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... is also that because of a jealousy for anyone else to have her beautiful love shared with them that Orual ends up threatening both of their lives. She does not feel that it is right for her, the one who raised her, to have her project ripped away from her. In the same way that the Fox is a slave to her so is Psyche to be property, a slave for her own pleasure and now that slave is being stolen from her. Different people will have different interpretations of any book. It always depends on the worldview and their background.
For instance, Professor Scott Daniels took a look at faith in his interpretation. Prof. Daniels is a philosophy and religion professor and his views were obviously influenced in this way. His take on the book was that it was made largely to show faith in a non-believing world, a pluralistic society, if you will. He used the image given in the book of the mountain castle that only Psyche can see. He also alluded to the Husband that no one else can see.
Orual asked atheistic questions relating to her husband such as, "How can you know if you have never seen him?" and other questions. Prof. Scott Daniels said that the castle was faith and that when Psyche can see it, she is walking in faith and when Orual can't, she is not walking in faith, but rather is denying God's existence. Another writer by the name of William Luther White, wrote on a myriad amount of ways to interpret the book. One way that he suggests is that of human nature clashing with that of the gods. He says that Orual comes to say that the gods are more than just, "What would become of us if they were?" She realizes that they are needed and that they are not there simply to chastise us.
She comes to say that, basically, we are all parts of one whole body. In my own opinion, I see "Till We Have Faces" to have many different psychological elements to it. The largest element is that of truth: truth to others, truth to God and truth to yourself. The character of Orual stands out to be a representation of human kind and our quest to find ourselves; a trek for the answers to the questions we all ask, "Who am I and Why am I that way?" To help explain his views, C. S. Lewis devises the symbol of the veil.
Orual never wore a veil until she wanted to hide who she was when going to find Psyche. After she ruined Psyche's life with the "God of the mountain" she decided to always wear the veil, everywhere she went. The reasoning behind this is that, in some ways, Orual knows the full extent of her actions against Psyche (she demonstrates this when she talks about knowing that she might possibly be making a mistake about Psyche's God-husband) and by wearing the veil, hides the truth from herself and others. To hide the fact that she, indeed, is extremely ugly and insufficient, not only physically ugly and insufficient to fight (being a woman and not a man) but spiritually repulsive and insufficient to love, like Ungit, she puts herself in a dark place and veils the truth from the world and herself (in doing this, she loses her face) the entire time she reigns over the kingdom. By donning another appearance and suppressing her self-authenticity she became a good ruler.
Again, like Ungit, she has many faces: not only one. She was no longer a female in battle, but an enigmatic figure to be reckoned with; she was not a homely lady, but a potential beauty. She was no longer an incapable girl, but a valiant and mysterious ruler of a kingdom in which all of the subjects are in love with her. By hiding her face, she was able to be a strong queen, which gave her work, and this gave her an acceptable distraction from her pain. At one time Orual said, "work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three -- far better than philosophy as a cure for ill thoughts. " Everything she does after the destruction of Psyche's mountain castle and her exile thereof, is an attempt to hide from the pain and truth of her life.
She denies her pain and accordingly, lives a confusing life. It isn't until she finds a small temple in the woods, far from her kingdom, that she starts to explore the actual truth of her love for Psyche and her other friends. The Priest tells a version of Psyche's story where Orual is jealous of Psyche; where it is her jealousy and selfishness that exiles Psyche from her Mountain castle. This inadvertently forces Orual to think about her life, and is the exact cause of her book-writing.
Upon writing, the truth is slowly and agonizingly revealed to her. Orual says, in reference to her book, "[it] was only a beginning-only to prepare me for the god's surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. " She is shown her true nature by a couple of people. First Taken tells her how her sister Revival really did love her but that Orual started to ignore her after the birth of Psyche.
This tells Orual of her selfish love. The next revelation is even worse in that it tells how she killed the man she loved by overworking him. It is Bardia's wife who tells her of how tired her husband always is and that it is because, as Orual figures out for herself, she wanted Bardia all to herself. So to bring this about, she selfishly kept him after hours working on stuff for her. She later realized that she did this sometimes with thoughts of jealousy and hatred toward Bardia for not loving her over his wife.
Now that the veil is coming off, the gods dig even deeper. They bring her to a courtroom of the gods. In the court, she is unveiled and told to read her book. What she reads is a complaint against the gods accusing them of thievery, of stealing Psyche. She accuses them of lying about a "shadow brute" that would devour her. When she is done, she realizes that the answer to all of her questions is the actual complaint.
All of these years that she complained about the gods taking Psyche away from her, it was actually she who did the taking. She was so selfish in her love. She was the "Shadowbrute. " She was the one doing all of the devouring, again, just like Ungit. Orual figures it all out when she asks, "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" (pg. 294).
How can the gods talk to us if we don't have a way to listen to them? If we cover our faces, then how can they find us to talk to us? Psyche and Orual have borne much together and now Psyche is forced, on behalf of Orual, to bear one more torment. She succeeds and because of the accomplishment of her final task of getting a casket from the queen of the dead, Orual is made beautiful, inside and out. The god's prophecy of, "you will be Psyche, " has come to pass. Orual ends her book with a summation of the book's theme, "I know now why you utter no answer Lord.
You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. " Reading this book has helped me to see different answers that I have always asked. Questions such as "Why did God do this?" are easier to answer now. God is the answer. It also taught me that my motives might be different then what I say they are.
I may do something out of a selfish motive and I need to be aware of that. This book has taught me that. The fact that I belong to the art loving, theatre-loving part of society has been revealed to me. I now realize why I analyze things the way I do sometimes: Because I am a thespian. Now, I interpret everything.
I look at life and wonder about it. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Till We Have Faces Walking In Faith Orual
