Major Hardcastle

*"Don’t you understand* anything? *Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us – to refute the enemy slander.* Of course *we’re non-political. The real power always is."*

**Major Hardcastle**, also known as the "**Fairy**", is the sadistic, cigar-chewing head of the Institutional Police, effectively a private army, and its female auxiliary, the Women's Auxiliary Institutional Police. Torture is her favourite interrogation method, and she takes special, sexual pleasure in abusing female prisoners.

One of her police captures Jane Tudor Studdock who she tortures by stubbing cigars out on her chest. Jane fortunately manages to escape, on account of the rioting outside in Edgestow which the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments have fomented themselves.

John Wither is not happy with Hardcastle, and in fact gives her a stern dressing down. Wither is one of the few people Hardcastle kowtows to, but still takes it as water off a duck's back. When she is told she must see the Head, she becomes nervous. Professor Filostrato takes her to the laboratory, and tells her just to reply, "Yes, sir!" to the Head.

Hardcastle and the Head are very eager for Jane to be brought back to Belbury for further processing. At one point she wishes to torture Mark Gainsby Studdock for access to her, but he does not know where she is.

## Basis

Since much of *That Hideous Strength* is tied into Arthurian legend, Major Hardcastle's nickname "the Fairy" is likely a reference to Morgan La Fay, the witch and archenemy of Arthur the King.

Nina Boyd, the biographer of Mary Sophia Allen OBE (1878-1964) suggests that Major Hardcastle is based on Allen. Allen was a militant feminist in the 1910–1920s and she was later one of the few high profile female members of the British Union of Fascists from 1939. She is chiefly remembered as one of the early leaders of the Women's Police Volunteers. Allen repeatedly sought to challenge or modernise the existing systems of the time, ensuring the Women's Police Service could become an auxiliary force after women were admitted into certain British police forces. She stood once for the House of Commons as an Independent Liberal, turning over her Women's Auxiliary Service to breaking the General Strike of 1926. Thereafter she met and talked with European fascists including Franco, Mussolini, Hitler and Göring as well as anti-communist brigades, entailing frequent trips abroad and publicly joining the British Union of Fascists in 1939. Although her links to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists were unofficial until 1939, she engaged in various militant activities, including the formation of the Women's Reserve in 1933, which was intended to serve the country in the event of subversive forces taking over. In retirement Allen was an activist for animal rights.

## Controversy

Major Hardcastle is one of the most controversial characters in the Space Trilogy.
Clive Staples Lewis never discusses Hardcastle's sexual orientation, but many people have read her as a caricature of a butch lesbian. Although it is not mentioned outright, Hardcastle takes pleasure in torturing Jane Tudor Studdock, and her Waips are female.

Similar controversy exists over Cyril Knellie and some of the homoerotic undertones of The Dark Tower and Other Stories, although it is questionable whether Lewis wrote those.

## Quotations

> *The Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite; you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.  And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention?  Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen.*
>
>

## References

1. ↑ Boyd, Nina (2013), *From Suffragette to Fascist: The Many Lives of Mary Sophia Allen*, Stroud: The History Press