C.S. Lewis built Till We Have Faces from the old tale of Cupid and Psyche, which appears in Apuleius and is told from the perspective of Psyche, not her sister. Lewis shifts the point of view to the older, plainer sister and asks what the story looks like from there. Students who write about this choice have a strong topic, but they need guidance on what counts as analysis.

The first trap is the inventory essay. A student lists everything Lewis changed, such as Orual's narration, the invisible palace, and the ambiguous gods, and treats each change as a separate fact. That approach shows the student read both versions, but it never asks why the changes matter or how they work together to shift the meaning of the story.

Good feedback names the move the student should make next. Rather than saying the essay needs more analysis, ask what effect a particular change has on the reader, such as how making the palace invisible to Orual forces the reader to decide whether to trust her. That question points toward interpretation without handing the student a ready-made answer. The same question can be reused across papers with small changes, which keeps the comments quick to write and still specific.

Teaching Students to Treat Adaptation as an Argument

A retelling is never a neutral copy, and students who grasp that tend to write sharper essays. Each decision the author makes, whether to cut a scene, add a character, or change who tells the story, can be read as a claim about what the original missed. Feedback that encourages students to phrase their points as claims about Lewis's purpose helps them move from description to argument.

• Identifies a specific change Lewis made rather than a general difference in tone
• Explains what effect the change has on how readers judge Orual
• Connects the change to a larger idea such as faith, doubt, or self-knowledge
• Uses evidence from the novel, not only a summary of the original myth
• Avoids assuming the myth is the standard Lewis fails or meets

Handling Students Who Have Not Read the Myth

Many students come to this assignment knowing nothing about Cupid and Psyche beyond a one-paragraph summary from the teacher. That is fine, as long as the rubric says clearly how much knowledge of the source is expected. Grading a student down for missing details they were never taught is unfair, and it discourages the kind of risk-taking that makes literary essays interesting.

A short handout summarizing the myth's main events levels the playing field and lets students focus on Lewis's choices. If the class reads Apuleius as well, the rubric can ask for specific comparisons. Either way, tell students ahead of time what the grader will treat as common knowledge and what has to be cited. Without that clarity, students who did extra reading are rewarded unevenly, and those who did not are left guessing at the standard.

Common Errors Worth Flagging

One recurring error is treating the myth as the true version and Lewis's novel as a distortion. Students who write this way often miss that Lewis is making a deliberate argument about perception and self-deception. A comment such as "What would the story gain or lose if we trusted Orual completely?" can redirect the essay toward Lewis's intentions. Students who recognize that the novel is itself an argument with the myth tend to write conclusions that say something about Lewis's view of belief.

Another error is reading Psyche as a purely allegorical figure standing for the soul, which flattens her into a symbol and ignores her warmth and her particular relationship with her sister. Feedback should encourage students to find both layers, the symbolic role and the human character. Essays that do this tend to produce more persuasive claims about what Orual loses and why it hurts.

Using Feedback Tools Without Losing the Personal Touch

Comment banks and AI-drafted feedback can speed up the repetitive parts of responding to these essays, especially the notes about summary versus analysis that appear on nearly every paper. The key is to edit each comment so it points to a specific moment in the student's own writing. A comment that mentions the student's actual sentence feels like a conversation, while a generic one feels like a form letter.

Teachers who use this approach often reserve their own time for the longer response at the end of the paper. A short paragraph of personal commentary on the student's most promising idea does more to build confidence than a dozen margin notes. The tools handle the routine work, and the teacher handles the encouragement that only a human reader can offer.