Angel's failed suicide attempt

Angel’s failed suicide attempt is a turning point in her relationship with Michael: rather than ending her suffering, it leaves her reliant on the husband she resents and deepens her fear that escape is impossible. Its significance unfolds beyond the immediate crisis, as the despair and dependency surrounding it become part of the trauma she later reveals to him.

Despair and Dependence

After reaching for a way to end her life in desperation, Angel survives but feels no relief. She is left in pain and believes she has entered bondage to another man. Her failed plans feed her conviction that she cannot do anything right, while her physical weakness makes her dependent on Michael for food, water, shelter, and everything else. She resents that dependence and hates him more because she must rely on him.

Michael’s persistence compounds her unease. She sees him as unlike the men she knows how to resist: her words do not seem to wound him, and his quiet determination unsettles her. He remains near her when she is awake, while she wants only to be left alone. The attempt therefore reverses her immediate hope of escape into a situation of enforced reliance, intensifying the conflict between her need for care and her fear of being controlled.

The Marriage and the Name

The crisis takes place within a marriage Angel refuses to let Michael redefine. When he tells her that Angel is not her real name and explains that Mara comes from the Bible’s Book of Ruth, she insists that Angel is who he married and the only name she will accept from him. The exchange makes her chosen identity a boundary: she will not let her husband’s religious understanding dictate who she is.

Their struggle also meets Michael’s biblical frame of reference. He tells her the story of a prophet whose wife repeatedly leaves and says that someday she will have to make a choice. Angel responds with bitter sarcasm, imagining the woman condemned and sent away. She does not ask how the story ends. The allusion places their marriage under the sign of return and fidelity, but Angel hears its danger as well as its promise: the possibility that she will be judged for leaving.

What the Attempt Conceals

Michael later recalls that, during Angel’s fever, she had revealed fragments of the misery behind her life. That memory helps him decide to go after her when she returns to Pair-a-Dice, even after her betrayal has wounded him. The failed attempt thus belongs to a larger pattern in which Angel’s desperation and pain are difficult for her to explain directly, yet remain consequential to Michael’s decisions.

When she eventually tells him more, Angel describes her mother’s life on the docks, her mother’s death when Angel was eight, and Rab selling her to a brothel, where Duke abused her. She understands these events not as a past separate from herself but as proof that she should never have been born. Her account makes clearer the depth of the despair that preceded her attempt and why survival alone could not make her feel free.

Aftermath and Meaning

Angel later tells Michael that she cannot have children: she had been pregnant twice, and Duke had a doctor end both pregnancies; after the second, Duke ensured she could not become pregnant again. This disclosure links the bodily consequences of past coercion to the self-condemnation she voices elsewhere. She believes that what happened to her cannot be washed away and that she is destined to remain a prostitute.

The attempt is therefore not presented as a resolved episode: it marks the extremity of Angel’s hopelessness and the way violence has narrowed her sense of possible futures. Michael’s memory of her fever and suffering helps draw him back to her, while Angel’s later disclosures give their relationship a fuller context. The event’s central reversal is stark: she reaches for death to escape dependence and pain, survives, and finds herself dependent on the very man she had most wanted to avoid.