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Despite proving to be a faithful adaptation of the book, there were a few "minor changes" in the recently released movie The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of these was to a line Father Christmas says to Lucy and Susan about "battles being ugly when women fight."1 The director, Andrew Adamson, claims that he changed this line to "I hope you don't have to use [the weapons] because battles are ugly affairs" since he considered the original line to be "a sexist aspect" of C. S. Lewis's novel.2 For many feminists this change is a positive one, and for the average moviegoer this tweaking of the script goes unnoticed; for most it is either a good change or a trivial one ... but is it?
This paper is intended primarily as a historical account of C. S. Lewis's gender theory-a theory largely neglected, especially by men: "In fact, judging solely by the names of authors of articles and books surveyed, the vast majority of those critics interested in female characters and gender issues in the Inklings are women."3 As a man, I have written this paper in an attempt to rectify this situation: if men are to be rulers in any sense of the word, we must not ignore gender issues and pretend that they are inconsequential. As a historian of philosophy, I have written this paper to comment on the theory of a man who remains highly influential-indeed, "the best-selling" and perhaps "the most quoted Christian author of all time"4and is thereby capable of doing a lot of good or a lot of harm depending on how his theory corresponds to orthodox Christianity, which, despite being at times difficult to pin down, I take to be the standard of a correct or incorrect theory. Lewis himself reminds us clearly that "when I err, my error infects everyone who believes me."5 Thus, I intend to see if Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (or, for that matter, Andrew Adamson) is right when she claims that Lewis's gender theory is "misguided,"6 or if we can rejoice with a certain "Mrs. B," who claims "The first influence that led me back to a right understanding of God's role for women was Mere Christianityby C. S. Lewis."7 What...