Choosing hell: damnation and salvation in Charles Williams' War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, and Descent into Hell

My original seminar paper focused on the use of the doppelg??nger motif in Charles Williams' novel Descent into Hell. In that novel, a doppelg??nger repeatedly appears to Pauline Anstruther, terrorizing her; this initially frightening apparition becomes, by the end of the book, a saintly second self after Pauline accepts and actively participates in Williams' "Doctrine of Substitution" (a corollary of co-inherence, whereby one person takes up the spiritual burden of another, thereby relieving their suffering). Lawrence Wentworth's doppelg??nger, on the other hand, (more properly a succubus, a double not of him but of a woman with whom he is morbidly obsessed) promotes his harrowing descent into a hell of self-annihilating self-absorption. For this paper I intend to expand my consideration to three Williams' novels: War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, and Descent into Hell and shift my focus from the doppelg??nger motif to an examination of two characters who choose to exclude themselves from any sort of meaningful human involvement and are doomed as a result -- Wentworth in Descent into Hell and Sir Giles Tumulty, who first appears War in Heaven, surviving that novel only to suffer a Wentworthian fate in Many Dimensions - and one character who is the most fully realized exemplar in these novels of a life properly lived according to Williams' spiritual system, Pauline Anstruther, who achieves, as a result, salvation