In reading Till We Have Faces, I was struck by the seeming complexity of Orual's character. In the beginning of the book, Orual is simply Orual. Her love is almost pure for those around her. Her love for Psyche is so deep, in fact, that she wishes to be Psyche's "real mother," lover, and "full sister(p.22)." This pure love, however, slowly transforms into something not so pure. Orual becomes jealous of Psyche and the fact that Psyche doesn't even seem to need her when Psyche is about to die.
After Orual forces Psyche to disobey her husband and Orual becomes queen, she begins to refer to herself as if she was not fully herself. I found it strange that she would say, for example, that if she could vanish into the Queen, "the gods would almost be cheated (p.201)." Why does she say such things and refer to herself as two different people? Perhaps Lewis was trying to flesh out her character more. It seems like maybe the "Orual part" of Orual could represent her guilt, her past, her weakness, and her ugliness.
The "Queen part" of Orual, on the other hand, might represent her strength. While she serves as queen, she wears the veil that covers her face. Orual describes how with her veil, she becomes "something very mysterious and awful (p.229)." This gives her power over others and a respect that she had not known while others could see her ugliness. Orual seems to use focusing on this powerful part of herself as a means of coping with her guilt. She tries hard to suppress "Orual" and become completely the "Queen."
Toward the end of the book Orual also calls herself Ungit. I'm not sure that I totally understand what this meant other than the fact that this was maybe the part of her character that didn't really care about the welfare of her people. Orual says that "to say that I was Ungit meant that I was as ugly in soul as she; greedy, blood-gorged (p.281-282)." This realization helps her to recognize how selfish she is and allows her to move toward becoming less selfish.
The part of Orual's character that I think I understand the least, is at the end of the book when she is called Psyche. At this point, she has come back to having a pure, selfless love for Psyche. Perhaps, then, this meant that Orual had become like Psyche in her character--the guilt was gone and her soul had been perfected.
I think at the end of the book she becomes like psyche because she suffers all that she has and bears the pain for psyche when she had to do the tasks to gain back her husband.
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