Although I loved the fantasy novels of E. Nesbit and J. R. R. Tolkien as a child, I was bored by C. S. Lewis’s Christian Narnia allegories.

And so I have come to C. S. Lewis late. I admire his gracefully-written, sometimes humorous, fable about the afterlife, The Great Divorce.

Even more gorgeous is his novel Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth.

In Till We Have Faces, Lewis turns the myth inside out.  He focuses not on the beautiful Psyche but on her ugly older sister, Orual. Faces have been their destinies:  Psyche’s beauty has won her the hatred of Ungit (Aphrodite);  Orual’s ugly brilliance has also won Ungit’s hate.

The Cupid and Psyche myth, a love story that goes awry, was a godsend when I was a Latin teacher. M. G. Balme’s Latin adaptation of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche inspired many to hang on through Caesar’s Gallic Wars (“Just a few more chapters and we’ll read Cupid and Psyche!” I’d say. ).  We’d read a few pages of C&P weekly as a treat; once we’d gone on to Ovid, they were in love with Latin again and the C&P could be put away.  The myth is one of the many tales inserted in Apuleius’ picaresque novel, Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass (the only Latin novel that survives whole).  In the tale, Psyche (meaning “soul”), the youngest daughter of a king, is exposed on a mountain because of an oracle of Apollo:  though her two older sisters have husbands, it is Psyche’s fate to be married to a non-human.  Venus, jealous of Psyche’s beauty, sends Cupid to poison her with the love of a monstrous man. (Yes, all gods are psychotic.)  But Cupid falls in love with her and rescues her from Venus’ fury.  He visits her for  passionate nights of love in a hidden palace, but forbids to look on him.

“Cupid and Psyche” by Antonio Canova

As is so often the case in fairy tales, the jealous sisters destroy the beautiful sister.   On a visit to Cupid’s palace, they tell her to look at her lover by lamplight while he sleeps, because he might be a monster.  Poor, Psyche!  Struck by his beauty, she stares so long that a drop of oil falls on him.  He leaves her because she has disobeyed, and Venus assigns her impossible tasks (such as gathering the wool of human-killing monstrous sheep) before she is reunited with Cupid.

Lewis’s rendition of the myth is written more like a historical novel than a reinterpretation of myth.  As a girl, brilliant Orual, the narrator, adores her half-sister, Psyche, whose mother died in childbirth.  Orual has no envy of the child’s beauty.  She brings her up with the help of the Fox, the Greek tutor/slave who teaches them both.  During an epidemic, the common people believe goddess-like Psyche’s touch can heal them:  this brings trouble from the gods, as you can imagine.  Eventually the middle sister, pretty, envious Redival, brings Psyche to the attention of the priests of Ungit (Aphrodite), who  insist that she must be left on the mountain as a sacrifice to end an epidemic and famine.

Orual, with the soldier Bardia, rides to the mountain to bury Psyche.  When she discovers Psyche has survived, Orual’s disbelief in the gods ruins Psyche’s life.  She cannot see Cupid’s palace and Psyche appears to be dressed in rags:  she thinks Psyche is psychotic.  She suggests Psyche look at Cupid with the lamp.  There is a huge storm:  Cupid appears as a beautiful passionless face in the sky, telling Orual that he can no longer hide Psyche from Venus, and that she, too, will be Psyche now.  Orual knows, at least at the time, that he is a god.  Later, she is not so sure.

Orual goes on with her life:  she studies fencing with Bardia, and falls in love with him, but he is married, and though he is her counsellor when  she becomes a warrior queen, she is aware that he does not think of her as a woman.

One of her great strengths is wearing a veil.  She never takes it off in public once she understands the power it gives her.

I could never have believed, till I had proof of it, what it would do for me.  From the very first (it began that night in the garden with Trunis) as soon as my face was invisible, people began to discover all manner of beauties in my voice.  At firs tit was “deep as a man’s, but nothing in the world less mannish,” later, and until it grew cracked with age, it was the voice of a spirit, a Siren, Orpheus, what you will.  And as years passed and there were fewer int he city (and none beyond it) who remembered my face, the wildest stories got about as tot what that veil hid.  No one believed it was anything so common as the face of an ugly woman.  Some said (nearly all younger women said) that it was frightful beyond endurance….  The best story was that I had not face at all….

There is a long scene in the Underworld, where Orual learns about faces and not having faces.  I could write an entire essay on just that.  This is a great book.