That Hideous Strength: Chapter 4

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of That Hideous Strength 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.

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Mark Studdock, a sociologist and Fellow at Bracton College in Edgestow, left Bracton to take a public-relations position with the N.I.C.E., a scientific think tank that purchased a large parcel of land from the College to set up its institute, including the ancient Bragdon Wood, where Merlin is buried, according to folklore. He travelled to Belbury, the current headquarters of the N.I.C.E., with the influential Lord Feverstone, another influential Fellow and a member of the Institute. There he met several high-ranking members of the N.I.C.E., but none of them seemed to know exactly where Mark fit in the organization or would give him a straight answer about his job description. One interesting character he met was Miss Hardcastle, known as "the Fairy," a burly woman who headed the N.I.C.E.'s police organization. The N.I.C.E. itself wants to re-engineer society along "scientific" lines including eugenics and direct mind conditioning, and Miss Hardcastle was particularly enthusiastic about her job as the enforcers of the Institute's agenda. He also meets another Fellow at Bracton, William "Bill the Blizzard" Hingest, who strongly advises Mark to leave the N.I.C.E. alone and go back to Bracton—as he himself is that night.

Meanwhile, Mark's wife Jane, who is disturbed by clairvoyant dreams, travelled to St. Anne's on the Hill. She was given the address of a Miss Ironwood, whom her tutor, Mr. Dimble, invited her to visit to talk about her dreams. When she spoke to Miss Ironwood, she was disappointed to find out that she could be no help, because there was nothing wrong with her. Jane's dreams are a natural ability inherited from her ancestry in a branch of the Tudor family. She has an ancestor who wrote down an accurate account of the Battle of Worcester despite not being there: he, too, dreamt it. Jane returned home to Edgestow, where she received a phone call late at night from Mrs. Dimble, asking if she could stay the night.

Chapter 4: "The Liquidation of Anachronisms"

First of all, I love the title of this chapter. That's not something I say often about chapter titles. It sounds like the title of a prog-rock album, but in this story, as we'll see, it's literally true.

Mrs. Dimble arrives at Jane's apartment. She needs a bed for the night because she and Mr. Dimble have been evicted from their house. Mr. Dimble is a tutor at Northumberland, another college in the University of Edgestow, where Jane is a student; apparently the Dimbles live on Bracton property. Apparently the N.I.C.E. land purchase includes their house, and they havve wasted no time coming in and taking over. Mr. Dimble is sleeping in his rooms at Northumberland.

Mrs. Dimble says that "there are dozens of what look like policemen all over the place," and also "it's almost as if we'd lost the war." I assume the "policemen" are Miss Hardcastle's detail. Their black uniforms call to mind the "blackshirts" of the British Union of Fascists. In the previous chapter, we were told Miss Hardcastle was a former British Fascist. Lewis's imagery evokes the threat of totalitarianism. World War II had just ended when That Hideous Strength was published, meaning Lewis had to have been writing it in the thick of the war, and an Allied victory would not have been a foregone conclusion. The Dimbles have already made plans to live at the Manor—Miss Ironwood's house in St. Anne's. Mrs. Maggs, Jane's housekeeper, who has also been evicted, is already there.

Mrs. Dimble thinks it's perhaps for the best that they were evicted. She had hoped to fill all the rooms of the house with children, but the Dimbles never had any, and she feels like she became too fond of wishing after them. She likens herself to "that frightful woman in Ibsen who was always maundering about dolls." This is an allusion to A Doll's House, which coincidentally I read for the first time in August. In Henrik Ibsen's play, Nora, the female lead, lives a sheltered life, dependent upon her husband Torvald. She is the "little woman" whom he infantilizes and regards their home as the titular "doll's house," a playroom for her. In the end, she leaves Torvald, wanting to find herself outside of the constraints of the expectations society laid on her as a housewife. By contrast, however, Mrs. Dimble finds her identity in her partnership with her husband, who solve their problems together. While it's Mother Dimble who sees herself as Nora, it's really Jane who is most like her: resentful of the housewife and "little woman" archetypes, and trapped in an unhappy marriage to Mark, who doesn't seem to really take her seriously.

That night Jane has a nightmare in which a man is persuaded out of his car and beaten to death in the road by three men. I wonder who that might be?

The next morning, Mark (who stayed the night in Belbury) meets with the Reverend Straik, also known as the Mad Parson. Straik is anything but a traditional Anglican priest. He's a political radical, saying, "Do not imagine…that I indulge in any dreams of carrying out our program without violence." His message to society is not one of Christian hope, but "absolute despair." The Mad Parson disavows organized religion and declares that the Kingdom of God is to be realized in the here and now, inaugurated by the N.I.C.E. and the "powers or science." Indeed, "the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12).

As Lewis has written elsewhere:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.… [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.¹

The Reverend Straik is exactly this kind of religious tyrant. Has Lewis patterned him after pro-Communist liberal clergy, or Fascists like the "German Christians" of Nazi Germany or Father Coughlin in the United States? Probably, it doesn't matter. The Mad Parson is a progressive zealot, whose religion is a blend of liberal Christianity and scientism. He is absolutely assured of the rightness of the N.I.C.E.'s cause. Worse, he sees himself as a prophet, standing alone (and with divine authority) against the "nauseating cant of the organised religions."

Ominously, Straik tells Mark: "There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough. No one goes out of the N.I.C.E. Those who try to turn back will perish in the wilderness."

Next, Mark goes to a committee meeting at the N.I.C.E., chaired by Deputy Director Wither. Mark finds himself disappointed (albeit unrealistically) that the N.I.C.E.'s real work goes on somewhere else. He hasn't yet ascended to whatever passes for the "Inner Ring" at the Institute. The main business of the meeting concerns the work that has begun at Edgestow: for example, the demolition of the ancient Norman Church.

Then comes the news of the murder of Hingest: discovered near his car, beaten to death in the middle of the night. Miss Hardcastle's police were on the scene almost immediately. It doesn't come as any surprise whose murder Jane had dreamt.

Hingest represents pure science. He was a renowned chemist, who studies chemistry to gain knowledge and understanding. He was an abrasive, aristocratic man, but also a shrewd one: the N.I.C.E. apparently recruited him for additional credibility, but he saw through their façade to their real agenda and, being non-political, wanted no part of it. As it turns out, when Miss Hardcastle asked him for a lift the previous night at dinner, it was not an innocent request. And Reverend Straik was right that no one gets out of the N.I.C.E.

Wither reports that Hingest was found in Potter's Lane. The allusion to Matthew 27 is no doubt intentional: Judas, after betraying Christ, returned the thirty pieces of silver he had been paid to the priests before going away and killing himself. The priests used his money to buy a potter's field to use as a graveyard. Acts 1:18 suggests that Judas died in that very field. Similarly, Bill the Blizzard is the "Judas" who betrayed the N.I.C.E. and died in Potter's Lane. (Or did the N.I.C.E. betray him?)

Jane, too, hears about Hingest's murder that morning, and she realizes that the business of her dreams has only just begun.

After the committee meeting, Cosser, one of the men that Mark had met the previous day, approaches him and tells him they have a job to do: to "get out a report about Cure Hardy," a quaint village near Edgestow. The N.I.C.E. wants to divert the river Wynd from its natural course through Edgestow, and its new channel will go right through Cure Hardy, and the valley where the village is situated is to be dammed to create a reservoir. The problem is, Cure Hardy is a famous location. Mark's job is to spin the issue to make the village look unsanitary and populated by "undesirable elements." The destruction of the village is necessary for progress; meanwhile a new model village, presumably representing that progress, will be constructed a few miles away.

Mark finds the village attractive, but he is too weak-willed to resist Cosser's disdain for its unhygienic atmosphere and "recalcitrant and backwards" population of agricultural labourers. And as a sociologist he is accustomed to seeing people as "populations" and statistics rather than individuals. Cosser, for his part, fails to see the pub where they have lunch as a gathering-place for friends and community. Mark has pleasant memories of time passed with friends at the pub as an undergraduate; but to Cosser the bureaucrat, it's just a dank, unhygienic place where "stimulants" are ingested.

When Mark returns home that evening, he resolves not to tell Jane about Cure Hardy, knowing her fondness for such places. Jane, for her part, decides not to tell Mark about her dreams or visit to St. Anne's. Again, contrast their relationship to that of the Dimbles: they are not a team solving their problems together, but simultaneously they keep secrets from each other and show a lack of interest in what the other is doing.

The Fellows of Bracton meet for dessert at the College that evening. Outside, they are disrupted by the sound of construction outside the building. One of the Fellows ironically quotes Virgil, from the Aenid: Saeva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractaeque catenae: "And then I heard the sound of cruel lashes, then the clanging of iron and dragged chains." Is this not only two days after the Fellows approved the sale of College land? Between the eviction of their tenants and the renovation of the property, the N.I.C.E. works very fast.

Feverstone informs the Fellows that Studdock has resigned his Fellowship, though he has not written a letter of resignation and (apparently) only passed the message along orally. This is, of course, a lie: Mark said no such thing to Feverstone, and he had told Jane he had no intention of giving up his Fellowship. They discuss who should take his place, and settle on a man named Laird who was interested in "pragmatometry" (the Pragmatometer, you may remember, is the N.I.C.E.'s electronic bulletin board system described in chapter 2). He is also well-connected politically. It matters not to Feverstone that Laird is practically unknown and his academic credentials are questionable. Actually, there are two openings: the Fellows see the murder of Hingest only as another vacant seat to fill.

Suddenly the noise outside reaches a crescendo, and someone shouts a warning. The east window of the room is shattered. Lewis is ambiguous about what had happened; it appears to be some kind of riot, since there are suggestions of raised voices and gunfire before the east window shatters.

We are told this is "that famous east window on which Henrietta Maria had once cut her name with a diamond." Henrietta Maria was the wife of Charles I and the Queen of England from 1625–49, when Charles was deposed and executed during the Civil War. A window autographed by a notable queen is a dear treasure indeed, and now it's been destroyed by a careless mob. I could mean "careless" in one of two senses: reckless, or indifferent. The rioters are both.

I said at the top that the chapter title was literal. In fact it's quite sterile: a euphemism for removing whatever is old, traditional, and beautiful, and doesn't fit in with the N.I.C.E.'s view of "progress." It sounds an awful lot like the kind of propaganda that Mark is being recruited to write, in fact. The "anachronisms" in this chapter to be liquidated include:

• the Dimbles' home and landscape
• organized religion, along with traditional theology and morality
• ancient landmarks such as Edgestow's Norman Church
• William Hingest, the pure scientist who pursues knowledge for its own sake and opposes the scientism and political agenda of the N.I.C.E.
• the village of Cure Hardy, with its old buildings, natural beauty, and traditional way of life
• the traditional governance of Bracton College by reputable academics
• Bracton College's landscape
• Bracton's priceless window, graffitied by a former Queen of England

And what of Bragdon Wood, possibly the most anachronistic anachronism in the novel so far?

Footnote

1. C. S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 292.