy, eldils are angelic beings, and the Oyéresu are the ruling intelligences of the planets. Their descent on St Anne's in Chapter 15 arms Merlin for the climax.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Bracton College sell Bragdon Wood to the N.I.C.E., and who arranges the vote?
2. Comprehension What does Jane see in her dreams, and how does Grace Ironwood explain them to her at St Anne's?
3. Comprehension What does Frost order Mark to do with the crucifix in the Objective Room, and how does Mark answer?
4. Interpretation Wither never gives Mark a clear instruction. Why is vagueness so effective a tool for controlling Mark, and how does it differ from the way Ransom gives orders?
5. Interpretation Mark writes reports of the Edgestow riot before it happens. What does this episode suggest about the relation between propaganda and power in the novel?
6. Interpretation Merlin is a pagan-era magician who serves the Christian Pendragon. Why does Lewis need a figure from the old Britain, rather than a modern man, to defeat Belbury?
7. Interpretation Jane fears being invaded or owned, by Mark, by the Director and finally by God. How does her experience in the garden in Chapter 14 change what she thinks freedom is?
8. Big Question Lewis argues in his preface that the novel makes the same point as The Abolition of Man. Can a society that denies any objective moral law still keep its scientists and planners from becoming tyrants?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 11:1-9 (Scripture)

  The builders of Babel want a tower reaching to heaven and a name for themselves, and God confounds their language. Lewis's title and epigraph come from a poem about Babel, and the banquet at Belbury repeats the judgement on a modern tower of ambition.

• Acts 2:1-13 (Scripture)

  At Pentecost the Spirit gives speech that every hearer understands, the reverse of Babel. The descent of heavenly powers on the humble household at St Anne's, followed by the confusion of tongues at Belbury, sets the two outcomes side by side.

• Ephesians 5:21-33 (Scripture)

  Paul calls husbands and wives to submit to one another in reverence for Christ and compares marriage to Christ and the Church. The Director's counsel to Jane and the Studdocks' reconciliation are Lewis's dramatized reflection on this passage.

• Augustine, City of God XIV.28 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine says two loves made two cities, love of self to the contempt of God and love of God to the contempt of self. Belbury and St Anne's are drawn as small versions of those two cities.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If men reject any objective moral law, they can no longer judge their own desires and will treat humanity and nature merely as material to be controlled. Those who seize such control will themselves be controlled by whatever impulse or power moves them, so that the planners of the N.I.C.E. end as servants of the dark eldils speaking through a dead man's head. Therefore the conquest of nature without the moral law ends not in human mastery but in human abolition, and only humility before a real good, shown in Mark's refusal and Jane's surrender, saves either the person or the nation.

Rhetorical device: simile (with antithesis). In Chapter 7 the Director tells Jane that obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill, setting the shifting order of a dance against the rigid order of the parade ground; the image governs the novel's picture of marriage and of the household at St Anne's.

Debate: Resolved: Mark Studdock is more responsible for his own corruption at Belbury than the N.I.C.E. is.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace Mark Studdock's desire to be on the inside, from Bracton's Progressive Element to the inner circle at Belbury, and argue whether the novel presents his refusal in the Objective Room as a new choice or as the recovery of something he had always known.

Comparison with The Screwtape Letters: Screwtape advises his nephew to lead his patient to hell by the gentle slope. Compare Screwtape's method with the way Wither and Feverstone draw Mark into Belbury, and argue what both books teach about how ordinary people are corrupted.

Medical Lens

The N.I.C.E. is a satire of scientific planning cut loose from morality, and several of its projects are medical or quasi-medical. Its central marvel is the Head: the severed head of the executed radiologist Alcasan, kept alive by Filostrato with artificial circulation and air, a mid-century version of the old dream of reanimation that the novel finally reveals as possession rather than science. The Institute's programme includes vivisection of animals, the replacement of punishment by remedial treatment of criminals, and talk of sterilising the unfit and eliminating organic life, which links the book to Lewis's essay arguments against the humanitarian theory of punishment. Frost's Objective Room is a course of psychological conditioning meant to destroy Mark's natural reactions through disorienting rooms and calculated indignities. On the other side, Grace Ironwood is a physician who treats Jane's visions as real perception rather than illness, and the novel sets her against the assumption that such dreams need only psychological explanation. Ransom's unhealing heel wound from Perelandra causes him continual pain. These are literary and theological uses of medicine; reading them as clinical portraits would be interpretive.

• Chapter 8, Moonlight at Belbury, and Chapter 9

  Mark is brought before the Head of Alcasan, sustained by pumps and tubes in Filostrato's laboratory.

  Reanimation Galvanism Anatomy Dissection Medical Ethics
• Chapters 3 and 7

  Grace Ironwood questions Jane about her dreams and tells her they are true visions, not a disorder to be cured.

  Dreams Nightmares Physicians Doctors Psychology Unconscious
• Chapters 12-14

  Frost conditions Mark in the Objective Room, a training meant to remove instinctive moral responses.

  Psychology Unconscious Medical Ethics
• Chapter 7, The Pendragon

  Jane first sees the Director lying with his wounded foot raised, living in constant pain from the heel wound received on Perelandra.

  Pain
• Chapter 16, Banquet at Belbury

  The animals kept for experiment break out of the laboratory and attack the banquet guests.

  Anatomy Dissection

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Belbury and St Anne's as two communities: how each recruits, governs, speaks and eats together, and what Lewis means by contrasting them.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation Mark and Jane have at the lodge after the last chapter ends, keeping to what each has learned.

• Classroom

  Read the opening of Genesis 11 aloud and then the banquet in Chapter 16; list every way the novel repeats and changes the Babel story.

• Fiction

  Retell the riot in Edgestow as two newspaper reports: the one Mark writes in advance and an honest one written by a resident of the town.

Further Reading

• Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis

  First novel of the trilogy (1938), introducing Ransom and Devine.

• Perelandra, C. S. Lewis

  Second novel (1943), in which Ransom receives his heel wound.

• The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis

  The 1943 lectures the preface names as the novel's serious point.

• C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper

• The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter