C. S. Lewis: Gender and Sex in Perelandra

by Marc Hays

C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy should be required reading, at least twice through, before graduating high school. While Lewis had many distinguishing characteristics that were and remain outstanding from his and our contemporaries, one that always brings me back to reading more and more of his work is simply his ability to think. That depth of thought allows him to see larger forests and additional trees that most folks miss; at least I know I often miss them. A festschrift for him could be entitled, Through New Eyes. I always see the world anew and afresh, larger and more glorious whenever I read Lewis. Here’s an example from near the end of Perelandra, the second book of the Space Trilogy:

Both the bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try–Ransom has tried a hundred times–to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, party exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes. The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).

If you’ve been reading Narnia since you were a kid, you’re doing well. If you continue reading Narnia without moving forward into the Space Trilogy, you could be doing better. Here are some links to get you started:

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C.S. Lewis, Gender, Perelandra, Sex, Space Trilogy