#449: The Politics of That Hideous Strength

Elites and populists among the culture war

On one level, Lewis’s That Hideous Strength depicts a Manichean struggle between light and darkness. The power of ‘that hideous strength’ hovers over the world, while the merrie band who gathers at St. Anne’s on the Hill resists it. 

In one of the more memorable images in the novel, Dimble suggests that the universe is “always hardening and narrowing and…