We tend to take questions like “Was C.S. Lewis sexist?” and place it in a binary: yes or no. We could do that, certainly, and we would have a simple and rather uninteresting answer, because if we’re going to boil right down to it, yes, for sure, obviously, much of Lewis’ work matches nearly any definition of sexism we’d like to use.

We could also spend a great deal of time putting Lewis’ views of women into the various contexts which he inhabited and investigating why he may have come to the conclusions that he did: the age he lived in, his lack of regular interaction with a diversity of women at various times in his life, the death of his mother when he was a child, the world of elite scholars in the 1940s and ‘50s in Britain, or how shaped he was by medieval and, yes, Christian thought.

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C.S. Lewis had strong political opinions and in many ways they undergird his work, though he’s slow to make them overt, unless he’s talking about the way schools are run. His earliest works (the world of Boxen that he invented with his brother) is filled with stuffy politics, mostly because he thought that’s what the adult world was: people endlessly talking about things he himself found boring. But as we saw in Prince Caspian, Lewis’ political thoughts often came down to a question of order versus disorder: Is the right person in charge and are they rightly responding to those in authority above and below them in the organizational chart?

In The Horse and His Boy we get an interesting and rather detailed look at Lewis’ ideas of the dangerous political leader, and what the most effective responses are in the midst of the disordered world that comes as a result of bullies and peacocks in power (Lewis, of course, says “pajock” rather than peacock). Nowhere is this clearer than in the poor young man named Rabadash.

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