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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapters 3 and 7

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

• Chapters 12-14

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

• 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.

• Chapter 16, Banquet at Belbury

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