Till We Have Faces

“I had a fear of the Priest that was quite different from my fear of my father. I think that what frightened me (in those early days) was the holiness of the smell that hung about him—it was a temple-smell of blood (mostly pigeons’ blood, but he had sacrificed men too) and burnt fat and singed hair and wine and stale incense. It is the Ungit smell.” 

Orual’s description of the Priest gives us an insight into the religion of Glome. The worship of Ungit includes human sacrifice and teaches Orual to associate “holiness” and the gods with death and fear.

“She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.” 

This is Orual’s description of Psyche. Unlike their sister Redival, whose beauty is superficial, Psyche’s is spiritual as well as physical; she makes the world around her lovelier by her presence in it. Orual’s comment about Psyche’s love of beasts also suggests that Psyche sees the beauty and value of things that others dismiss, foreshadowing the conflict between the two sisters about the existence and nature of the gods. 

“The Fox had taught me to think—at any rate to speak—of the Priest as of a mere schemer and a politic man who put into the mouth of Ungit whatever might most increase his own power and lands or most harm his enemies. I saw it was not so. He was sure of Ungit. Looking at him as he sat with the dagger pricking him and his blind eyes unwinking, fixed on the king, and his face like an eagle’s face, I was sure, too. Our real enemy was not a mortal. The room was full of spirits, and the horror of holiness.” 

When her father threatens the Priest’s life, Orual is struck by the depth of his faith and, despite her philosophical education, cannot help but believe that Ungit is re“What did I beget her for if I can’t do what I think is best with my own? What’s it to you? There’s some cursed cunning that I haven’t yet smelled out behind all your sobbing and scolding. You’re not asking me to believe that any woman, let alone such a fright as you, has much love for a pretty half-sister?” al. This moment demonstrates how Orual is torn between religion and philosophy.

“What did I beget her for if I can’t do what I think is best with my own? What’s it to you? There’s some cursed cunning that I haven’t yet smelled out behind all your sobbing and scolding. You’re not asking me to believe that any woman, let alone such a fright as you, has much love for a pretty half-sister?” 

The king’s comments show that he thinks of his children in terms of property or assets, rather than as people to love and protect. In fact, he does not seem to understand love at all and is suspicious of Orual’s affection for Psyche. To him, Psyche’s beauty is an advantage over Orual and he thinks she should resent her, not love her. 

“I have come to feel more and more that the Fox hasn’t the whole truth. Oh, he has much of it. It’d be dark as a dungeon within me but for his teaching. And yet…I can’t say it properly. He calls the whole world a city. But what’s a city built on? There’s earth beneath.”

This quote is from Psyche’s musings about her fate as she waits to be sacrificed. Rather than seeing religion and philosophy as completely opposed—the way Orual tends to—Psyche suggests that they complement each other: philosophy is only part of the truth, for the rest, we must look to the gods. Again this suggests that she has a much clearer understanding of, and belief in, the gods than Orual does. 

“And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I would have been given to some king in the end—perhaps such another as our father. And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married. To leave your home—to lose you, Maia, and the Fox—to lose one’s maidenhead—to bear a child—they are all deaths.” 

Death is something that we have no control over; similarly, here, Psyche suggests that women in Glome have no control over their destiny. They are “given” as wives, as if they are objects; taken away from the people they love and who love them in order to bear children, an act which may result in their death, as it did for Psyche’s own mother. Psyche makes these comments to Orual as she tries to convince her that death awaited her anyway and that, as a sacrifice to the gods, her death might at least do some good.

“‘I only see that you have never loved me,’ said I. ‘It may well be you are going to the gods. You are becoming cruel like them’.” 

Orual cannot accept Psyche’s reasoning, she is too absorbed in her own grief, in her own loss, to participate in a discussion of death and marriage. Significantly, Orual’s reaction to Psyche here is one of the first indications of her tendency towards jealous love, which is such an important theme in the novel.

“‘Why, yes, it’s a pity about her face. But she’s a brave girl and honest. If a man was blind and she weren’t the King’s daughter, she’d make him a good wife’” 

This is the “love-speech” (42) that Bardia makes about Orual and which she overhears. Despite their ambivalence, she treasures these words as the closest thing she will ever have to a sign of romantic love. Bardia’s words might be rough, but they show that he, unlike others, can see past Orual’s physical appearance and appreciate her good qualities.

“Years after, I dreamed, again and again, that I was in some well-known place—most often the Pillar Room—and everything I saw was different from what I touched. I would lay my hand on the table and feel warm hair instead of smooth wood, and the corner of the table would shoot out a hot, wet tongue and lick me. And I knew, by the mere taste of them that all those dreams came from that moment when I believed I was looking at Psyche’s palace and did not see it. For the horror was the same: a sickening discord, a rasping together of two worlds, like the two bits of a broken bone.”

This quote expresses the “horror” Orual feels at being excluded from Psyche’s new life and the torment of being torn between two worlds: the world of material, physical objects—of science and philosophy—and the world of the gods, of faith, where nothing is as it seems and her senses are so mixed up so that she can “taste” her dreams. As well as the metaphysical dilemma Orual experiences, the fact that the table feels like a body—with hair and a tongue—suggests that she is also dismayed to be excluded from a particular kind of love—sexual love—that Psyche’s marriage gives her access to. 

“I’m not my own. You forget, Sister, that I’m a wife. Yet always yours too. Oh if you knew, you’d be happy.” 

Here, Psyche refuses to obey Orual’s command that she leave the valley, telling her that her she must obey her husband now, instead. This does not mean that she no longer loves Orual, but she is firm that her sister is not the authority figure in her life anymore. While her role as a wife means she is not her “own”—implying that she belongs to her husband—this is a much more positive portrait of marriage than the one she painted earlier in the novel, one that would make Orual “happy” if she understood it. 

“You are alone, Orual. Whatever is to be done, you must devise and do it. No help will come. All gods and mortals have drawn away from you.”

When the Fox has left her to sleep, Orual feels entirely isolated and solely responsible for protecting Psyche. This sense of isolation feeds her determination to act and leads to her disastrous plan to “test” Psyche’s husband. Had she recognized the help and support available to her—from “gods and mortals”—the outcome might have been different.

“You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I’m not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred.” 

When Orual threatens to kill them both if Psyche does not agree to look at her husband’s face, Psyche realizes that the love Orual feels for her is jealous and dangerous and begins to wonder if she knows her sister at all. Here, instead of bringing them closer together, Orual’s possessive love drives them apart and leaves them feeling something akin to “hatred” for each other. 

“A monster—the Shadowbrute that I and all Glome had imagined—would have subdued me less than the beauty this face wore. And I think anger (what men call anger) would have been more supportable than the passionless and measureless rejection with which it looked upon me.” 

When she is confronted by Psyche’s husband, Orual is amazed by his beauty and his aloofness. Her desire for proof of the gods’ existence has been fulfilled but she finds it impossible to comprehend. Ugliness and anger—two things she is familiar with—would be easier for her to accept than the reality of the god’s true nature.

“Then, as a quite different thing, came the thought that my father would be dead. That struck me dizzy. The largeness of a world in which he was not…the clear light of a sky in which that cloud would no longer hang…freedom. I drew in a long breath, one way, the sweetest I had ever drawn. I came near to forgetting my great central sorrow.” 

Orual’s reaction to the prospect of her father’s death demonstrates just how much his behavior has oppressed her. His presence and the threat of his anger and violence—like the rain threatened by the cloud—cast a constant shadow over her life.

“Oh Lady, Lady, it’s a thousand pities they didn’t make you a man.” 

Orual’s reaction to the prospect of her father’s death demonstrates just how much his behavior has oppressed her. His presence and the threat of his anger and violence—like the rain threatened by the cloud—cast a constant shadow over her life.

“I was taking to queenship as a stricken man takes to the wine-pot or as a stricken woman, if she had beauty, might take to lovers. It was an art that left you no time to mope. If Orual could vanish altogether into the Queen, the gods would almost be cheated.”

Orual comes to define herself through her grief; the loss of Psyche is the central event in her life. As an ugly woman she doesn’t have the option of the “wine-pot” or of “lovers,” but by performing the role of queen and, essentially, taking on a new identity, Orual can escape the pain of her grief.

“I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.” 

The Fox speaks these words to Orual while apologizing to her for trying to persuade her not to fight Argan in single combat. His apology recalls Orual’s own behavior on the mountain, when she used her love to “force” Psyche to test her husband by threatening to kill them both. The Fox’s distaste for this kind of coercion justifies Orual’s decision not to tell him about her threat, but also asks the reader to reconsider her behavior and whether or not it was just. 

“I felt of a sudden very weak and my legs were shaking; and I felt myself changed too, as if something had been taken away from me. I have often wondered if women feel like that when they lose their virginity.” 

This is Orual’s description of her physical reaction to the realization that she has killed Argan; that she has killed a person. The fact that she then considers whether this is how women feel after having sex for the first time recalls Psyche’s comment about marriage being a type of death. As well as confirming the fact that Orual is a virgin, it also suggests that she thinks about sex and sexual love in terms of violence and loss.

“The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.” 

Here, Orual frames the misogyny she experiences throughout the novel as punishment from the gods for the sin of being a woman.

“It seemed to me that all would be bearable if, only once, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Bardia, I loved you.’” 

For Orual, Bardia’s death is made even more difficult because she has never openly expressed her love for him, and she cannot publicly express her grief in the same way that his widow, Ansit can. Here, she suggests that Bardia’s death also represents for her the possibility of expressing, rather than just feeling, love. 

“I begin to think you know nothing of love…Perhaps you who spring from the gods love like the gods. Like the Shadowbrute. They say the loving and the devouring are all one, don’t they.” 

This is the accusation that Ansit, Bardia’s widow, levels at Orual. By comparing Orual to the gods, she undermines the opposition Orual has established throughout the novel, which rests on the idea that her love for her sister, Psyche, is pure and that the gods have cruelly torn them apart. Ansit also draws attention to the obsessive nature of Orual’s love, which, like the mysterious Shadowbrute, devours its objects.

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” 

This quotation contains the novel’s title phrase and usefully summarizes one of its central themes: in order to know the gods we must first know ourselves. It is only when Orual has confronted the true nature of her complaint against the gods and, thus, her own true nature, that she can receive an answer from them. Only once she has learned her real identity—figured here by her face—can she understand the nature of the divine. 

“She had no more dangerous enemies than us. And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, 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.” 

Here, the Fox suggests that Orual’s jealous love is merely an extreme form of mortal love itself and that one of the reasons the gods hide their true selves from us is that we would be jealous of the love their beauty inspires. In trying to keep a person’s love to ourselves, we prevent them from loving the gods as they should. The danger of this jealousy is evident in the disastrous consequences that follow from Orual’s attempt to keep Psyche all to herself.