I love so much of C.S. Lewis, but my word, he had problems with women

Cover of The Screwtape Letters

Just finished rereading The Screwtape Letters. I enjoy so much of that book so very much. It's a shame C. S. Lewis really seemed to have trouble getting his head around the idea of women as people. He was okay with courageous schoolgirls, who seem to have been essentially just like boys to him, but he couldn't seem to get past puberty, when women changed into The Other. And complicating all this, I think, was his deep uneasiness over all things sexual.

The final letter, which he intends as the triumphant peroration of the entire book, is desperately marred for me by the analogy he uses to describe his hero's feelings on finally reaching heaven. Lewis/Screwtape says that all the temptations to which our hero had formerly been subject would now seem "as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door."

Even the first time I read this, many years ago, I identified with the poor nauseating raddled harlot. I still do. The poor girl. How do we know how she felt? Maybe she loved the hero. Maybe she's heartbroken.  Maybe she didn't see herself as a "raddled harlot" at all. 

But I have this reaction because I see her as a person, and Lewis doesn't. Lewis tried to see women as people; he really did; but when that aim isn't consciously on his mind, he produces passages like this. 

Lewis' uninterrogated assumption is that women are a what, not a who; that we exist as objects that nauseate (but revoltingly attract) men, or else are ideal objects that redeem men; but have no existence on our own account. He finds it hard to rise above that. I will give him credit for often trying to do so. I wish he had succeeded more often. I wish I could enjoy the whole of the Screwtape Letters as much as I enjoy most of it.

And I wish Lewis' opinion of women had not had such an influence on my own opinion of myself, when I was growing up.