Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. I recommend you support your local bookseller or public library, and read the book first.
Philologist Elwin Ransom, brought to the planet Perelandra (Venus) by Oyarsa, the spiritual ruler of Malacandra (Mars), encountered his old enemy Weston who had abducted him to Malacandra, while exploring Perelandra's sole fixed island with the Green Lady, the planet's only woman. Weston's personality is gone: Ransom believed he had become an Un-Man, an animated corpse possessed by the malevolent spirit Weston had called the Force, but which Ransom believed to be one of Satan's allies, if not Satan himself.
Ransom later found the Un-Man by following a trail of tortured animals. He was trying to tempt the Green Lady, into violating the one law decreed by Maleldil, the ruler of the universe: not to live or spend the night on the island. After Ransom dissuaded the Lady from listening to the Weston-thing, that was Weston, it engaged in psychological torture on him, calling his name for no reason to keep him awake all night.
Ransom does manage some sleep, but when he awakes, the Un-Man is at his efforts to tempt the Lady again, telling her story after story of women who had suffered nobly but were vindicated. Ransom suspects these women were "witches or perverts." The temptation goes on for days, and Ransom's efforts to stop it are hampered by his own need for sleep, which Weston no longer shares. Further, at times he loses his temper, causing him to lose ground to the Un-Man's rhetoric.
One day Ransom awakes to find Weston and the Lady dressed
in robes made of feathers The Un-Man has told her that the people of
Earth wear things like this, not just for protection from the cold,
but to look beautiful. The Weston-thing has a pocket mirror: he shows
the Lady her own reflection, but she is fearful of this new experience
and seemingly indifferent to her new appearance. He also tries to make
a gift of the mirror to her, but without a concept of personal
property, she does not understand the gift.
Ransom realizes at the end that the Un-Man's appeal to the Lady's vanity isn't merely superficial: "The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage."
In The Screwtape Letters, published in 1942, a year before Perelandra, the elder devil Screwtape commends his nephew Wormwood for making use of the Patient's sense of vanity. On one hand, the Patient has acquired some urbane and intellectual acquaintances with whom he can socialize, and who for all their sophistication do not understand the "spiritual" world he has discovered in his newfound Christianity. On the other hand, he can happily kneel in prayer next to a simple greengrocer, knowing that he and his urbane friends are out of the grocer's league. The Patient can be let to be self-satisfied for walking in both worlds and believing he's above them both.1 Pride isn't merely one of the seven deadly sins: it's the deadly sin, which Lewis believed the cause of all human misery.2
Ransom suspects Weston's anecdotes to be about "witches and perverts," not merely about women who suffered nobly in the face of tragedy or injustice. Rather, they would appear to be about people who transgressed social norms—of which "witches and perverts" would be two examples.
Lewis was a traditional conservative but eschewed partisan politics, and in a series in his honour, I would do the same. However, I'm reminded of the 2017 incident in the U.S. Senate in which Elizabeth Warren was deemed to have broken a Senate standing rule and barred by a vote from participating further in the debate. The majority Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, explained later: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted." Those last three words subsequently became a feminist slogan celebrating women who refused to be silenced. But if we can take what apparently happened in the Senate at face value, then the fact got lost that Warren persisted in transgressing the norms of Congressional conduct.
Lewis might have found it admirable that some women persisted against oppression or injustice. I doubt whether he would have approved of Weston extolling the Nietzschean idea of the superman who rises above conventional societal norms.
The logic of the Un-Man's temptation is something like this: Maleldil loves the Green Lady and wants her to become older, to mature. Part of this maturation process, as he said in the previous chapter, was to understand that Maleldil's rule was made to be broken. Because she is beloved, she is special. He shows her the mirror so that she can see and admire herself; he offers her the mirror so she can have something others cannot. And because she is special and beautiful and worthy of self-admiration, she deserves the right to transgress Maleldil's rule against dwelling on the Fixed Land. (She will be like God, knowing good and evil.)
After the serpent tempted Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves to mask their shame (Genesis 3:7). Later, God gave them animal skins instead (v. 21). Clothing was the first visible sign of the Fall: the leaves that cloaked their newfound shame, then the skins that symbolized the need for sacrifice to atone for their sins. Though unfallen, the Green Lady has bypassed the fig leaves and gone directly to the animal skins. While she says Weston found the feathers that the birds had dropped, in the last chapter, Weston was torturing frogs for pleasure. I wonder whether he told the Lady the truth. We can at least infer that she is not aware of him killing the birds.
The temptation continues next Sunday with chapter 11.
Footnotes
1 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, chapter 10, fadedpage.com, accessed July 19, 2026, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20140509/html.php.
2 "It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began." Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 8, fadedpage.com, accessed July 19, 2026, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150620/html.php.
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