Narrative:
[383] A king reluctantly accedes to his people's demand that he heed an oracle and order the ritual sacrifice of his daughter Psyche ("soul, mind") to avert a threatened plague. When a procession accompanies her to her place of execution, however, the promised monster-executioner fails to appear, and Psyche finds herself transported from an isolated precipice to an edenic garden in a lovely valley. She enters the nearby palace, bathes, falls asleep, and is awakened during the night by the unseen but sensuous embrace of Venus's son Love. The next morning she finds her finger and head encircled with gold bands.
Anxious to reassure her father, Psyche sends messages through her sisters that she is well. Motivated by jealousy, the sisters suggest that her elusive lover may in fact be a fiend, and urge her to look at him carefully while he sleeps. When she does so she sees an image of beauty, brightness, and dawn, but at this moment a drop of lamp-oil awakens him and he angrily departs with the 'divine' warning that the Fates "shall work thy punishment alone."
Pathetically intent on reconciliation, Psyche now begins a long exile in earth and hell, poor, hungry, toil-worn, and pressed by constant fears. She first seeks aid from Ceres and Juno, but they cannot avert the wrath of Venus, Love's mother, whose minions brutalize her and threaten her with death. She is whipped, made to sort huge mounds of grain and gather golden fleece from dangerously wild rams, and sent to extract a mysterious secret from the pit of Hades. Only a tacit alliance with nature effects her survival: ants sort the grain for her, a reed explains to her how to approach the rams, and Jove's [384] bird fetches water from the confluence of the Styx and Cocytus rivers.
Psyche now harrows the underworld, where she must refuse to heed several pathetic figures who call to her for help (including an image of her father), and reject a banquet of exotic Hadean delicacies. In the end she is overwhelmed by despair, but Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, finally takes pity on her and gives her the casket Venus demands. On her return journey to the upper world Psyche opens the casket (which contains the "secret of changeless beauty"), and sinks into a coma, but "Love" at this point finally relents, closes the casket, and affirms his (small-case) love. At Love's request, Jove even promotes Psyche to divinity, and she presents her casket to Venus, who 'forgives' her and accepts her as her daughter-in-law. Psyche is now led into a heavenly valley to the throne of Jove, at whose bidding she drinks the cup of eternal life, and all cry aloud at her beauty.
Sources:
"The Story of Cupid and Psyche" was one of the first completed Earthly Paradise tales. Morris drastically revised the tone of his chief source for it, Book IV of Apuleius's Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass, and interpolated several minor details from Shakerley Marmion's Cupid and Psyche.
Apuleius's gods are even more noxious and meddlesome: Cupid is explicitly capricious and untrustworthy—he personally stage-manages, for example, the feigned-sacrifice-scenario—and Venus is a ranting dominatrix who "flew upon [Psyche], tore her clothes in a great many places, pulled out her hair, shook her by the head, and grievously maltreated her." Morris's "Love" and Venus are almost mild by comparison.
Nor are Apuleius's mortals particularly appealing. His king grieves for Psyche, but complies with the oracle's demand for her death, and Psyche is a proud and vengeful woman, who punishes her jealous sisters' deception with a death-dealing lie of her own. Morris, in short, makes a sustained attempt to reinterpret Apuleius's fairy-tale as a parable of spiritual maturation.
Critical Remarks:
[385] "The Story of Cupid and Psyche" is, of course, an allegory of female maturation. From the onset, Psyche's superabundant beauty passes understanding, and she expresses the fullness and "soul" of nature, an element of the natural world in one of its precarious moments of perfection. Clearly latent also in Morris's redaction of Apuleius's plot is his fondness for a variant of the King-Cophetua-and-the-beggar-maid motif: here once again, Psyche's affectionate and disinterested desire earns the love of a male of higher—indeed, highest—station.
Psyche is an active seeker in her way, but she is also a battered and imprisoned woman (compare familiar images from The Defence of Guenevere), led to the precipice, whipped and imprisoned, and rendered comatose by her decision to open the forbidden box. "Soul" looks suspiciously like an embodiment of masochistic Victorian ideals for women, and aspects of her travail parallel 'good' responses to sexuality in a period when "maturity" for women meant to leave one's parents and cleave immediately to one's husband. It is in this context that Psyche's lingering attachment to her family is "immature," and her alleged 'misjudgment'—her desire to see her unseen mate—an intolerable act of rebellion—is punished with unremitting intensity. The sole Earthly Paradise female quest narrative is also the only one in which Venus is jealous, threatening, and unrelentingly cruel—to another woman. She orders Psyche's humiliation with vengeful satisfaction, and her obduracy and virulence dominate the narrative's second half. Venus's sexuality is here a harsh and peremptory force, but Psyche's is softened and allayed by the bloom of her eternal beauty and youth, and the imprint of her paradigmatically gentle nature.
As the (literal) "soul of innocent desire," Psyche must therefore struggle to appease this vengeful goddess of sexuality before she can enter into the Greek pantheon with Love. Several male protagonists in The Earthly Paradise confront women forced to live as serpent or lamia-figures who embody male sexual fears. In this tale, the pattern is reversed: Psyche may or may not have [386] reason to fear that her handsome spirit lover is a demon in disguise, but she has every reason to fear the crazed domina who turns out to be his mother.
There are significant indications of stoic strength of character, however, in Psyche's responses to her travails. She calmly accepts death. She makes no attempt to flee. And she harrows hell without hesitation or complaint. At its best, then, Psyche's courageous journey to the underworld and her eventual apotheosis represent another persistent theme of The Earthly Paradise: the natural human yearning to transcend the limits of time and death. Even here, however, the final brush with heaven in Morris's narrative recalls the inadequacy of earth, "And godlike pity touched her therewithal / For her old self, for sons of men that die. ..."
See Bellas, 78-96; Boos, 235-51; Calhoun, 151-56; Kirchhoff (1990), 162-65; Oberg, 60-61; Silver, 68-69.
Manuscripts:
Morris noted that "The Story of Cupid and Psyche" was the first completed classical tale, and underwent several drafts. "The Story of Cupid and Psyche," B. L. Add. MS 45,305, ff. 73v-98, is an early pencil version, though the basic plot and end rhymes are generally those of the published tale. The draft at the Tinker Library, Yale University, roughly parallels those in the Fitzwilliam and Huntington; the fair draft for the printer is in Huntington MS 6418.
Illustrations:
In the mid-1860's, Edward Burne-Jones and Morris prepared a series of wood-cuts for parts of a proposed version of The Earthly Paradise which included "Zephyrus and Psyche," "The Talking Reed," "The Court of Venus," and "Psyche Entering Hades." Later, Burne-Jones completed a cycle of paintings on the legend of Cupid and Psyche for a frieze in the Kensington house of George and Rosalind Howard.