by David » September 6th, 2006, 12:02 pm
I don't know about the man-in-a-woman's-body concept. Orual is a woman. If she does not do the things we attribute to being a woman--marry, have children, love a man--it is because she has grimly concluded that these things are barred from her due to the fact that she is (supposedly) ugly.
Now I say "supposedly," and this has been debated before, but I throw it out again. Was she really ugly? In some ways, the text seems to suggest she was. Her father drags her in front of a mirror and says "Would the gods want this?" And when she rips off her veil to show Barda's wife her looks, I assume there's something unattractive about her.
On the other hand, Till We Have Faces is about the face, about facing God, about how we present ourselves, through what was once called our "countenance" to the world. Maybe Orual's face was ugly only because it reflected her grasping, controlling, domineering, selfish personality. Maybe she was a little homely (as we say in America, meaning plain or unremarkable) but her unattractive spirit made her face repulsive in some way.
I remember that Batta says she could be attractive if she would just do her hair and put on make-up. She dismisses this suggestion, and a lot of people on the list point out that Batta is a sycophant and only wanted to worm her way into Orual's affection. But at that point in the novel Batta had nothing to gain by saying so, since Orual was not in power and it did not look like she would ever be in power, so maybe there was some truth in what Batta was telling her and she just didn't want to listen. I think her hanging of Batta after she becomes queen is one of the prime acts of brutality Orual commits before she changes. Perhaps Batta was not being entirely untruthful when she said Orual could be attractive if only she wanted to.
The way, the weather, the terrain, the discipline, the leadership. --Sun Tzu