SOURCE: "Humanistic Psychology in C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces: A Feminist Critique," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Fall, 1989, pp. 185-98.

[In the following essay, Bartlett provides a feminist reading of Till We Have Faces from the theoretical perspective of humanistic psychology. According to Bartlett, feminists and humanistic psychologists would object to Lewis's presentation of "self-effacing women" who submit to male control.]

C. S. Lewis writes in his concluding note in Till We Have Faces, "The central alteration in my own version [of the Psyche myth] consists in making Psyche's palace [the palace given her by the god Amor] invisible to normal eyes…. This change, of course, brings with it a more ambivalent motive and a different character for my heroine [one of Psyche's sisters] and finally modifies the whole quality of the tale." I believe Lewis is correct in his analysis of this change, for, as I shall demonstrate, the protagonist's inability to see the palace mirrors her inability to see and understand her own inner conflicts.

Yet, while I feel Lewis has masterfully illustrated Orual's psychological dilemma, the vision of reality I see presented in this text appears confused, for Lewis asserts an Archetypal Christian ontology and then proceeds to impose that ontology on his mimetically constructed characters in an attempt to fuse the moral requirements of his religious belief system with what he intuitively perceives and accurately presents as the psychological motivations of human behavior. While Lewis's moral recommendations seem to work for the characters in his text, these ideals may or may not work so well for the book's readers, whose reality does not necessarily validate such recommendations. Bernard Paris, in Character and Conflict in Jane Austen's Novels, speaks of a clash between the structural requirements of a novel and the demand for accuracy in mimetic representation. Till We Have Faces presents just such a difficulty. If Lewis's characters lived in our world rather than in their own world, the resolutions they find for their emotional and moral dilemmas would not work.

Paris proposes the application of the concepts of humanistic psychology for describing the nature of mimetic characterization and for explaining this conflict between verisimilitude and the formal structure of a book. This article will use the terminology of psychologists Abraham Maslow and Karen Horney in discussing the emotional development of Lewis's extremely complex protagonist Orual as well as in describing and accounting for the conflict between her accurate portrayal and Lewis's avowed Christianized vision of reality as manifested in the archetypal structure of the novel. While Lewis may not have been aware of these psychologists' writings, he was sufficiently acute in his perception of human nature to demonstrate accurately (though perhaps unwittingly) much of their theory in his mimetic characterizations.

Maslow has said that what is commonly called Humanistic Psychology is more accurately named "Third Force Psychology," for it is a "viable third alternative to objective, behavioristic … psychology and to orthodox Freudianism." According to Maslow, a hierarchy of five basic types of needs exists for human beings. These (in order from lowest to highest) are the physiological needs, the safety needs, the love and belonging needs, the esteem needs, and the need for self-actualization. The physiological needs are met through food, shelter, and clothing; the safety needs require security, stability, and freedom from fear; the love and belonging needs require affectionate interpersonal relationships; the esteem needs require self-respect and the respect of others; and self-actualization is the ongoing development of one's unique personhood, so as to become all that one can be.

While Maslow's concept of self-actualization does not point ultimately to a transcendent God, Maslow does speak of transcendence when describing moments of truest self-actualization or "peak-experiences." Thus his secular psychology is compatible with what William J. Bouwsma has called "Christian adulthood." In contrast to the Greek view of a gender-specific ideal of rational "manhood," Bouwsma identifies the "normative Christian" concept of a non-gender-specific "adulthood," using a term suggestive of process from its Latin root adolescere, "to grow up." He sees the Christian life "as indefinite growth, itself the product of a full engagement with temporal experience involving the whole personality." We can see Lewis drawing on this normative Christian concept of adulthood in The Great Divorce, where the bright and solid people of heaven spend eternity moving closer to God, continually growing in their awareness of "him" and of their true natures. In this story, Lewis demonstrates an understanding of the need for continuous growth in the human personality. One is never fully grown in Lewis's or in Maslow's vision of the human condition.

In Lewis's retelling of the Psyche myth, Orual, Psyche's older half-sister, feels the effect of deprivation at the level of love and belonging on Maslow's hierarchy. Though she is a princess in the barbaric state of Glome, it seems that almost everyone rejects her because she is ugly. She remembers her father's words to her at the coming of her tutor, the Fox, in this way:

"Now, Greekling," said my father to this man, "I trust to beget a prince one of these days and I have a mind to see him brought up in all the wisdom of your people. Meanwhile practice on them." (He pointed at us children.) "If a man can teach a girl, he can teach anything." Then, just before he sent us away, he said, "Especially the elder. See if you can make her wise; it's about all she'll ever be good for." I didn't understand that, but I knew it was like things I had heard people say to me ever since I could remember.

Orual's account of her father's words indicates two reasons for his rejection of her: (1) she is a woman and (2) she is ugly. Bernard Paris, in A Psychological Approach to Fiction, describes the results of such rejection by attributing to the individual who is not adequately fulfilled in his lower needs a consequential fixation at an earlier stage of development. In Orual's case, because she does not feel loved and accepted by others, she spends her life searching for the affection and approval she seldom receives.

Karen Horney, in Neurosis and Human Growth, provides the terminology for describing Orual's method of coping with her loneliness when she speaks of "neurotic solutions." Paris explains the use of such solutions by telling us that a person abandons the real self as a means of self-preservation. His statement implies that individuals try to actualize not what they really are but what they think they should be. Horney calls this new and fictitious image of the self an idealized image, and accounts for it as the individual's attempt to counteract self-hate. But because inner conflicts produce contradictory values in the idealized self, this self is impossible to actualize; so self-hate remains to torment its victim. The "despised self" is Paris's term for what Horney describes as this equally imaginary hated self. Orual's despised self is an ugly woman not worth loving. As this essay will illustrate, in an effort to banish her self-hate, Orual claims the beautiful Psyche as her own, and thus unconsciously unites Psyche's beauty with herself, consequently becoming, in her mind, lovable. Also we shall see that because Orual is ashamed of her womanhood, her idealized image demands that she be motherly toward Psyche and yet masculine at the same time.

The sacred story told by Psyche's priest at the end of the book reveals to Orual the true nature of her demands on Psyche:

But now all the dreamlike feeling in me suddenly vanished. I was wide awake and I felt the blood rush into my face. He was telling it wrong—hideously and stupidly wrong. First of all, he made it that both Psyche's sisters had visited her in the secret palace of the god (to think of Redival going there!).

The priest continues to tell Orual that the sisters could see Psyche's palace and were jealous because "Her husband and her house were so much finer than theirs." Consequently, according to the priest, the sisters attempted to ruin Psyche by convincing her to light a lamp and view her husband, an act which he had forbidden her.

The retelling of her life's story from this perspective drives Orual to write her case against the gods, which constitutes Book One of Till We Have Faces. Horney would call this attack on the gods an "expansive solution," for the expansive personality, says Horney, identifies with an idealized self and is therefore very sensitive to criticism and failure. The Priest's story has threatened her self-deception, and she must prove his tale false in order to continue believing that she embodies her idealized self.

Horney also describes a solution which relies on self-effacing behaviors rather than on expansive ones. According to Horney, self-effacing individuals feel no conscious superiority and unwittingly exaggerate whatever helplessness and suffering they experience. They long for "help, protection, and surrendering love." Their method of externalizing self-hate is to believe that others are accusing and despising them. Thus, they deny their expansive feelings, which actually remain repressed by the dominant solution. They become what Horney calls their "subdued" selves, hoping to appease others and therefore attract love. Yet, because no amount of love from others will convince self-effacing people that they are lovable, they make unjust claims on these others as the proof of affection. Self-effacing individuals feel their suffering is so exceptional that they are entitled to the excessive devotion they demand. Instead of expressing rage (as the expansive-types would do) when denied these demands, they absorb their rage and make others feel guilty as a means of revenge. Often, self-effacers become morbidly dependent on others, trying, through loving, to "develop to the full the loving attributes" of their idealized selves.

Orual begins her self-alienation with all of these self-effacing characteristics, when, at Psyche's birth, she takes over the child's care, relieving the nurse of her duties:

Batta was only too pleased to have her work done for her and the king knew and cared nothing about it. The Fox said to me, "Don't wear yourself out, daughter, with too much toil, even if the child is as beautiful as a goddess." But I laughed in his face. I think I laughed more in those days than in all my life before. Toil? I lost more sleep looking on Psyche for joy of it than in any other way. And I laughed because she was always laughing. She laughed before the third month. She knew me for certain (though the Fox said not) before the second.

Orual's exceptional care of Psyche is a means of merging with Psyche's person, thus taking the child's beauty into herself. Her peculiar devotion to Psyche is also an attempt to make the girl totally dependent on Orual and thus eternally grateful as well. This particular devotion, Orual unconsciously feels, will satiate her insatiable need for love. In fact, when trying to persuade Psyche to leave her divine mate, Orual says, "if anyone is to care for you or counsel you or shield you … it can only be I."

Despite this self-effacing care for Psyche, Orual, like all individuals who rely on this particular neurotic solution, has latent aggressive tendencies which reveal themselves when Orual batters her sister Redival for hitting Psyche:

Then I hardly knew myself again till I found that I was astride of Redival, she on the ground with her face a lather of blood, and my hands about her throat. It was the Fox who pulled me off and, in the end, some kind of peace was made between us.

Since childhood, Orual has been forced to compete with Redival, whose beauty, though not equal to Psyche's, is far greater than her own, and therefore Orual uses the excuse of retaliation on Psyche's behalf to vent her vindictive anger at Redival.

Expansive trends are evident in her feelings for Psyche, as when Orual threatens to kill Psyche if she will not light a lamp and view her husband. Orual's threat to kill Psyche is a desperate expansive attempt to force the girl to obey her wishes. In inflicting Psyche with guilt rather than physical wounds, Orual still attempts to dominate her. But, with these words, Psyche calls her sister's bluff:

You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure I like your kind better than hatred. Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots, and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture—I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.

While Psyche loves Orual, she does not appreciate this "loving" blackmail, and thus she loses trust in Orual's intentions. Because neither the expansive solution nor the self-effacing solution brings Psyche's complete surrender in action and emotional assent to her sister's unrealistic demands, Orual suffers great disappointment and terror. She says of Psyche, "I found I was becoming afraid of her." Psyche has removed herself emotionally at this point, and when the whole valley is destroyed by the wrath of the god, Psyche becomes an outcast in some unknown realm, farther from Orual than she was while she remained in the god's valley.

Horney describes a third neurotic solution which suppresses both the expansive and the self-effacing trends we have been examining in Orual's behavior. Horney calls one who uses such a solution the resigned personality. Such individuals give up struggling to achieve their goals and settle for less than they could achieve. They convince themselves that they do not want love, companionship, or success, believing that what they do not want, they cannot lack. Emotional detachment distances resigned types from others and thus protects them from the emotional pain often present in interpersonal relationships. In fact, they usually resent any type of influence, pressure, or coercion.

"It's a strange, yet somehow a quiet and steady thing," writes Orual, "to look round on earth and grass and the sky and say in one's heart to each, 'You are all my enemies now. None of you will ever do me good again. I see now only executioners.'" Because the other two neurotic solutions have failed her, Orual takes on the characteristics of the resigned personality as she distances herself emotionally from the universe. Because she expects only the worst from the world about her, she guards herself against its influence and asks nothing at all from her environment. As we shall see, because Psyche is further from her than ever, Orual grits her teeth and waits on the gods' supposedly vindictive judgment. She writes, "I looked on things about me with a new eye. Now that I'd proven for certain that the gods are and that they hated me, it seemed that I had nothing to do but wait for my punishment." Yet, as day after day passes with no punishment forthcoming, Orual must resign herself, not to punishment, but to life. She writes, "I began to see, at first unwillingly, that I might be doomed to live, and even to live an unchanged life, some while longer."

Realizing that she must go on living, Orual protects her emotions by locking away her memories of Psyche. Upon returning to Psyche's room, she restores everything as it had been in Psyche's childhood:

I found some verses in Greek which seemed to be a hymn to the god of the Mountain. These I burned. I did not choose that any of that part of her should remain…. I wished all to be so ordered that if she could come back she would find all as it had been when she was still happy, and still mine. Then I locked the door and put a seal on it. And, as well as I could, I locked a door in my mind. Unless I were to go mad I must put away all thoughts of her save those that went back to her first, happy years.

Orual admits in this passage that her defense against madness is to lock in some secret recess of her mind the pain she feels because of Psyche's rejection of her. Later readers discover that because the Fox grieves openly for his loss of the adult Psyche, Orual finds little comfort in his company.

However, she still finds him useful to her in her efforts to bury her emotions, for by questioning him often upon matters of "the physical parts of philosophy, about the seminal fire, and how soul arises from blood," she hopes to learn "hard things … and to pile up knowledge." In this way, she can stifle her softer moods with hard facts. Her softer moods are identified with the mothering, womanly part of her idealized self-image and the discredited neurotic solution, self-effacement. Although she has wounded her arm in her attempt to coerce Psyche into lighting the lamp, she returns to the fencing lessons she had been taking from Bardia, the captain of the king's guards, even before her arm has healed. She tells her readers, "My aim was to build up more and more of 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." Womanhood has always been a burden to her because she has always been ugly. This is a chance to do away with her womanhood and thus the source of her pain. Her first defense emphasized a part of womanhood which requires no beauty. A child of necessity loves its mother, whether she is beautiful or not, for she is the source of nourishment. When this kind of behavior no longer brings her the devotion she craves, Orual must deny her craving in order to hide from herself her own self-hate and her sense that she does not deserve this love she now must believe she does not need.

Because masculinity and a lack of emotion are frequently equated, stifling her emotions allows Orual to satisfy the masculine side of her idealized image. Her womanhood embarrasses her, for it is the reason her father rejects her. Being masterful in the knowledge the Fox imparts and skillful (if not strong) in the fencing Bardia teaches provides a way for Orual to be like a man, even though she cannot become one. This satisfaction is only temporary, however, for as her comment on Bardia's well-meaning words indicates, after she becomes queen and assumes her father's manly role, Orual finds that she cannot "drive all the woman out of" her:

"We've had scores of matches together. The gods never made anyone—a man or woman—with a better natural gift for it. Oh, Lady, Lady, it's a thousand pities they didn't make you a man." (He spoke it as kindly and heartily as could be; as if a man dashed a gallon of cold water in your broth and never doubted you'd like it better.)

Orual has masculine talent but also the need to develop her feminine potential. When she tries to actualize her idealized image of masculinity without her real self's womanhood entering in, she frustrates this very acute need. It is interesting to note that, because of her unseemly countenance, her earlier tendencies toward motherliness ignore the sexual component of motherhood. She is a sexless mother, and therefore one who, because she has symbolically dried up her own breasts, cannot nourish Psyche in any way. The conflict in her idealized image, then, is between these two poles. She must be a mother without a mate and be a man, but not a woman. In order to be self-actualizing, she must integrate these contradictory needs. She must allow herself to develop her manly talents and her womanly tendencies as well. She must also become a mother who is able to create an atmosphere of growth for the beloved which will foster the beloved's self-actualizing tendencies. But she cannot foster growth if she continues to perpetuate her own barren idealized self.

In the following passage, Orual sums up the purpose of her resigned solution:

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…. I was taking to queenship as a stricken man takes to the wine-pot or as a stricken woman, if she has 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.

Here Orual attempts to rid herself of the pain she feels because of Psyche's rejection, as she takes on duties associated with her father, thus becoming manly, and in the process ridding herself of womanhood. Thus, she can isolate herself from rejection by rejecting feeling before she can feel rejected.

Her desire to be rid of this "despised" self is clearly demonstrated when she permanently dons a veil to cover her face. Here again, she has resigned herself to her "fate":

Hitherto, like all my countrywomen, I had gone bareface; on those two journeys up the Mountain I had worn a veil because I wished to be secret. I now determined that I would go always veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since. It is a sort of treaty made with my ugliness…. The Fox, that night, was the last man who ever saw my face; and not many women have seen it either.

Orual's resignation, far from allowing her to cope with her environment, only makes it possible for her to hide from herself. The veil she wears over her face to mask her ugliness before the world, she has already had intact internally for years, acting as a protective barrier between her and her despised self. She perpetuates a self-deception, believing that, in fact, "Orual" is dying; but she soon finds "Orual" will not die. Here the image of pregnancy in reverse aptly describes how she perceives what is happening to her despised self:

I must now pass quickly over many years (though they made up the longest part of my life) during which the Queen of Glome had more and more a part in me and Orual had less and less. I locked Orual up or laid her asleep as best I could somewhere deep down inside me; she lay curled there. It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive.

It is in the midst of this self-deception that she is confronted with the sacred story in the temple of Istra. Because it is a true story, it pierces her psychological defenses, causing her to see the uselessness of her resigned solution. Her counterattack is a return to expansive behavior as she writes her "case against the gods," and we, the readers, are to affirm her idealized self-image by agreeing that the gods have dealt unfairly with her. As she puts it in her final expansive assertions at the end of the volume:

Now, you who read, judge between the gods and me … Why must holy places be dark places?

I say, therefore, that there is no creature (toad, scorpion, or serpent) so noxious to man as the gods. Let them answer my charge if they can. It may be that, instead of answering, they'll strike me mad or leprous or turn me into beast, bird, or tree. But will not all the world then know (and the gods will know it knows) that this is because they have no answer?

While at this point Orual feels the gods cannot answer her accusations, as the following passage from her second book points out, her own words provide a response:

Since I cannot mend the book, I must add to it. To leave it as it was would be to die perjured; I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it. What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant. I found I must set down (for I was speaking as before judges and must not lie) passions and thoughts of my own which I had clean forgotten. The past which I wrote down was not the past that I thought I had (all these years) been remembering.

Writing down her own motives forces Orual to think about them. Because her idealized image demands that she have the justice she requires of the gods, Orual is driven to an honesty of which she is not capable under different circumstances. Thus, her unrealistic demands upon herself prove to be the catalyst for her self-discovery. As she relates her self-deceptions, she becomes aware that she has been deceived and therefore meets herself face to face. In this way, her book, which was originally meant as an attack on that which threatens her neurotic solutions, is the very thing which begins the breakdown of those solutions.

Now that Orual's wall of defense has a crack in it, a harsher stroke comes from the individuals around her. Orual learns that Redival had felt hurt and lonely when the Fox and Psyche began to dominate Orual's attention. "I had never thought at all how it might be with her when I turned first to the Fox and then to Psyche," says Orual, "For it was somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill-used one. She had her gold curls, hadn't she?" This is Orual's first glimpse of what Redival was really thinking and the reasons for her antagonism toward both the Fox and Psyche: they had stolen Orual's love.

While the Fox and Psyche may have unwittingly stolen Orual's love from Redival, shortly after Bardia's death, Ansit, his wife, accuses Orual of stealing Bardia's energies and devotion:

"Oh, I know well enough that you were not lovers…. You left me my share. When you had used him, you would let him steal home to me; until you needed him again. After weeks and months at the wars—you and he night and day together, sharing the councils, the dangers, the victories, the soldiers' bread, the very jokes—he could come back to me, each time a little thinner and greyer and with a few more scars, and fall asleep before his supper was down, and cry out in his dream, 'Quick, on the right there. The Queen's in danger.' And next morning—the Queen's a wonderful early riser in Glome—the Pillar Room again. I'll not deny it; I had what you left of him."

The queen, who has secretly loved Bardia for years and had begrudged his sickness because it had kept him from the palace, knows Ansit's words are true. She has devoured all those for whom she cares by taking all and giving back nothing. She has drained Bardia of his life's blood, consuming him in order to satisfy her own voracious needs.

Orual comes to understand her motivations even more clearly through a series of visions which she attributes to the gods. In her first vision her dead father returns and forces her to dig down through the floor of the Pillar (or throne) Room into another Pillar Room just like the original, only smaller, where the air is warmer and harder to breathe. This room, "floor, walls, and pillars," is made all of "raw earth." Then she must dig again through this earthen floor until she comes to still another Pillar Room, even smaller than the last, and made of "living rock." This room is darker, signifying the darkness of Orual's soul. It is dark because (despite her cries for understanding and her dislike for the darkness of the goddess Ungit's house) she has refused to see what is in her own soul. Just as her soul shrinks within her, so the roof of this small room closes in on them, and as it does, her father asks, "Who is Ungit?" Her answer, "I am Ungit," signifies her recognition of her despised self, for, like this all-devouring faceless stone goddess, Orual returns nothing to her devotees and reveals none of herself. The darkness of the temple is the same darkness with which Orual cloaks her own motives.

Lewis's belief in original sin is evident here for he presents Orual as actually embodying her Ungit-like despised self; yet if we as readers look objectively at Orual's life, we see that the only reason she acts as she does is that bitterness has been provoked by her environment from childhood. Horney would urge her to recall these circumstances and ask her to realize that while she is not her idealized self, neither is she her despised self. Lewis seems to interpret the information he presents in a way that conflicts with what Horney would call therapeutic.

Orual's next encounter with her inner self occurs in a dream when she meets holy sheep in the pasture of the gods and is overrun by them as they come to greet her. They demonstrate the beauty of being true to one's self, for, in Lewis's created world, the gods and the things of the gods cannot act contrary to their own natures. This vision, as Horney would see it, is therapeutic, for it provides Orual with a model for self-actualization and a hope for the discovery of her real self.

In Orual's final visionary encounter, she at last reads her case against the gods. Through its reading she relates, not the book she has written, but the very substance of her thoughts. As she says, "I looked at the roll in my hand and saw at once that it was not the book I had written. It couldn't be; it was far too small." As she begins to read, she sees that her real motivations have been all the jealousies, hatreds, and fears that we have discussed earlier:

There was utter silence all round me. And now for the first time I knew what I had been doing. While I was reading, it had, once and again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long, for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over—perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever … if the judge had not stopped me.

Thus, Orual reads her own mind and knows her own motives; yet Horney would argue that she remains too harsh with herself, for this psychologist would say that we cannot accept another's forgiveness until we are willing to forgive ourselves. Lewis does, however, demonstrate an awareness of the redundancy of neurotic claims, for Orual repeats in her vision the neurotic claims she has repeated time and time again in the extra-visionary world.

Now that Orual is aware of her Ungit-like despised self (though she still does not see that it is a false self), she comes to understand that all the effort in the world will not produce the perfection of her idealized image. Therefore, she is ready to reach out to her possible self in an effort to actualize her true potential.

Two figures, reflections, their feet to Psyche's feet and mine, stood head downward in the water. But who were they? Two Psyches, the one clothed, the other naked? Yes, both Psyches, both beautiful (if that mattered now) beyond all imagining, yet not exactly the same.

"You also are Psyche," came a great voice. I looked up then, and it's strange that I dared. But I saw no god, no pillared court. I was in the palace gardens, my foolish book in my hand. The vision to the eye had, I think, faded one moment before the oracle to the ear. For the words were still sounding.

Because Orual becomes a second Psyche at the end of the novel, we can safely say that, for Lewis, Psyche is a role model for both Orual and his readers. Because Orual is equally as beautiful, yet not the same as the original Psyche, we can say that Lewis appears to see the need for some kind of individuality in emotionally healthy individuals.

Yet Horney and many Feminists as well would reject Psyche as a model for the healthy human being. Peter Schakel, in Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, makes the following statement which will help to explain their objections:

We are not to assume, therefore, that Psyche's loving attitude, self-giving concern for others, responsiveness to spiritual urgings, and understanding of divine matters reflect something unique and unattainable; rather, they exemplify what all of us could be and indeed should be.

This aspect of Lewis's message is what Horney, who has been described as the originator of much Feminist thought, would not accept. Psyche, when sacrificed to the god of the Mountain, becomes a Pagan symbol for the Incarnate Christ. As we shall see, in her marriage to the anthropomorphic deity, she becomes the model for the Christian wife. When Orual cites the opinions of those in Glome in an attempt to persuade Psyche to light a lamp and gaze on her husband, Psyche's response emphasizes the human nature of her marriage to the god of the mountain. Later she refers to her sister's virginity and thus emphasizes the sexual physicality of her own relationship with her mate. Psyche also mentions that she would be ashamed to disobey him. Because the god is anthropomorphic, he, not Psyche, becomes the role model for males, and Psyche's behavior toward him is the model for female relationships with men. Psyche's submissive example recommends a self-effacing solution as the goal for feminine behavior, and the authoritarian position of the god glorifies the expansive solution in men. Feminists as well as the psychologists we have been discussing would agree that such a model for human interaction can work only within the confines of fiction, for the world of the readers, as Paris points out, does not confirm the effectiveness of such exclusive reliance on one model for human relations.

While Lewis's Psyche shows great inner strength in resisting Orual's neurotic claim that Psyche be totally surrendered to Orual's insatiable desire for undivided allegiance, Lewis nevertheless presents as the only appropriate alternative allegiance, devotion to a masculine mate who demands an identical amount of control over Psyche's behavior. Psyche is not even permitted to view her husband's countenance. Readers see that although Lewis appears to admire Orual's intellect, he ultimately condemns her search for knowledge and its inherent power, through his presentation of Psyche's willingness to remain ignorant as a virtue. A recent analysis of the Psyche myth presents a psychologically healthier interpretation in which the goddess discovers her true identity when she leaves the oppression of Amor's cave.

Feminists would argue that women must resist Lewis's solution to the problem of communication between the sexes, for they would see Lewis's idealized image of heterosexual relationships, not as one of communication, but as one of domination of the male over the female, a model which Horney, Maslow, and Paris also would find unacceptable. It seems that the remedy Lewis provides for Orual's inner conflict is what Horney would call another neurotic solution. Though this self-effacement works within the confines of the novel, humanistic psychologists and Feminists alike would say that in the world outside Lewis's text, self-effacing women who allow men to set limits to their personal knowledge or efforts toward other achievements severely hinder their own self-actualization. Also, they would agree that though Lewis demonstrates in Orual's portrayal a deep understanding of much of the female experience, he fails in his attempt to provide a pragmatic solution to the emotional crises many women face. Feminists and humanistic psychologists would explain that only in insisting upon her right to define her self-worth as something which does not depend upon someone else's opinion can any woman discover her full feminine potential. They would add that in this way, and this way alone, will she be able to come "face to face" with her real self.