That Hideous Strength

The chapter opens with Jane Studdockreminiscing about a sermon on the societal functions of matrimony. This sermon recalls her last time in church, during her wedding six months earlier. Brooding now, Jane reflects on her lackluster marriage to her husband, Mark. Mark is hardly ever home, and even when he is, they haven’t much to say to one another. She realizes that Mark will most likely miss dinner—again—due to a meeting at the college. Jane is supposed to be working on a thesis on John Donne but can’t focus. She looks at a picture in the newspaper, instead, and suddenly recalls a dream. She has many dreams, though this particular dream is different in that the people in it spoke French and she understood some of the dialogue. The dream was of a prisoner being interrogated by a man with too-perfect teeth who wore pince-nez. He and the prisoner seemed to know one another. Though the dream felt real, when the prisoner continued to refuse whatever the visitor was offering, the dream turned into a nightmare. The visitor unscrewed the prisoner’s head from his body and took it away. The head then belonged to an elderly man with a white beard who was in a churchyard, and people were digging the man up.