Abstract
The Psyche and Cupid story is a central myth of female maturation, among its other meanings. At its core, it is a story of a powerful older woman, a mother-figure, controlling a younger woman’s path to maturity, seemingly blocking her way by imposing impossible tasks, but through these tasks teaching her what she needs to learn to become an adult. In the Greek myth, the marker of maturity is full and socially sanctioned union with the god/husband; in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, the marker becomes a job that both “pays the rent” and that the young woman can hold with integrity and independence. I will also look at such diverse sources as the Tam Lin legend, Hayao Miyazake’s Spirited Away, C.S. Lewis’s retelling of the Psyche myth in Till We Have Faces, and the movie Julie & Julia as variants of the underlying “mother”/maiden conflict.