"When Psyche lets go of Cupid's leg and falls, exausted, to the ground, Cupid turns in his flight. Alighting on the top of a tall cypress, he speaks to her about what he had not wanted her to see: his relationship with his mother, his vulnerability. "My poor, naïve Psyche," he begins. She did not know what was happening, could not know except insofar as she felt his fear of being exposed, his fragility, and the urgency of his need for control. Now anger rushes to the surface as he begins to speak about his love. His voice is distant and supercilious: "In fact I disobeyed the orders of my mother Venus, who had commanded me to chain you with passion for some wretched and worthless man and sentence you to the lowest sort of marriage. Instead I flew to you myself as your lover." He had shot himself with his own arrow, falling in love with her and making her his wife, only to discover that she had thought him a wild beast, a monster, and had taken a knife to cutt off his head, "the head that held a lover's eyes." It is hard to hear the love ("your lover, lover's eyes") through the veil of attack, which now picks up force. He had warned her not to listen to her sisters. As for Psyche, he will punish her now "merely by leaving." With this, Cupid takes off into the sky, heading for his mother's chambers. By refusing to accompany her father in his blindness, by saving herself and her child instead of obeying her husband, by opening her eyes and seeing with whom she is living, Psyche has walked out of the Oedipus plot, but Cupid is heading into the heart of tragedy."
Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure
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