VII

Chapters 16-20:

Loving, Hating, Hiding

PLOT SUMMARY: The narrative now speeds up and these five chapters summarize perhaps forty years of Orual’s life.  Upon her return from the mountain, Orual hides what happened there from the Fox and decides henceforth to hide her face behind a veil.  The King is injured in a fall, shortly thereafter, and lies dying, as does the old Priest: Bardia and the Fox, therefore, negotiate with Arnom, who will become Priest, to support the queenship of Orual.  Orual solidifies her position as Queen by killing Argan, heir-designate to the throne of Phars, in single combat, thus saving Trunia, the heir by order of birth, and establishing friendship between the two nations.  By plunging into the work of being Queen—and a very good one—Orual is able to crush her old personality and forget, most of the time, her past deeds and misdeeds.

Lewis’s portrayal of Orual’s character is sharpened and deepened, in Chapter 16-20, by a series of key motifs and images.  First is the expansion of the theme of love to show in Orual’s life distorted forms of the other two natural loves, philia and eros.  Distorted storge is there, too, particularly as Orual, upon her return home, goes to Psyche’s room and puts everything in it as it had been before all the sorrows began:

Orual, determined not to give up her ownership of Psyche (“when she was . . . still mine”), attempts to freeze her image and memory of Psyche at the desired point: it is an example of “what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted,” as Lewis put it in The Great Divorce.¹

          Orual’s relationship with the Fox illustrates philia “going bad” in a similar way.  Lewis defines philia as a deep, lasting friendship based on shared interests.  There is a grandfatherly side to the Fox’s relationship with Orual, and thus a strong element of storge, but there is also philia, for they are drawn together by their mutual interests: she shares his hunger for knowledge, and this forms the basis of one of the few friendships in her life.  Because she has few friends, she comes to depend on the Fox, and to clutch at him in much the same way she did at Psyche.  Thus, when she grants the Fox freedom before her fight with Argan, she is horror-struck and embittered by the thought that he might, now, return to Greece.  Given no encouragement to go, and subtle pressure not to, he decides to stay, reluctantly and uncertainly.  In that light it is particularly ironic—and particularly evil—that, having persuaded the Fox to stay, Orual herself later begins to neglect him:  “I was too busy to be with him much” (p. 235).  Always Orual considers her loves in terms of what they contribute to her, not what she should contribute to them.  Later, Orual apologizes to the Fox for the possessiveness which she allowed to distort her love:  “I knew at the time that all those good reasons you gave for staying in Glome after you were a freeman were only disguises for your love.  I knew you stayed only in pity and love for me.  I knew you were breaking your heart for the Greeklands.  I ought to have sent you away.  I lapped up all you gave me like a thirsty animal” (p. 296).

          It is similar with Bardia and eros.  Orual’s relationship with Bardia includes a large measure of philia, growing out of their shared activity of swordplay and their shared interests in the governing of Glome.  But this develops, for Orual, into at least a small measure of unrequited, frustrated, and inevitably distorted erotic love.  Lewis defines eros as that special variety of sexual passion we call being [< p. 54] in love.  The first sign of it here is Orual’s reaction when she hears that Bardia married for love (p. 146) and is ruled by his wife:  “I was fretted by the thought of this wife, this petted thing, suddenly starting up to delay or to hinder” (p. 153).  It appears again in Orual’s irritation when the Fox makes denigrating comments about Bardia:  “To hear Bardia called fool or barbarian angered me.  (Bardia called the Fox Greekling and ‘word-weaver’ in return, but that never fretted me in the same way)” (p. 196).  Her dislike of and jealousy over Bardia’s attention to his wife (as on p. 222) lead to sexual fantasies:  “The picture, the impossible fool’s dream, was that all should have been different from the very beginning and he would have been my husband and Psyche our daughter.  Then I would have been in labour . . . with Psyche . . . and to me he would have been coming home" (p. 224; ellipses in the original).

          In The Great Divorce the possessive mother is told that God wanted her “merely instinctive love . . . to turn into something better”;² if natural love does not turn into something better, it inevitably becomes something worse—jealousy, possessiveness, a kind of hatred.  So it is with Orual’s loves for Psyche, the Fox, and Bardia.  And standards of comparison, in parallel situations and contrasting reactions, are supplied to emphasize the self-centeredness and inadequacy of Orual’s loves.  When Orual returns from the mountain and refuses to tell the Fox all that went on there, he remarks sadly, “Well.  You have a secret from me” (p. 180); he knows, as Psyche knew, that true love must be open, honest, and free, for when Orual suggested that Psyche’s husband need not know Psyche had looked at him, Psyche replied, “‘You thought I would hide it?  Thought I would not tell him?’ she said, each word like the rubbing of a file across raw flesh” (p. 166).  Later, when the Fox hears Orual’s plan for combat with Argan, he “implored me with the same anguish I had felt when I implored Psyche [to return to Glome]” (p. 198).  The striking thing, however, is that the next morning the Fox apologizes to her for treating love as a tool:  “Daughter, I did badly last night. . . . I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love.  Love is not a thing [< p. 55] to be so used” (p. 204).  Such an apology, even such a thought, had never entered Orual’s head.  It is as Psyche commented earlier, “You know little of love” (p. 162).

          Orual’s early intimations of the inadequacy of her love and the hardships it caused lead to the second motif central to these chapters, that imaged by the veil.  Veils appear first in the book at the time of the King’s marriage, as a covering for Orual’s ugliness.  They arise next when Orual journeys to the sacred mountain with Bardia and wears a veil so that she will not be recognized.  When she returns from her second journey to the mountain, she decides to “go always veiled”:  “It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness” (pp. 180-81).  What started out as a covering for physical ugliness and a disguise now becomes, symbolically, a way to cover her inner ugliness and to alter her self-identity, to hide and thus almost to bury her old and despised self.

          The veil is a symbol—that is, it is itself (a literal veil in the action) and something more, but the more is always a group of possibilities radiating out from the central image.  One is not, therefore, to look for “the one meaning” symbolized by the veil, but several meanings, some of which will of course be more satisfying or convincing than others.  A variety of possibilities have been suggested by commentators on the story: that it stands for the queenship, for the flesh, for the barriers between herself and the gods.  A veil is a conventional cultural and literary symbol, sometimes used as an emblem of modesty and decency—for this reason the Fox finds it rather barbaric that adult women in Glome do not wear veils (p. 197).  Such qualities are important and valuable to the new identity Orual adopts, and the veil in part epitomizes the outward decorum and properness for which she is known as queen.  It is an important biblical symbol of covering (for example, Exodus 34:33-35) which becomes a barrier to understanding or relationship (II Corinthians 3:13-16).  But a veil also has been used conventionally as a symbol of shame and guilt:  so Nathaniel Hawthorne used it again and again.  And surely this is a very important dimension of Lewis’s symbol.³

          Beyond such direct and conventional symbolic meaning [< p. 56] for the veil, it also functions in Till We Have Faces as a symbol for symbolism.  Like a veil, a symbol conceals in order to reveal:  it conceals its meanings behind a literal image in order that they may be conveyed powerfully as they are grasped by the imagination.  In a work which explores reason and imagination as a central theme, the veil suggests that the full value of symbol (and metaphor and myth) may be hidden, unrecognized by the overly rational mind, as Lewis failed to “see” it fully early in his life.  And it suggests that Till We Have Faces itself reveals the full value of myth in conveying eternal and universal truths to the receptive heart and mind.

          A key function of the veil is to symbolize Orual’s new identity as the Queen, a third motif in this section.  It begins when Orual negotiates with Arnom over the Crumbles, to get him to accept her claim to the throne, and when she decides to fight Argan:  “Ever since Arnom had said hours ago that the King was dying, there seemed to have been another woman acting and speaking in my place. Call her the queen; but Orual was someone different” (p. 199).

          Lewis uses a series of symbols for Orual’s efforts to repress her old identity:  a door, death, a dam, and pregnancy.  Thus, when Orual finishes restoring Psyche’s room to its childhood state, she closes both a literal and a symbolic door:  “I locked the door and put a seal on it.  And, as well as I could, I locked a door in my mind” (p. 183).  The symbol recurs in Chapter 20, with even stronger emphasis: “The Queen of Glome had more and more part in me and Orual had less and less.  I locked Orual up . . . somewhere deep down inside me” (p. 226).  Further symbols elaborate on the meaning of what she is doing to her personality.  What she locks up, or dams up, to use another metaphor, are the feelings—love of Psyche, anger against the gods—associated with her earlier days:

But she wants not just to hold back but to push down the old Orual:  there is to be reduction, not growth.  The process is imaged as the reverse of pregnancy, as she lays her old personality to sleep deep inside herself:  “It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive” (p. 226).  So, as Orual waits for her Father’s life to end and her combat with Argan to begin, her thoughts are of death:  “One part of me . . . said, ‘Orual dies if she ceases to love Psyche.’  But the other said, ‘Let Orual die.  She would never have made a queen’” (p. 211).  And following the combat, the literal slaying of Argan becomes a figure for what will become of her old self: “I am the Queen; I’ll kill Orual too” (p. 225).  In light of all this, the wording of the first sentence of the third paragraph in the book in significant:  “I was Orual the eldest daughter of Trom, King of Glome” (p. 4; italics added).  She no longer is Orual; now, she is the Queen.

          Orual clearly thinks of the accession to the queenship as marking a radical change in her life, in effect giving her a new identity.  She notes the new direction in her life by speaking of it as embarking on a journey into a strange new land (p. 210) and comparing her victory over Argan to the loss of virginity:  “I felt myself changed too, as if something had been taken away from me” (p. 220).  The change is characterized by her stifling of the sensitive aspects of her personality, those traditionally labeled “feminine,” in order to become an efficient and unemotional human machine:  “My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless, which had come to me when I heard the god’s sentence; by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me” (p. 184).  Thus, when Bardia treats her “more and more like a man” (p. 184), she is accomplishing her aim; but given the eros she feels toward Bardia, it is only natural that “this both grieved and pleased me.”

          A central element of Orual’s new identity as the Queen is to be active and assertive.  The queenship is “an art that [< p. 58] left you no time to mope,” and becomes Orual’s effort to make herself “vanish altogether into the Queen” (p. 201).  Thus as Queen she is always working, as judge, as administrator, always seeking ways to strengthen Glome:

It is in the light of all this activity that Arnom characterizes the Queen, after her death, as “the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world” (pp. 308-9).

          The activity in her new role, her devotion of her life to her role as Queen, leads into a fourth motif, that of sacrifice.  As she leaves the city to meet Argan in combat, Orual remembers Psyche:

But she misapplies the comparison in thinking that she will die at Argan’s hand.  Actually, this going out to the combat field, as Psyche had gone out, epitomizes the way she will sacrifice her life for her country from this point on.  The rest of her life she devotes to her people, filling her days with planning, administering, judging.  Her identity as Queen, in fact, has substance only in activity:

Having eliminated Orual, her life has no meaning apart from her work.  Thus in one sense all that she does is for herself, to fill the emptiness of her existence.  But in another sense she does all and gives all to her people:  her life of toil and suffering—physically in battle and mentally in decision-making—rather than death, becomes her sacrifice.

          Her external identity can be altered by wearing a veil and plunging into a life of activity, but her personal identity, her own sense of inner ugliness, cannot so easily be expunged by assuming a new name and role.  Deeper down the old sense of guilt and pain continue, biding their time.  Orual can cover her face with a veil, but she is reminded of her guilt by the swinging chains of the well, which sound to her like the weeping of a girl.  She can build thick stone walls around the well, as she can cover her face with a veil or crush the Orual in her, and thus suppress her old being: “For a while after that an ugly fancy used to come to me in my dreams . . . that I had walled up, gagged with stone, not a well but Psyche (or Orual) herself.  But that also passed.  I heard Psyche weeping no more.  The year after that I defeated Essur” (p. 235).  The juxtaposition of the last two sentences suggests that she thinks she has succeeded:  Orual is dead, memories of Psyche permanently dammed up, the Queen in control of Glome and of her life.  But old guilt and old identities will not remain repressed:  they fester below the surface, awaiting the lance which will release them, which, in Orual’s case, comes in the decisive final chapter of Part I. [ <p. 60]