C.S. Lewis's Advice to Ugly Girls

bitterness over what you lack will rot every gift you actually have. You don’t get justice in this world, you get grace.

No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race, for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny. How bitter this was, every ill-favoured woman will know. We have all had our dream of some other land, some other world, some other way of giving the prizes which would bring us in as the conquerors; leave the smooth, rounded limbs, and the little pink and white faces, and the hair like burnished gold, far behind; their day ended, and ours come. But how if it’s not so at all? How if we were made to be dregs and refuse everywhere and everyway? - Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis inadvertently gives unattractive women some advice by writing some 82,000 words about a woman who was born ugly and how she makes a case for herself against the gods. This book is called Till We Have Faces, the final novel that C.S. Lewis wrote and one that he labelled ‘far and away his best work’. Through a reinterpretation of the tale of Cupid, Aphrodite, and Psyche told from the perspective of Psyche’s unnattractive sister Orual, we are whisked away into an ancient world where the pagan gods are real and are asked to wrestle with the question “Is it fair to be born ugly?”

You could argue that Orual is right, certainly no one would fault her for being as bitter and dejected as she feels, what with having her face in a world where women were primarily valued for their beauty––yes even more so than in today’s modern times. At least today, the world has structured itself in a way that women can also receive the positive reinforcement they seek from their jobs, talents, family, their climbing of the career ladder, academic ladder, and so on and so forth. Where Orual’s from, however, women had no choice but to play out the hand they were dealt at birth, however cruel or fortune-filled.

All throughout Orual’s childhood––from when her dark dry locks were compared to her younger sister Redival’s gold, to how her beloved Psyche is taken away from her and forced to live a life of destitution (or so she thinks), to the way her cruel father treats her––her whole life, she wrestles with the concept of unfairness. She curses the gods, pleads with them, and is filled with a self-righteous anger. And from a certain angle, who can blame her?

Here’s where it gets a little complicated. As unlucky as Orual sees herself, she did have a few aces in hand. One of these being that Orual was born a princess of a kingdom and the eldest daughter of a King. A small kingdom, granted, and a tyrant King father, yes, but she enters the world inheriting a station of power and privilege nonetheless. And though Orual is born with a clear disadvantage because of her looks, she seems to marr every single good and beautiful thing she is gifted by the gods with sin. Till We Have Faces is a story that shows us what happens when a real wound (that comes with unjust societal consequences), becomes the organising principle of someone’s identity. We follow a character whose suffering becomes evidence, in her mind, that she is always the injured party and therefore that her possessiveness, manipulation, resentment, and cruelty are purely unfortunate consequences of what others have done to her.

Examples of Orual’s misdeeds include:

1. How she doesn’t let her tutor/slave Fox go despite her having the power to do so, and when he agrees not to leave her, she laps his moment of weakness up instead of doing the more gracious thing and encouraging him to pursue his highest fulfillment and happiness. She apologizes to him for this eventually, but not till the very end.

2. She marrs her love of Psyche with jealousy and selfish ambition— no matter how “agape-like” she thinks her love to be. During the climax of the book (spoilers) she is made to read out an account of her true feelings, showing for the first time, her true “face” and she is horrified at the clarity and implications of the truth.

3. Every time she loves, Orual distorts it with trickery and selfishness. She is cruel to Bardia (who already had a wife) and through subtle and overt manipulation, she keeps him working hard in the castle till the late hours till eventually, he dies from overexhaustion. Orual grows fat on the lives of men–– this is the accusation thrown against her from Bardia’s wife.

She uses the little power she has over others like a tyrant and looks down at other people for superficial reasons in exactly the same way she experiences being belittled. In multiple times throughout the novel, she calls people who are not of her lineage (who don’t have their divine blood) degrading names like “slut!” and we see how despicably Orual treats those who in a lot of ways had much less privilege than her and have drawn a much unluckier set of cards.

The irony is that when she is Queen, she acquires the ability to observe what it’s like on the other end of the conversation from those who lament about the unfairness of it all. As they lay their qualms down on her feet, Orual’s feelings on these matters may give us a glimpse into what the gods may feel when we complain about justice and injustice.

Justice? Oh, I’ve been a queen and I know the people’s cry for justice must be heard. But not my cry. A Batta’s muttering, a Redival’s whining: ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘Why should she?’ ‘It’s not fair.’ And over and over. Faugh!”

Though Orual struggles with the belief she has that life is unfair and that she was dealt an incredibly bad hand (she bemoans this for paragraphs, imagining alternative dimensions where Bardia is her husband and Psyche, her daughter), as queen and ruler and as someone with absolute power over her kingdom herself, she becomes angered and annoyed at those who wish ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ for themselves saying that she cannot find it in her to care. She grows tired of their many proclamations of her same exact general feeling. And isn’t that such a powerful and intriguing hypocrisy? For what is a peasant to a Queen? And what is a queen to God?

“Yet all the time I was able to go about my work, doing and saying whatever was needful, and no one knew that there was anything amiss. Indeed the dooms I gave, sitting on my judgement seat, about this time, were thought to be even wiser and more just than before; it was work on which I spent much pains and I know I did it well. But the prisoners and plaintiffs and witnesses and the rest now seemed to me more like shadows than real men. I did not care a straw (though I still laboured to discern) who had a right to the little field or who had stolen the cheeses.”

What’s surprising, however, is that in the end, Orual is remembered as a just, wise leader. Is this just? At the expense of the happiness of her loved ones, was it worth it that she achieve all of this? After all the wrongdoing that she had done?

(I, Arnom, priest of Aphrodite, saved this roll and put it in the temple. From the markings after the word might, we think the Queen’s head must have fallen forward on them as she died and we cannot read them. This book was all written by Queen Orual of Glome, who was the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world. If any stranger who intends the journey to Greece finds this book let him take it to Greece with him, for that is what she seems mostly to have desired. The Priest who comes after me has it in charge to give up the book to any stranger who will take an oath to bring it into Greece?

After reading Orual’s story, it grows more and more apparent to me that as I relate most to Orual in her bitterness and vices, I grow further and further away from her in the greatness of her virtues. And might not we all? For which of us have not grown fat on the lives of the people who pour out everything they have for us? They give all they can and we thank them inadequately, knowing that this is true in our hearts. We are like Orual giving Fox luxurious apartments in Ungitland while preventing him from going to Greece. Which of us has not had a selfish love? Has not had the same gnawing self-serving thoughts that Orual has had?

Who are we to make our case against the gods? To exclaim that life isn’t fair, lament at how the wicked do prosper and how the gods turn a blind eye?

“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?”

Once we take a true accounting of ourselves and our actions, once we truly show our faces, our words will die at our lips and we shall be quiet–– bashful and bare-faced under the eyes of the Truth. Orual demands justice from the gods before she knows what she herself truly is, and when she finally acquires a face from which she can speak honestly, her accusation collapses into a need for mercy. Her ugliness was not in her flesh, but in her ability to love and the inherently flawed manner that she operated through the world––no matter how “good” her initial intentions had been.

And if the gods had been just, they would have cast her into the pit. Instead, they showed her grace. And perhaps that is the answer to her lifelong grudge against her station in life, as well as to women who perceive themselves to be unattractive, as well as to all the people who feel like the odds have been stacked against them since birth. The gods are not fair. Thank God.

“Are the gods not just?”

“Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.”

-Till We Have Faces

Perhaps we should be thankful that life is unjust. If it weren’t, then woe be to us all.