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

The shortest of the four parts, Part 3 establishes the depth of Joy’s pain while demonstrating the depths of her courage. Highlighting The Impact of Marriage, these chapters depict her decaying marriage to Bill. Her increasingly frantic writing and the outpouring of her feelings into her sonnets stress the links between Writing and Survival as she longs for England and divorce in America. Struggling to make sense of her pain and sorrow, these chapters explore her continuing search for clarity in her faith, returning to The Power of Conversion. Her letters with Jack reinforce that, while Joy’s doubt about God’s plan remains, she maintains her commitment to Christian truth and revelation. Finally divorcing Bill and leaving America, Joy goes through her own great divorce, an allusion to Lewis’s Great Divorce. Framed by the epigraph to Part 3, which quotes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, these events embody Aslan’s commandment to have courage.

While shorter, Part 3 includes several important plot details, including Bill’s violence toward her, his betrayal of Renee, whom he supposedly loves, and Joy and Bill’s subsequent divorce. The character dynamics between the three adults in the New York farmhouse take center stage, and Bill’s disappointments as a husband to Joy and a future husband to Renee grow. As a foil to Jack, Bill finds accepting Joy as herself impossible. Although he struggles with the idea of a perfect Southern wife, a faithful and demure partner to his ”Rhett Butler,” he faces conflict with Joy (203), who is determined to achieve her own agency and not be a mere appendage of her husband. She desires a marriage of equals—something foreshadowed from the beginning with her resentment at her empty refrigerator—and even when Bill attempts a reconciliation, he fails. Having physically assaulted Joy and insulted her work, which looms large in her self-identity, Bill asks her to try again at a marriage that he has destroyed with infidelity, including with her own cousin.

Anticipating Part 4’s discussion of marriage between Jack and Joy and Jack’s respect for church-sanctioned marriage, Bill’s handling of his failing marriage stresses how marriage as an ideal and institution helps chart Joy’s changing character. As she becomes less traditional in her pursuit of happiness with Bill, willing to move to England to begin a new life, she pursues Jack, who holds deeply traditional ideals of marriage but does so without diminishing Joy’s value. Bill and Jack differ in their desires—Bill wants a traditional wife while he pursues pleasure and other women, with his children and meals taken care of and his house cleaned. Jack embraces his moral compass while also expecting that of others around him. As Bill vacillates between Joy and Renee, pursuing the woman he sees, he demonstrates that his love remains turned inward toward his own needs.

Unable to get a divorce because of a lack of funds, Joy embraces writing as a means of practical survival—Joy “pressed out articles and short stories, anything to find enough money to leave” (215). When her writing doesn’t sell, Joy settles into sadness. Unable to break the icy atmosphere in the house, Renee leaves, conflicted by Joy’s choices and Bill’s harsh attitude. With Renee gone, Bill settles back into his routine and tries to reconcile with Joy. Bill’s mercurial moods conflict with Joy’s own steadfast emotions, and this contrast appears in their writing, as the novel describes it. Complaining to her college roommate Belle, Joy declares Bill “wrote a nonfiction book called Monster Midway about the carnival life, and now he’s trying to be a part of it” (209). Where Joy writes of herself painstakingly and without reservation—qualities Jack notices in his first letters—Bill becomes what he writes about, just as he loves whichever woman is nearby.

When Joy begins to take care of her own needs, she does so in a way that reflects her ever-deepening faith. Having stayed with Bill out of obligation, she has been “subjugating myself to abuse” (219). Having the courage Aslan has called for, Joy buys tickets to England after selling her beloved piano. Remembering Jack’s line that “the world holds a long sordid history of man searching for happiness in everything but God,” Joy leaves with a handful of trunks and suitcases and her two sons (226). Her voyage across the ocean represents a leap of faith and the last step in her conversion.