N.I.C.E Girls Only: “That Hideous Strength,” Unnatural Feminism, and... Birth Control?

That Hideous Strength is the final book in C.S Lewis’ Space Trilogy and, although it’s the only story that takes place on Earth, the story is the most alien. It begins prosaically with Jane — a woman in her early twenties stuck in an unsatisfying marriage and focused on a career in academia. A scientific research group — the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E) — turns the story Orwellian, begins a clique, and uses the power of FOMO to pressure Jane’s husband Mark into selling himself to a cult. Then Jane realizes she’s a clairvoyant and joins a community in a manor house with a mysterious man named Ransom. Angelic beings crash into Earth. Then Merlin comes back to England. It’s wild.

But through the hodge-podge of ancient mythologies, social commentary, British gardeners, brutal police, and regular tea times, C.S Lewis draws a parallel between Jane’s attitude towards her marriage and the N.I.C.E’s technocratic agenda as both seek artificial ways to control nature and natural law.

Mind versus Matter

Both Jane and the N.I.C.E pit mind and matter in a power struggle in which the mind seeks to dominate matter instead of living in harmony with it. Lewis suggests that this is rooted in a desire for control and an unwillingness to accept natural limits.

The N.I.C.E is run by “The Head” — a literal head taken from a corpse kept artificially alive by scientists. This sums up the organization’s attitude towards the natural world. The body is a collection of parts that can be controlled at will by scientists and bureaucrats instead of understood and respected as a whole person who partakes in the natural cycle of birth, death, and eventual decay.

Jane’s friend Mr. Dimble points out that the N.I.C.E is separating mind and matter, but that the counter-strategy is to learn from a time past, when,

“every operation on Nature [was] a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead — a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases” (285).

As the Dimbles try to tell Jane, family relationships are supposed to work in the same way — working with the body and its natural processes and desires instead of against it. But Jane refuses to accept that. Instead, she wants to subordinate the physical aspects of her marriage to the demands of her academic career and the technology of modern birth control.

In Jane’s mind,

“Some resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, thus invading her life, remained. . . this fear of being invaded and entangled was the deepest ground of her determination not to have a child — or not a long time yet. One had one’s own life to live” (73).

I don’t believe Lewis is categorically condemning career women. But he does seem to challenge the belief that we can (or should) pick and choose which parts of our physical nature we accept. We desire emotional and physical intimacy — good. But the natural result of that intimacy is [usually] children. And children are not the “price” of intimacy but the overflow of its joy. Jane’s decision is rooted in a desire for control and at odds with love, which necessitates surrender to something beyond the self. It acknowledges a connection with someone else, and therefore a sort of mutual claim.

What a Pill the Body is

While the N.I.C.E advertises its dedication to human progress, it really means the advancement of the mind’s ability to produce machines. To achieve their ends they destroy villages, torture dissidents, experiment on live animals, and dabble in eugenics. Once society accepts the supremacy of minds and technology over nature, less-capable humans become merely lumps of matter to manipulate. You cannot love while devaluing the body. And without love, sterility, cruelty and chaos ensue.

Both the N.I.C.E and Jane resist the way the world naturally works and try to dominate matter with technology. Jane treats her body like a machine. She thinks she can push the “childbearing” button at will, but realizes that turning it “on” may be more difficult than turning it “off.” There is a direct connection, in the story, between Jane and Mark’s lack of emotional connection and the barriers in their physical connection. They refuse to submit to or be vulnerable with each other in any way, and their love begins to die. Later in the book, we learn that Jane is a direct descendent of the Tudor dynasty, but that the child (in Lewis’ mythological vein, King Arthur’s heir) will now never be born since she used birth control (278).

Lewis suggests that love cannot be fully expressed and harmony cannot be fully experienced without submission to nature and its laws. You can’t fully love without a body, and you can’t have a body without being limited by it. This is the tension Jane wrestles with — she wants marriage without sacrifice, love without children, guidance without submission.

Venus Scandalizes the N.I.C.E People

Without giving away too much of the plot, the N.I.C.E crumbles. Ransom compares the N.I.C.E’s work to the Tower of Babel (288). And like Babel, the N.I.C.E is overrun by chaos. Their language — the means by which human minds communicate, and often control, thoughts — is scrambled. The animals kept for experiments run rampant through the halls until they burst outside and begin to copulate — as animals do in the wild. Nature bubbles up and confounds the tidy tyranny of a technological bureaucracy.

The book’s ending is the triumph of Venus, who visits Earth as one of Lewis’ “Oyarsa”. It’s disgusting and proletariat to N.I.C.E sensibilities and scandalous to Victorian ones. Healing the society and the minds corrupted by scientism takes the form of both physical and spiritual passion. As Ransom’s allies push back the N.I.C.E’s police and destroy the eugenics labs, Jane and Mark reconcile in a cottage that Venus decorates.

Ransom tells Jane, “…you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience” (147). Jane and Mark’s marriage was failing because both thought they could give each other their bodies while withholding their hearts. Or, at different times, they thought they could give their minds while suppressing the natural result of giving their bodies. Both realize that no one is autonomous — especially in marriage.

We cringe at the word “obedience,” but Lewis suggests that we were created for it and that we find harmony only when we reconcile the body and the mind instead of making them enemies. The message isn’t that we become anti-technology, but that we understand and respect limits when our inventions can or do destroy and subvert the natural world — even if it means sacrificing “progress.” A woman’s body, with all its unique abilities and pains, is not her prison, but the means by which she gives, creates, and expresses love. Lewis suggests that when both individuals and society forget this, we wander in a sterile world headed for the mad scientist’s table instead of the wedding feast.