Into the Wardrobe

The various psychological interpretations of whether she only thought she was so ugly or not are possibly interesting as subjects themselves, but for the purposes of understanding the book and its author's intentions, I think it unnecessarily complicates the issues presented -- and the idea even negates certain things that I think Lewis fully intended to be there. Thus, it is clear that people around her DID think she was ugly when she is younger. And she doesn't take on the veil until later so her ugliness was still apparent at least for a while. To remove the physical ugliness in a "modern" reading of trying to turn it into a psychological understanding only is to remove the mythic element where the physical ugliness "becomes" that psychological understanding in a sense.

One might also suggest that Psyche is not really as beautiful as she is said to be, but only that people "wanted" to believe she was. Or one might say that because Psyche was so beautiful, people only thought Orual ugly in comparison. But then what about Redival, with her sort of "in-between" appearance? No, to me, we must simply accept what the story tells us about Orual.

And getting rid of the physical ugliness would only render the scenes where she "becomes" beautiful in the wall frescos (is that the right word?) rather meaningless and pointless. And besides, in the story, there is no psychological "resolution" of her, say, finally "accepting" her ugliness and then realizing that she wasn't as physically ugly as she thought all along, as we might expect to see in a modern novel about internal mental states and such. So a supposition about her not "really" being ugly after all serves no purpose in reading and understanding the story.

By the way, I wrote above that we must simply accept what the story tells us about Orual. And this means that we must accept the mystery and "mythic" inscrutability of the insistence later that Orual in some sense "is" Psyche. On the other hand, ironically, the place where "accepting what the story tells us" really does lead us to "wrong" conclusions is in Orual's very own words about her psychological state --ie, we are totally convinced, and agree with her viewpoint, in the first half of the book by her insistence of her "love" for Psyche and her justification for her anger at the gods. It is only later that we discover (along with her) in her revelation that it was really only selfishness and pride that deceived her and made Orual think her distorted impressions could ever be called "love" or "justified anger at the gods".

One might then argue, "ok, if Orual was wrong about her impression of what her own feelings of love were, why couldn't she also be wrong about how ugly she "really" was?". And the answer is that her psychological error about love and justified anger were "resolved" in the book by her enlightenment about her internal state -- thus, the whole purpose for the name of the book -- while the physical ugliness was "resolved" in a very different "mythical" way (but obviously connected mythically and symbolically to that internal psychological struggle about love and anger).

Anyway, so my opinion is that however interesting it might be to speculate on just how ugly Orual really was, it is quite irrelevant to the purposes of the story at best and possibly even destructive to some of its mythical and structural elements to imagine that she wasn't really all that ugly and that it was "all in her mind". There were other issues that were "all in her mind" that the book was "really" dealing with all along.

--Stanley

Lissy, Lewis often used images from paganism in his fiction. In addition to TWHF, there are Venus and Mars showing up in the Space Trilogy, and Pan in the Narniad. Two essays of his that you might find of interest in this matter are 'Is Theism Important?' and 'Religion Without Dogma' (both collected in the book God in the Dock), as well as the book Mere Christianity, where he talks about corn gods.

Thanks, I'll definently look for those essays. This aspect of Lewis' writing is really interesting to me.

Many, if not all, editions of TWHF include a "Note" from Lewis identifying his source and explaining Cupid & Psyche. Also, he discusses TWHF in The Letters of CSL. However, the best, most thorough summary, explication and analysis I've seen is in Walter Hooper's CSL: Companion & Guide.

Has the chat room joined the choir invisible?

sorry, I should have started a new topic. Ive been gone so long it was like driving in LA for the first time.:)