TSL Chapter 20 -- A Terrestrial and an Infernal Venus

Summary

Having lectured on Love (mortal and divine), Uncle Screwtape turns his baleful eye on the object of that love: Women. He notes that God has prevented Nephew Wormwood's attempts to undermine The Patient's chastity so (sigh), they're going to have to get him married.

Screwtape wants a dossier on each of the young women in the neighborhood (a Binder full of Maidens?) so he can find the right "type" of woman to lead The Patient into damnation.

"Type?" -- Hell sets fashion (who doubted it?), and for each age, they describe a proper "type" of woman who will be trendy and attractive and thus unwomanly -- and therefore leading pious men away from "spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages."

He describes the women of various ages concluding that in the current age (1940's) Hell has deigned that the model woman will be "more boyish than nature allows."

He then describes, in general the two type of women fixed within each man's mind -- the Terrestrial and the Infernal Venus. A man will feel natural, even Godly love toward the Terrestrial Venus. His feelings will be "readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, colored through with... golden light of reverence and naturalness." The other kind of girl -- the Infernal Venus, the man will desire brutally. She will draw him away from marriage (naturally), but should he somehow marry her, he would treat her as "a slave, an idol, or an accomplice."

Ideally the attraction to the Infernal Venus would lead to a mistress or to whoring, but marrying her would be fine, anyway, because even without fornication sexuality can lead to a man's undoing.

Girls, Girls, Girls...

If writing about love is a minefield of self-exposure for moralizing writers, writing about women is walking into the furnace of sexual-frustrations on parade.

Lewis's are surprisingly by-the-book for a man who was living with, and may have been fornicating with a woman almost three decades his elder, whom he referred to as "mother" when he was writing this.

He hits the classic Madonna-Whore complex dead on, of course, and has a boiler-plate condemnation of fashion. He doesn't go much beyond this though, more or less ending with extremely conventional wisdom.

Where he stops short, though there is something a bit interesting: fornication and solitary vice (The Wanking) are clearly sins -- but he suggests that sex within marriage can be a sin if it's done correctly (wrongly). He implies that the man's MW-complex will keep him from acting appropriately lovingly toward the target of his desire, so maybe that's it: if a man marries a Whore and then treats her as a Whore, it's still a sin, even if they're married before God.

But CSL doesn't tell us much about this -- just that it's possible.

My Reaction

My reaction was more or less "Meh" -- I found Screwtape's advice conventional and dreary but now that I've read up on CSL's "love life" I'm sort of glad he left it that way.

As an anti-sermon, it's lacking in practical advice. I suppose he's saying, "Don't marry the girl you want to fuck! For goodness's sake, marry the girl you view through the Golden Light of reverence and Naturalness! That stroppy temptress at the pub won't make you happy, young man! She won't!"

Meh.