Cupid and Psyche, Part I: Marrying Amelia Bedelia and the Problem of Beauty

The Chatner is entirely supported by paying readers, whose generosity has now enabled me to write three novels in three years, and keep baby Rocco supplied with a near-endless supply of bananas (He likes to carry the peel around with him after he’s finished like a blanket). If you become a paying member, you get access to a wealth of subscribers-only writing (I also take requests, so email me your demands). For the rest of May I’m offering a 40% discount for the next year to anyone who signs up.

Please do consider upgrading to a paid membership! If you’d like to do so but can’t afford it, just email me at dannymlavery@gmail.com and I will get you a free gift subscription for the next year.

Cupid weeping as once again everyone in Heaven criticizes his wife for failing to follow directions

[From Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: Adlington version, Bulfinch version]

A lot of people will try to tell you that the story of Cupid and Psyche is a Neoplatonic allegory for the soul, but don’t you let them. It’s a story designed to reassure the average person that beautiful people aren’t that much happier than the rest of us.

Apuleius’ frame for the story is marvelous. He himself has been transformed into a donkey, and also kidnapped by thieves; worse, he has overeaten: “And yet for all the great sleept hat came upon me, I could in no wise leave eating: and whereas when I was a man I could be contented with one or two loaves at the most, now my huts were so greedy that three panniers full would scantly serve me, and while I considered these things the morning came.”

The same thieves have also kidnapped a young woman for ransom, and her distress is so great that the old woman left to mind her tells her the story of Cupid and Psyche to calm her down, although first she — the old woman, I mean — threatens to burn her alive if she doesn’t shut up, so I can’t imagine it was very calming at all.

It is difficult to live alongside beauty without developing a lot of compensatory fantasies about the soul, of course. Take the last twenty years or so: On the one side, you have half-joking fables like “this is how you age when you’re unproblematic,” which promises beauty, or at least an arrested aging process, to the virtuous, while on the other hand for a few years talking about himbos become quite popular, promising modesty and unself-consciousness to the already-gorgeous. The idea of someone who was not only good-looking but also intelligent and socially competent (and worse yet, aware of their attractiveness, possibly even prepared to leverage it to their advantage against you!) is too much by half. Better balance it out with vague affability.

This was, I’m sure, a problem even for the ancient Greeks, who by my count spent about three quarters of every day drawing examples of perfect male beauty and only twenty-five minutes tending to their crops or participating in democracy, which left things wide open for the Romans to steal all their shipping lanes and temples.

The story of Cupid and Psyche, broadly, is of the most bumbling marriage between two gorgeous fools ever contracted. Psyche is a young woman who is so beautiful that everybody hates her; Cupid is the darling rascal of Heaven with a serious case of small-dog syndrome, since no one, least of all his mother Aphrodite, has ever bothered to discipline him as he tears about in the nude flinging arrows at people. Aphrodite, for her part, is the most ruthlessly committed boy-mom this side of Norma Bates.

Aphrodite is vexed to begin with, since Psyche’s beauty causes everyone to leave off making sacrifices to her, so she calls her Yorkshire Terrier boy to her side and demands he makes her fall in love with an old hat or a pile of sticks. He botches the job, like Michael Palin’s character in A Fish Called Wanda who keeps accidentally killing dogs instead of his target, and falls in love with her himself; the two marry and go through a series of comic mishaps.

Being married to Psyche is a lot like being married to Amelia Bedelia; she cannot hear an instruction without slightly misinterpreting it and immediately disobeying it. Things must and do end well, but everyone beautiful must behave very, very stupidly first, so that listeners to the story will not become jealous and discontented.