The idea of retelling the myth of Cupid and Psyche, with the palace invisible, had been in C. S. Lewis's mind ever since he was an undergraduate; the retelling, as he imagined it, involved writing through the perspective of the elder sister. He argued that this made the sister not simply envious and spiteful, but ignorant (as any mortal might be of the divine) and jealous (as anyone could be in their love). He tried it in different verse-forms when he considered himself primarily a poet, so that one could say that he'd been "at work on Orual for 35 years", even though the version told in the book "was very quickly written". In his pre-Christian days, Lewis would imagine the story with Orual "in the right and the gods in the wrong".[2][3]
One of the inconsistencies of Apuleius's version was the fact that the sister's could see the palace. For Lewis, the theme of belief is central to the story and he felt that Apuleius missed the chance to give his version of the story a true mythic quality; that is to invoke what Rudolph Otto terms in his 1923 work The Idea of the Holy the idea of the numinous which is a feeling of awe in the presence of the spiritual or holy, the supernatural.[4] Orual does not posses the belief system that will allow her to enter into the realm of the numinous as she briefly catches sight of the palace before it vanishes. After this scene, her resolve to "protect" Psyche from the love of others is the root of her jealousy and the crux of her accusation against the injustices of the gods.[5] Conversely, Psyche, from an early age, exhibits the openness to embrace the numinous; she feels a civic duty to heal the citizenry of Glome, she willingly accepts her role as the Accursed and the conjoined penalty of death/marriage to the Shadowbrute, the god of the Grey Mountain.
Another theme that Lewis felt Apuleius did not fully develop revolves around sacrifice.[6] Till We Have Faces is a retelling of Apuleius's original story. Within Lewis's work there is also a retelling of the myth Orual has been telling her self represented by the segmenting of her narrative into Part 1 (the myth she tells (of) herself) and Part 2 (the retelling (to/of) herself with a new understanding of her self-awareness and outer connections to others). By the end of Part 1, Orual realizes that her love for Psyche has become perverted; it is a possessive love, unwilling to share Psyche's love with others. Bardia's widow, Ansit, points this out to Orual in a no-holds-barred confrontation after her husband's death; Orual has "consumed" the lives of her loved ones just as Ungit consumes sacrifices. This begins the dose of self-awareness that leads to Orual's "death of self" or sacrifice of her self to others, a higher, more universal power. On a societal or cultural level, the need to temper the natural loves, what Lewis would expand upon four years after TWHF in his 1960 book The Four Loves, with the subjugation of storge (affection), philia (friendship), and eros (romantic love) to that of agape (divine love) is the basis for one's ability to retain the ordered nature of those three natural loves; without the authority of agape, divine love, to govern them, the breakdown of the natural loves would ensue as a result of the back-biting nature of the three natural loves if left to their own devices.[7] This ideology goes as far back as Homer's era and the subject of the Trojan War which was used to exemplify to Greeks the effects of disordered love on socio-cultural mores (see Helen of Troy).
Origin of title
C. S. Lewis originally titled his working manuscripts "Bareface". The editor (Gibb) rejected the title "Bareface" on the ground that readers would mistake it for a Western. In response, Lewis said he failed to see why people would be deterred from buying the book if they thought it was a Western, and that the working title was cryptic enough to be intriguing.[8] Nevertheless, Lewis started considering an alternative title on February 29, 1956, and chose "Till We Have Faces", which refers to a line from the book where Orual says, "How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?"[8] He defended his choice in a letter to his long-time correspondent, Dorothea Conybeare, explaining the idea that a human "must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona."[9][8][3]
