Abstract
Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a Romantic vision of evil energy that reaches to the heavens, a geographical representation of capacity and scope and perpetual cosmic change. On the other hand, Lewis’s vision of hell in The Great Divorce is that of a land without substance: a conurbation of addiction to mental maladies, an endless mental substance abuse, an emptying of presence, and a banal stasis to the journey of the soul. Many of Lewis’s sources and inspirations for The Great Divorce, similarly, portray hell as a land of paradoxical “seeming-largeness”, while having ontological smallness. Throughout Lewis’ narrative, one gets an increasing sense of the importance of understanding place correctly, as a matter of eternal consequence. Lewis often returns to the idea that places are important for the ways that they can convey glimpses of heaven, by displaying their ebullience of life, or spiritual presence, dramatized through the classical and medieval idea of the genius loci—the “spirit of a place”—showing how the divine presence can fill landscapes, but is emptied from others.
