Becoming Mrs. Lewis: The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Great Lion

From the novel’s prologue, which centers on the great lions at the Bronx Zoo, to Aslan of The Narnia Chronicles, lions symbolize The Power of Conversion. Linking the lions at the Bronx Zoo to herself, Joy suggests that she and the lions live in cages. Rather than the bars of the zoo’s enclosure, Joy faces the imprisonment of her atheist beliefs and her marriage to an unsuitable and unfaithful partner. Hemmed in by the strictures of her domestic existence and her lack of faith, Joy feels drawn to the caged lion in the Prologue, and she reaches out physically to it, regardless of the danger. Touching these lions, Joy sees that “capture had damaged their souls” (3).

Merging her love for Jack with her spiritual journey, Joy proclaims at the beginning of the novel that “it was the Great Lion who brought us together” (1)—a reference to the Christian God. As the creator of Narnia and the thread that links The Chronicles of Narnia together, Aslan—the Lion that Jack creates—also represents the Christian God who pursues Joy before she converts. Regardless of the danger these lions present to her, she makes contact. Likewise, conversion threatens Joy’s identity and safety, pushing her out of her secure beliefs and removing the masks she wears to the world. Despite their danger, “the lions I’d been drawn to all life and his Aslan” have functioned as “signposts and messages” (387) telling her how to find God and truth. The lions that begin this journey at the zoo teach Joy and the reader to “understand their fate, and accept it with roaring dignity” (3).

The Kilns

Formerly the place where bricks were fired for buildings in Oxford, The Kilns is the place where Joy rebuilds her life. The home for Jack and Warnie in Oxford, the Kilns symbolizes The Impact of Marriage, serving as a foil for the farmhouse in upstate New York and demonstrating how loving and healthy Joy and Jack’s marriage becomes. From Joy’s first visit, she perceives the house’s value for her future. This belief makes her view her own home in New York as strange and uncomfortable, noting that her “heart was at the Kilns and my body was here, and nothing at all in the world made sense” (201). Her heart represents not only her own identity that she’s left behind but also Jack, her true partner. Unlike the farmhouse in New York, which shares similarities with the Narnia ruled over by the White Witch, Joy imagines the Kilns as a demi-paradise. While both feature places for Joy’s children to explore nature, promising rest and enjoyment, only the Kilns offers Joy security.

The house that Jack helps her buy in Oxford serves a practical purpose, representing the marriage that helps Joy remain in the country. Jack’s offer to move her into the Kilns, made more urgent by her cancer diagnosis, offers proof that her marriage to Jack is sanctioned and real. While her doctors “sent me to the Kilns to die” (389), it is there that she lives, recovering temporarily and consummating her marriage to Lewis. The Kilns becomes the space where Joy finds peace and sees marriage in a new way. This house becomes a home, demonstrating that Joy returns home to God and Jack more than simply brick and mortar.

Sonnets

In the depths of her despair in Part 3, as Joy pursues divorce and emigration, she writes sonnets urgently. These poems, which often serve as epigraphs for the novel’s chapters, represent how Writing and Survival connect for Joy. The sonnet is a 14-line poem, which can have varying rhyme structures and characteristics depending on its specific type. Reflecting the history of the sonnet, which has been used by Francesco Petrarch and other poets to express unrequited love, Joy’s sonnets voice her feelings for Jack and the emotions that seek to overwhelm her. She confesses:

Feelings that could not be acknowledged in the light of day or with the sound of voice—the ache of stifling desires, the pain of rejecting needs because they were unacceptable, the frustration of responsibility that hemmed me in as a woman—found their way out through the gateway of poetry (44).

Filling the pages of these sonnets with her unexpressed fears and emotions, Joy transforms them, changing them from destructive to productive. Helping to bridge her warring selves and document her struggle to survive, “At night, I returned to my sonnets” (185). These sonnets eventually work to transform Jack and his feelings. When she gives them to him, he becomes more tender. He helps nurture the love that preserves Joy as she experiences symptoms from the cancer inside her body. Her sonnets and poems frame each chapter, except the Epilogue, marking each step of her life, disappearing from the top of the page once she dies in the novel.