Letters from the Devil From Snodhopper to Leechwart on Christian Women Melinda Selmys In the spirit of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.  Originally published in Issue XII of Vulgata, Febrary, 2004.

My very dearest Leechwart,

I notice with what snide contempt you failed to make any mention, in your previous letter, of my dismissal from my post at the tempter's college. Don't imagine, even for a moment, that I could not see it there – the veiled delight behind a platter of empty platitudes and mundane (almost idiotic, in fact) questions and relations of the boring minutae of your own less than admirable career. I can see that you did it deliberately, because you did not want to give me a chance to defend myself against the accusations that have been swirling about my name. I wish to assure you, therefore, that I haven't the least interest in defending myself before you, or in providing any excuse for my actions, or for my dismissal. It is a well known fact that it was actually due entirely to the incompetence of others, but I see no reason to explain it to you beyond that fact.

Now, to business. In spite of the obvious contempt in which you hold me, you seem, at least, to recognize that I have something of use to offer you. Well, I am inclined to withhold it out of spite – except for the searing and disconsolate thought that if I do not share my abundant wisdom with you, some human will be the better for it, and will perhaps ascend that terrible golden ladder into realms best left unspoken of. If they say I am a heretic, let them say it, but I am not so much one that I would rather spite you than the Enemy.

You tell me, as though this were some sort of interesting piece of news, that you have been assigned to tempt a woman. This should not come as so great a shock to you, my dearest friend – about half of all of the wretched, stinking little creatures are female, and if you have only had to tempt men before it is nothing more than a testament to the abject futility and narrowness of your entire career. To begin with, I assume you will have read the brilliant and scintillating work on the subject put out earlier this century by the Women's Studies department of the college? I understand that the predicament you are in is that of being faced with a woman who (presumably as a result of your own incompetence and purile mismanagement of the case) is not actually a feminist, and who considers herself to be one of the Enemy's soldiers. This by no means excludes the possibility of tempting her in accordance with all of the usual guidelines for destroying her sex in this century – though, of course, you may need to consider a couple of modifications.

In the first place, it is deplorably unclear from your letter how well educated she is, either on the Enemy's actual position with regards to women, or on the deliciously vile encrustations that we have managed to build up on the lamentable movement towards the “fair” treatment of that sex. Does she have feminist sympathies? If so, it goes without saying that they need to be exploited. Does she reject feminism as an impediment to orthodoxy? That would be rather worse, but certainly not without its possibilities. Of course these should have been obvious to you at once – so obvious that I begin to suspect that you are playing me for a fool, and that you simply hope I will say something idiotic or self-incriminating in the course of our correspondence. Understand, therefore, that I only continue writing because my opinion of you is so low as to admit the possibility that these things have actually not entered into your shriveled and emaciated husk of a mind.

If she is inclined to be sympathetic to the feminist movement, then you should play these inclinations like a violin-bow across a raw nerve. Don't let her catch a glimpse of any of the Church's most recent, devastatingly repugnant writings on the “dignity” of women – I don't think you are up to the task of convincing her to reject them on their own merits. Instead, ensure that she is constantly and mercilessly oppressed by the misreporting that our media division has proudly secured amongst the ranks of human reporters and newsmen (or “newspersons” as we would have them say.) Let her wander into an Anglican parish and hear a stirring sermon preached by a woman – one that really speaks to her “unique” “feminine” needs – and then talk to whichever of your colleagues is responsible for her parish Priest, and ensure that he's up half the night with a bilious attack before she next hears him preach. Then she will see (or at least think she sees), how much more applicable, and meaningful, and passionate the woman's sermon was.  Induce her to make friends with someone on the verge of a particularly heart-wrenching divorce – preferably one in which there are no children involved to pull her sentiments in the opposite direction – and then prod her to wonder how this woman could have been expected to make such an ill-advised marriage work. The point is that you should get her thinking that the Church is most likely backwards and that it is lacking in compassion. Naturally, you must never let her hear or suspect that it appears to lack compassion only because it's perspective is so much wider, because its concern encompasses the world in its entirety and not a single individual or exception to the exclusion of everyone else.

Of course this is the least important of the things that you can do – getting her to fall into direct heresy, to challenge the stated position of the Enemy on any matter, is obviously a great good, but there are better things. You say that she feels she is called to the married life. This is good – women who think of themselves as orthodox can rarely be coerced into any of the fine convents that have come under the tutelage of our Ideological college. Your job, in this case, is clear. Encourage her to take notice of all of the most repulsive Pauline passages on women – you know the ones where he begins prating on about such gruesome virtues as marital obedience. Let her interpret these in precisely the way we have so encouraged men to interpret them over the years. Let her think that it means blind and unquestioning submission to every whim of an arbitrary and callous master (you will be surprised to find that this is possible even when she is actually contemplating marriage with a specific man who does not actually seem to possess these traits.) Let her think that she will have to do violence to her own talents, that she will have to conform to a limpid stereotype of the “good wife” -- preferably one that is in radical contradiction to her real personality. Let this fester into a positive fear, so that she feels constantly disgruntled by the threat of an obedience far more harsh than that which marriage will actually demand of her. Ideally, this should be used to keep her from approaching the altar at all – fear and malcontent over an imagined future suffering is always far more meritorious, from our point of view, than actual suffering, from which the Enemy frequently has the atrocious manners to bring “a greater good.” You understand the principle, of course – and having been already discredited quite sufficiently, I will not hesitate to criticize that slag-heap of a whip-master whom we are constrained to call our Hellish “Father,” specifically in reference to that most grevious of errors he made in attempting deicide against the second person.

If, however, she cannot be induced not to marry, let her married life become a constant strain and burden on her personality and upon her psychological resources. If she will not openly reject the harness of obedience (ideally she should dismiss it outright as an out-dated historical accretion), then let her chafe under it. Let her expend her every energy in attempting to obey every minor and irrelevant request. Thus, if her husband asks her to get him a coffee, let her jump up and run across the house, even if she is suffering from cramps or is already exhausted – and particularly if his request is made out of laziness and not out of solicitude for her good. This, in itself, might potentially be a virtue, but it is easily made into a vice by a simple sleight of hand. She returns with the coffee, smiling and doing her best to be pleasant, and he takes it (preferably without thanking her – if she does marry, you will have to cultivate a close relationship with her husband's tempter), now let her ask, quite unnecessarily, if there is anything else that he would like. He is human – he'll probably think of something. Keep her running about the house, expending her resources on errands that he could easily and happily do himself, and all the time encourage in her the delicious and viperous thought that she is being an exceedingly good wife, that she unbearably virtuous, a martyr, even, in a culture where most women are entirely fixated on themselves and would so much as lift a finger for their husband's needs. Prey upon her pride, and insert, ever so slightly, a sense of exaggerated dignity, and then a sense that she is a better wife than he is a husband, and then a sense of injury... you should know the process well enough. Now, the really clever and necessary thing here is that there be, looming upon the horizons of her marriage, some matter in which it is actually necessary that she make a sacrifice, that she obey. Work upon her sense of herself as a martyr, but let her begin to think that she is reaching the end of her potential virtue, that she has already done far more than could be reasonably expected, that her husband (who has only been accepting her own offers), is really reaching the limits of her toleration. Then, when he asks of her something that she is actually bound, in duty to the Enemy, to do, let her snap. It is, you will find, almost really satisfying – as if it were a genuine, fully developed pleasure – to see how quickly one who martyrs herself to her own pride can be turned into a bitter and venomous shrew.

Naturally, it is also helpful to have her think that obedience means that she can not question – that she should not discuss, or point out facts that may not have been considered, and particularly that she should not give her husband any notion of what her needs are. From this you should proceed, wherever possible, to keep her silently and, slowly-ever-more-grudgingly submissive in cases where she should really be open, and honest and frank about her thoughts and feelings. Let her imagine this to be the height of virtue, and harp upon the same wounded martyr complex as I discussed above. Then, whenever a situation arises in which it is actually necessary that she simply obey – either because there is no time for discussion, or because it is inappropriate to disagree about the matter in front of the children, or because they are both too tired and worn-down to have a fruitful conversation – then let her insist upon speaking her mind. Let her think “I have been silent too long. I have already endured too much. His every decision reveals that he does not know (perhaps does not care?) what I need at all. It is simply beyond all toleration.” From this, it is almost always possible to spark a full-fledged fight, in which all sense of partnership or charity is abandoned, and in which she takes out upon him all of the pent-up frustration she possesses as a result of her ill-advised attempts to conform to her ill-conceived notion of her own sanctity. This is especially enjoyable if the children are present to witness their parent's descent into juvenile histrionics, if some important work ends up being neglected because of it, or if it results in them both being cranky and tired for an entire day afterward.

Of course the best and most profitable result of this is that she will, in spite of all of her self-destructive attempts, not actually possess a single shred of obedience! She will be, in fact, obedient only to her own notion, boiled up from a sense of pride and an ill-opinion of her husband, of herself as a martyr. When she obeys her husband's request to watch the children while he goes out with a friend, it will not be prompted by charity towards him, but from a self-gratifying vision of herself as the tireless and perfect wife yoked to a slothful and obdurate husband. In those cases, however, where obedience demands a real sacrifice, or where it is actually in the interest of that despicable little thing the Enemy calls her “immortal soul,” she will refuse to obey, and will even become bilious, temperamental, and ideally hysterical at the thought of genuine submission.

Yours, with the usual ill-thought,

  Snodhopper