Against Equality

love, lovers, and the gift of submission

When I was seventeen, I read CS Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength. There were parts of it I loved and parts of it that I didn’t understand. But one part in particular stuck with me, probably because, in a strange novel, it was the strangest to modern ears. It is a conversation between a young wife, Jane, and Ransom, a man who communes with angels. Married to a scholar and a PhD student herself, Jane feels unhappy in her marriage. Her husband, Mark, feels similarly: unquiet and disenchanted. Jane explains as best she can how she feels about her marriage: “‘I thought love meant equality,’ she said, ‘and free companionship.’” Ransom responds: “‘Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.’ ‘I always thought that’s just what it was,’” Jane says. “‘I thought that it was in their souls that people are equal.’ ‘You were mistaken,’ he said gravely. ‘That is the last place where they are equal. […] Equality is medicine, not food.’” Jane objects. “‘But surely in marriage…?’ ‘Worse and worse.’” You can imagine Ransom shaking his head. “‘It’s not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be.’”

Equality not in a marriage? An impossibility and an outrage. Surely this, I thought as a young woman, is Lewis speaking vulgarly as a man, and not only that, but as a man of his time. The book was published in 1946, after all, and since then we’ve come a long way. Accordingly, my first marriage was a union of equals. Neither one of us would have, consciously, at least, put ourself above the other; neither would have offered (much less demanded) obedience, humility, submission or surrender. We were friends. There was no hierarchy.

There was also no erotic spark. No desire for the other, save for the most basic gratification on his part (sex with him felt, from my perspective, like he was simply using me to masturbate himself) and, on mine, an obligation to have a “healthy relationship.” Sex was a duty, and because of that it was degrading.

The depravity of my first marriage began to reveal itself in how completely unfeminine I was becoming. At first I welcomed this. The loss of my femininity was something I thought I had desired. Weren’t we moving towards a genderless equality? Were not independence and equality our goals, and to that end, socially constructed gender roles something to eschew and leave behind? What use and what good was femininity anyway? But something more than daintiness was ebbing away from me. I was losing the capacity to be, not exactly dependent and not exactly vulnerable, but submissive in a way that would have been a right response to true authority. And I began to grieve this loss. I longed for the chance to unburden myself of myself. Not of the adult responsibilities I shouldered nor of my own independence, but of the place I had assigned my self at the center of my own life. I wanted to give my entire soul and my entire body to a lover. I wanted to be cherished as belonging to another. But to make this sacrifice of my own centrality, my beloved would have to be above me and not my equal. It is a paradox. To surrender myself to an equal would be lose the very thing I want to give away. But to surrender myself, to give willingly my self-concern, to a man above me who was worthy of such an honour, would be to elevate myself, as well as my lover, in the very act of surrendering myself. He would himself grow in stature as I gave myself to him. I would become enlarged for giving such a gift.

There is plenty of cultural messaging which suggests that femininity is weakness and submission defeat. But without a chance to give myself as a gift, I was unable to feel myself to be a gift. I belonged to myself. But I longed to belong to another. What began as a quiet sense of dissatisfaction in me soon began to fester into something more poisonous. I realized that I was unfeminine because he was unmanly. To give him myself, my full self, erotic and obedient and full of love, he would have to be able to take the offering in hand and cherish it as an adornment to his masculinity. The more authority a man held, the more I longed to be taken in hand as his own. Instead, cynicism was becoming my default attitude. There are two kinds of hardness in a person: one that creates a shell, an exoskeleton around a soft core, and another where hardness moves inwards, where one’s core itself begins to thicken and ossify and the space for softness grows smaller. For me – I am grateful for this – it was the former that I felt occurring. In a self-protective way I formed armour around myself. As it became stronger my inner self became softer. But the softening was painful to me. It grew into an ache that had no hope of comfort.

There are many reasons why a marriage falls apart. It is very likely that a marriage based on friendship and mutuality is something of the norm. Husbands and wives often feel like domestic coworkers and not lovers. Much of the time these marriages last. But sometimes the lack of tenderness grows into resentment, and that was the case for my first marriage. My husband began to want a submissive wife in an effort to realize his own masculinity. He demanded that I surrender to him. The more he did so, the further away from submissive I became. It enraged him. There is a passage in Charlotte Brontë’s great love story, Jane Eyre, where Rochester realizes that his beloved Jane will not be his wife (because, it turns out, he is already married). “‘Never,’” Rochester says as he grinds his teeth, “‘never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!’ (and he shook me with the force of his hold.) ‘I could bend her with finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye,’” he says directly to her:

‘Consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage – with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it – the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit – with will and energy, and virtue and purity – that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence – you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh! Come, Jane, come!’

I’ve quote Rochester’s speech in its entirety so that we can see the threat of violence that underlies his feelings. The desperation to possess that part of a woman which is wild, savage, free, can lead to brutality. I know this well. But the desired part of her, the part that can only be possessed if offered and given, will be farther away from him than ever. And she will look upon him with contempt. His manliness will be mocked. This is the confusion of the rapist.