53 pages • 1 hour read
C. S. LewisTill We Have Faces
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Identity
The theme of identity is most obviously connected to the novel’s narrator, Orual. As a young girl, she has an identity imposed upon her, primarily by her father, who thinks that because she is ugly she has no value.
Her sense of identity is also shaped by her relationship with the Fox. Having lived in Glome all her life, Orual has always believed in the gods and their power. When the Fox, who is originally from Greece, teaches her that the world consists primarily of what she can see or feel, however, her faith in the gods is shaken and she wants proof of their existence. She expresses this conflict between her religious faith and her philosophical education as the experience of living her life in “two halves” (72), not belonging fully to one world or the other. This conflict continues even when she is queen, as is evident in that, apart from the Fox, Bardia, a believer, is her most trusted adviser.
When she loses Psyche, Orual finds herself overwhelmed by grief; not only is it her “great central sorrow” (90), but it becomes the center of her being, too. When she becomes Queen of Glome, she takes on a new identity, and describes the Queen as a separate person from Orual. This allows her to bury her grief and rule Glome effectively. Significantly, this coincides with her decision to wear a veil always, hiding the features that have led other people to ridicule and underestimate her. Now, instead of being judged by her appearance, Orual is judged by her words and deeds, and the people of Glome deem her a good and fair ruler.
Eventually, however, her ability to repress her true self fails, and, in a series of visions, she is forced to confront the reality of her nature and of her actions. This involves looking at her reflection in a mirror and recognizing that her face is the face of Ungit: she must acknowledge the similarities between herself and the rapacious goddess she has always objected to. This process of self-reflection and self-discovery is prompted in part by the injunction of an unnamed god, who tells her that she must “Die before you die” (131), which might be understood to mean that she must live through the death of who she thinks she is in order to find out who she truly is.
When she has finally accepted the person she is—a person whose love is selfish and jealous, who is resentful and insecure—she can finally begin to understand the nature of the gods, too. According to the novel, knowledge of the divine is impossible without self-knowledge, and the reward for both is the beauty and happiness that Orual has always longed for.
Obsessive Love
Orual’s fatal flaw is the jealous and obsessive nature of her love. This stems in part from her own insecurity; she finds it difficult to believe that she is worthy of love and so she clings ferociously to those she loves and who love her back.
The most obvious example of the consequences of this kind of love is Orual’s “test” of Psyche’s husband. Initially delighted to discover that her beloved sister is alive, Orual is hurt to find that she would choose a life with an unseen stranger over a life with the sister who has cared for her from birth. Shortly after Psyche is born, she tells us that she “wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half-sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich” (10). In other words, Orual wants to be the only person to love Psyche and the only person that Psyche loves.
When Psyche chooses to stay in the valley with her husband, Orual feels rejected. Convincing herself that she is acting in Psyche’s best interests, she decides that she will have to rescue her sister. This ultimately leads her to threaten Psyche’s life and her own if Psyche does not perform her “test.” All of this is in spite of Psyche’s assurances that she still loves Orual and her confusion that her sister is not pleased by her happiness. Orual, however, is determined to be the source of all Psyche’s happiness and persists with her plan. The consequences of Orual’s test are Psyche’s exile and the sisters’ separation.
Orual is asked to confront the nature of her love in a number of implicit and explicit ways. For example, at one point, the Fox apologizes for trying to convince her to do something for love of him—the same way that she coerced Psyche on the mountain—telling her that “Love is not a thing to be so used” (98). More explicitly, Ansit challenges Orual to consider the consequences of her love, accusing her of “devouring” (125) those she cares about, including Bardia, who expended all of his energy in serving the Queen. Significantly, Psyche suggests that Orual’s obsessive love actually borders on hate, a conclusion that Orual later reaches herself. This close relationship between jealous love and hate is opposed to the divine love that Orual discovers at the end of the novel. The Fox is instrumental in helping her to understand this, more positive, kind of love. He warns her that “mortals…will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature” (142), suggesting that obsessive love is what separates the mortal from the divine.
Faith
A central theme in the novel is the conflict between scientific rationalism—embodied by the Fox—and religious belief. Orual experiences this conflict in a very immediate way and describes herself as living in two different worlds: the world she grew up in, where the gods are real, capricious, and jealous, and the world the Fox teaches her about, in which it is better to trust in what you can see and feel than in the “inventions” of priests. The Fox teaches Orual to look for evidence and to plan and reason, rather than believe. As a result, she can no longer trust implicitly in the gods’ existence: she requires proof. This need for proof is evinced when she asks Psyche to look at her husband and clarify his identity; despite Psyche’s assurances that her husband is the god of the mountain, Orual demands that she see his face, before she will believe her.
When Orual is confronted by the god after Psyche has looked upon him, she is overwhelmed by his beauty and his indifference. The mere sight of a god does not mean she understands his nature, however, and she is infuriated by the thought that her separation from Psyche could have been prevented if the god had just revealed himself to her. It is only towards the end of the novel, when Orual has come to understand herself and her own motivations that she begins to understand the nature of the gods and repudiates her earlier complaint against them. Then, she tells us that before the face of God, “questions die away” (144). Divine Nature exists outside the material world that the Fox introduced to Orual and is itself “the answer” (144)
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By C. S. Lewis
