The Great Divorce

The nagging wife Ghost of Chapter 10 marks another in a series of female Ghost characters that have caused some critics to fault the novel for relying on gender stereotypes about particularly “female” sins. One female Ghost nags her husband relentlessly; another tries to use sexuality to coerce entrance into Heaven; another is so wrapped up in her own vanity that she rejects Heaven for fear of how she will look in comparison to the solid Spirits. Some of the male Ghosts engage in stereotypically male behaviors as well, such as the bully who assaults a smaller peer in the queue for the bus, but because there are more male Ghosts in total, the gender stereotyping of them is not as concentrated or as obvious.

Chapter 11 narrates the novel’s only instance of a Ghost choosing to accept the offer of Heaven. In contrast to the bereaved mother, who feels that her grief is righteous even when it causes suffering in others, the man with the lizard understands that he is a captive of sin; he can feel that his life is on a miserable course thanks to his own choices. By having the narrator directly compare these two Ghosts, Lewis shows that he is interested in trying to accurately represent Christian doctrine as he understands it, not in making that doctrine easily palatable to readers. Many people would consider it rude at best and immoral at worst to call any version of grief over a deceased child “sinful.” Through MacDonald, Lewis expresses that even positive, healthy human emotions can be distorted into something harmful. In fact, the novel implies (as Lewis argues explicitly elsewhere) that this distortion is all that sin and evil are; they have no ultimate reality separate from God and his goodness.

This idea explains many characteristics of the Ghosts, including their insubstantiality and their self-delusions. The Hell that they inhabit—the Grey Town—is one that they themselves create by denying the reality of God’s love. In other words, they could leave at any time; it is not that God is punishing them but rather that the kind of existence they have chosen is incompatible with God, Heaven, or in fact happiness. More specifically, each of the Ghosts has prioritized clinging to some aspect of their current selfhood rather than surrendering it for the fuller and more real self they could become in Heaven. This reflects the centrality of sacrifice, death, and rebirth to Christian doctrine: Just as Jesus died to save humanity from its fallen state, each person must “die” to themself, sacrificing their own ideas about who they are and what is good for them in order to be saved.