Till We Have Faces
What do Psyche and Orual both learn about the nature of love?
What does love mean in this story?
What does love mean in this story?
What better place to look than Lewis himself! See the following:
"[A] 'case' of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow."
Orual learns that love is not selfish, but self-giving and sacrificing. Instead of wanting to own Psyche and control her, she needed to accept Psyche as her own person. In what could almost be called her madness, Orual became what she hated the most about her father and Ungit. They were both selfish and only interested in themselves. Though Orual hated this, she never took a step back and looked at herself long enough to realize she too had these faults. So what does Orual learn about love? She learns that she has never truly understood love, she has only loved herself.