Till We Have Faces, Resource and Website

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"For it is not only Psyche and Orual herself who have been ruined; Orual now recognizes this. Other lives as well have paid the price for Orual's selfishness: the Princess Redival, whom Oural ignored and even detested after Psyche's birth. All along, Orual realizes, Redival was lonely, and only wanted to join Psyche's and Orual's private circle. Poor Bardia, whom Orual (out of jealous love) kept away from his family on any pretense of meeting, planning, or royal business, ended his life overworked, a man who had sacrificed the company of his own family to spend day and night at the palace on the Queen's behest. And Psyche herself, like the mythical Psyche, has been sentenced to eternal toil at all manner of impossible tasks. Orual is guided by the palace slave she always knew as "grandfather" to a place where she is shown images of Psyche performing these tasks.

In the next picture I saw both Psyche and myself, but I was only a shadow. We toiled together over those burning sands, she with her empty bowl, I with my book of poison. (300)

In the end, however, Orual is allowed some comfort and redemption. She learns that Psyche has felt little emotional distress and anguish over the years, that her pain has all been of the physical variety. Orual, instead, has borne all the anguish. Orual learns as well, with her last breath, why the gods give no answer to her accusations, why there is no explanation for her suffering here in this world:

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might --

Here ends Queen Orual's "life's work," which, she has realized, is itself the answer to her questions: "To have heard myself making [the complaint] was to be answered" (294). The Queen's body, still clutching the scroll, is discovered by a priest, and the scroll is placed in the temple for safekeeping until it can be transported to the cultural and intellectual Mecca of Greece.

I have said that the existential problem of the dividing gulf is powerfully dramatized in the interplay between characters in Till We Have Faces, and indeed, the tension between Psyche and Orual, Orual and Bardia, Orual and the Grandfather, make possible the dichotomy of believer versus nonbeliever, and divine versus human love. Most important to the expression of this existential problem, however, is Orual's interior monologue; by making an Everyman of Orual, Lewis has avoided the danger of gratuitious didacticism, always a possibility with allegory. For it is, in fact, as allegory that the novel must be read. For its recycling of myth and universal insights into human nature, Till We Have Faces appeals to secular readers and critics, and to Christians for its eloquent presentation of the problematics of Christian life on earth. For these reasons in general, and for its particular concern with the dangers of obsessive love, the work will undoubtedly and deservedly retain its seat of honor in the Lewis canon. Queen Orual, for this reader, is memorable, for her pain, her universality, her humanity, and Till We Have Faces is unforgettable for its rendering of the ever- present and ever-dividing human capacity for selfishness and destructive love."