Till We Have Faces

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold is a dramatic retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, predicated by C. S. Lewis from a chapter of The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The first part is written from the perspective of Psyche’s ugly eldest sister Orual, as a long-withheld accusation against the gods. Although the book is set in the fictional kingdom of Glome, Greece is often mentioned. In effect, the story deals with the interplay between the Hellenistic, rationalistic world-view and the powerful, irrational, primitive one.

Plot summary

SPOILERS BELOW

The story is a powerful retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, from the point of view of Orual, Psyche's jealous ugly sister (as she is seen in the usual telling). It begins as the complaint of an old woman, bitter at the pain and injustice of the gods. Although she is indeed ugly, far from resenting her beautiful sister, she loved Psyche, and felt the gods had stolen her. She had not been allowed to see the beautiful castle in which her sister lived, except for a brief moment, in which she distinctly recognized it according to Psyche's description, but brushed off what she saw by claiming she could have been mistaken. When she urged her sister to look at her husband, she did so for fear that her sister had married a monster. After suffering for years (during which she had become a just and victorious queen — though one clinging and ravenous for affection), she heard a recounting of the tale which depicted her as having deliberately ruined her sister's life out of envy. In justice, she is recounting her tale in hopes that it will be brought to Greece, where she has heard that men are willing to question even the gods.

Orual begins the second part of the book by declaring that her previous argument was false, that she has no time to revise it properly, but must amend the book before she dies. After at first finishing her book, she considered it time to end her miserable life. However, various mysterious events and occurrences happened to her, including dreams paralleling the tasks given to Psyche in the myth. In the end, she has a dream where she is entitled to present her complaint to the gods. Re-reading her work, she realizes that her love for Psyche was compounded of possessiveness, and that her actual motivation for urging Psyche to look at her husband was jealousy — not of Psyche, but of Cupid (referred to in the story only as 'the god of the mountain'), who had, in her eyes, stolen Psyche's love. This realization allows her to meet and reconcile with Psyche.

The text ends in the middle of a sentence: "Long did I hate you. Long did I fear you. I might—", and is followed by a note from another character (Arnom, priest of Aphrodite), who describes that she had been found dead at her writing table, presumably mid-sentence as evidenced by the way the word "might" looked on the page on which her head fell on as she expired.

Origin and evolution of the titles

Lewis originally titled his working manuscripts "Bareface," most likely in an effort to bluntly suggest Orual's physical ugliness (a haunting and ironic contrast to other beautiful characters, arguably the most beautiful archetypes in all of mythology: Psyche, Cupid, and Aphrodite). The metaphorical and literal utility of faces can be further elucidated from the original myth. Psyche was not allowed to see Cupid's face, relegating these intimate encounters with this strange being to be veiled in the bare nakedness of darkness. Furthermore, the plot hatched by Orual and executed by Psyche, is an allegory for humanity's calculating and ambitious tendencies to supersede rule or law—to circumvent, mute, or escape punishment. This is a hard-earned concept that Psyche, and later, Orual, arrive to, effectively "earning" or "growing" their once bare, naive faces', which fittingly qualifies them to meet the gods face to face in their own respective timeframes. Still, the metaphorical device of "faces" allows the novel's arguably underlying theme of redemption to reach fruition (eg, Psyche was rescued from the human sacrifice by Cupid; Aphrodite's allowances with the negotiating Cupid; the forgiveness of Cupid for Psyche's betrayal; forgiveness for Orual's contempt for her sister, her father, the Fox, the gods, and finally, a glorious rescue from her own self hate). Notably, Orual has been compared to the "Beast" in the Beauty and the Beast adaptation, among other variations of the Psyche and Cupid myth. In fact, the novel's same conclusion of redemption and transcendence from animal-like conditions remains in Beauty and the Beast, albeit with focus on different characters. It's ironic that Orual feared Cupid to be a beast or devil. Above all, Bareface metaphorically suggested the emptiness of identity, an ironic and even paradoxical concept.

Related Stories

The Story in The Golden Ass that inspired Till We Have Faces is known as Cupid and Psyche or Eros and Psyche. A variant version of this story evolved into Beauty and the Beast. Of this, the most popular version in modern times is the Disney animated movie. In the latter, ironically, Beauty's sisters, including the equivalent of Orual, have vanished.

References

• Till We Have Faces is in print, ISBN 0-15-690436-5
• Myers, Doris T. (2002). Browsing the Glome Library. SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2). This discusses many classical references that Lewis used in the book, now obscure to many readers.
• The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim (1977), ISBN 0-394-49771-6 (The connection between "Cupid and Psyche" and "Beauty and the Beast" is found on pp 291-295 and 303-310).

Bibliography

• Donaldson, Mara E. Holy Places are Dark Places: C. S. Lewis and Paul Ricoeur on Narrative Transformation. Boston: U of America P, 1988. (Currently out of Print)

• Myers, Doris T. Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2004.

• Schakel, Peter. Reason and Imagination in C.S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984.

External links

• Review and Critiscism: Till We Have Faces