Did C.S. Lewis Ignore Women? 2 New ‘Screwtape’ Retellings Ask The Question.
(REVIEW) In the last 18 months, two Christian publishers have released books reimagining C.S. Lewis’s classic “The Screwtape Letters” as concerning the temptation not of a man, but of a woman. This raises a question.
What exactly did Lewis miss by focusing on a man?
Both “My Dear Hemlock” by Tilly Dillehay (a Protestant pastor’s wife) and “The Bellbind Letters” by Samantha N. Stephenson (a Catholic bioethicist) retain Lewis’s technique. A senior devil advises a junior devil how best to tempt the “patient,” a young adult who, early in the book, becomes a Christian but remains vulnerable to sin.
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As with “Screwtape,” these books focus not on demons (though all three believe they are real), but on the patient — us!
All three make distinctions between men and women, though Lewis makes the fewest. Lewis describes “Unselfishness,” whereby a woman generally means “taking trouble for others,” while “a man means not giving trouble to others,” prompting perceived but unintentional selfishness. He notes that “up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less," cuing “secret resentment, even between lovers.”
Lewis gives his main character a few male-only experiences (facing the draft, pursuing a woman), but he mostly depicts his characters behaving not narrowly as males and females, but as humans whose comportment under temptation is instructive for everyone. Lewis, the apologist, was famous for presenting mere Christianity, the core fundamentals of the faith shared by all Christians everywhere. In “The Screwtape Letters,” Lewis might be described as presenting mere humanity.
Dillehay and Stephenson set out to write versions for women — but both are at their best when they take the Lewisian approach, considering women not just as females, but as humans. Several of Dillehay’s early chapters in this vein are beautiful, nearly rivaling Lewis’s prose. Her examination of internet usage is especially perceptive: Online, humans “become avatars of themselves” who exist in a mode like that of the demons, “floating in a relief of cool, dark independence from His Time.”
Stephenson builds nicely on Lewis with further expositions of his most famous passages. Where Lewis described man’s perverse belief that “my time is my own” rather than belonging to God, Stephenson adds another dimension, the temptation to “regard uninterrupted projects as her own right.”
Lewis wrote of the potency of arduous obedience in “a human, no longer desiring, but still intending” to obey God’s will. Stephenson adds further description: A Christian “whose coolness of heart still never freezes the will.”
Both authors include some specifically female experiences well worth consideration, such as postpartum depression, miscarriage and breast cancer. But when we turn to second-order gender distinctions, the differences between men and women that are not intrinsic or biological but rather temperamental or situational, Dillehay and Stephenson have to make judgment calls about what counts as women’s issues. The results are mixed.
Dillehay wants to raise some second-order sex distinctions to near ontological status. Virtue and vice don’t bifurcate along gender lines, and traits like gentleness or sensitivity should be described as feminine only by generalization, rather than as fundamental facts of femininity. But Dillehay said “the female is built” especially to offer empathy, citing “Eve’s blood” as the source of some behavior, and has her demon explain, “She is female. This means her mind is designed to think in terms of the whole picture, the ‘atmosphere.’”
Stephenson is more successful at keeping her patient in the “mere human” category, marked but not defined by some generally female tendencies — tendencies that Stephson deftly handles. No matter the situation, from mom guilt to mothers-in-law to scrapbooking frenzies to self-care, a Christian woman is almost sure to find her sin unmasked by Stephenson.
But Stephenson seems almost hell-bent on including every possible female iteration of vice, which leaves her little space to develop each. Some become overly didactic and hard to appreciate. Dillehay, too, eventually turns to the rapid-fire approach, covering in the last 90 pages her patient’s first childbirth all the way to her natural death decades later.
Dillehay’s is the better-written and more merely Christian of the two books, but she belabors male headship, lacks nuance when discussing a wife’s sexual duties to a porn-watching husband and adds a surprise reference the Nephilim (in some interpretations of Scripture, the offspring of fallen angels and women).
Stephenson’s book is decidedly Catholic, emphasizing the Mass, rosaries and saints. Toward the end, she throws a theological bomb, suggesting that Protestants who do not pray to Mary are following Satanic influence.
So what do we gain by a female-oriented “Screwtape”? It’s hard to identify an overarching theme in either book.
“Women” are not a monolithic group, and the temptations they face vary greatly. Lewis, writing for the merely human, ignored the pressure to cover everything and gained the space to develop a few central ideas at length. Foremost among them might be his comment that “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one.”
Dillehay and Stephenson don’t get everything right, but they suggest some particularly slippery spots for women.
Rachelle Peterson writes from Mesa, Arizona, and runs the Substack The Hundred Acre Bookshelf.