This is what Orual is doing throughout all of Till We Have Faces. She has a complaint, but the reasons that she gives for her complaint turn out to not be her reasons at all. Instead of looking inside herself to find out why she ruined Psyche's happiness, she looks to the gods as objects for her blame. It wasn't her fault that the gods were unclear. She didn't really know. The gods changed the past so that even though before she wasn't sure, if she looked back now the past would tell her that she had always known. These are just a few of the reasons that Orual gives for her actions, but none of them are the true reason that she finally discovers. At the end of the book, when Orual finally reads her complaint, she isn't reading from the book she wrote. She reads something that she has never seen before; that she finds to be the truth. The truth is something that in all of her anger about what had been done, she had never considered as what could have been her reason.
The question I have been thinking about is whether or not Orual had good reasons in the midst of all of her rationalizations. I know that I am coming from a completely different time and culture, but I think that looking at how Orual sees her love for Psyche we can find some thing that may have made her doubt Psyche's story. Orual sees herself as Psyche's mother, she isn't really, but she has played that role in Psyche's life. This might be my world view coming into play, but what mother would be okay with her daughter living with and being married to a man she has not met. I know that as the one who was getting married I wanted my family to know who my husband was. This is a different situation and Psyche's husband is a god and no one knew that she would end up married after the sacrifice on the hill, but I think that some of Orual's jealousy came from the fact that as the one person who had loved Psyche up until this point, she was not allowed to meet the one who had come into Psyche's life. I think that any mother who was as close to her daughter as Orual seems to be to Psyche would be jealous of a man she has never met who takes her daughter from her.
Maybe this is just another rationalization that Orual herself had never thought of, but there is so much ambiguity in the story that maybe that is all we can find. Maybe Orual would have been less jealous of a man that she knew instead of a secretive god, but maybe not. I think that often it is easier for a person to rationalize his or her actions instead of claiming responsibility for them. Orual points the finger at the gods as the reason for what she did and this was not the best course of action she could have taken, but was there any truth in her accusation. We learn that her real reasons were selfishness and jealousy, but would things have been different if the gods had revealed more things to her?
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