Come away with me and be my wife

“Come away with me and be my wife” is Michael Hosea’s repeated appeal to Angel to leave her circumstances and marry him. The words begin as a promise of escape that Angel meets with cynicism and refusal; their meaning deepens as the marriage takes shape, exposing the gulf between her transactional expectations and Michael’s belief in an enduring shared life.

First Proposals and Refusal

Michael first tells Angel that she will marry him and that he will take her out of there. She treats the declaration as another proposal in a day already crowded with them, answering with cold irony and asking when she is expected to play her part. Michael replies that he wants to know her before the ring is on her finger. His offer therefore joins a practical promise of removal with a request for a relationship, though Angel initially hears it through the conventions of the life she knows.

When Michael later asks her to come home with him and be his wife, Angel angrily shrugs off his hands and refuses. He keeps returning, each time more determined, while Bret Magowan eventually warns him to leave if he wants to avoid trouble. Michael does not unbutton his shirt; before departing, he repeats the appeal, “Come away with me. Marry me.” Angel answers that she has already refused three times. The refrain marks not easy courtship but a sustained conflict between Michael’s persistence and Angel’s effort to keep the offer at a distance.

Marriage and Competing Meanings

After they marry, Michael insists that Angel is his wife, but she argues that he paid for her just as before. He explains that paying the Duchess seemed the quickest way to get her away, making clear why the act of rescue does not immediately alter Angel’s view of their bond. She continues to measure the marriage against the transactions that have governed her life.

That difference appears in their expectations of married life. Angel tests whether Michael expects the usual wifely duties; he says they will consummate the marriage when it means more to her than work. When she offers to do whatever he wants, he objects to treating intimacy as an indifferent service and declares that his vows before God bind him for better or worse, until death. His repeated proposal thus acquires a meaning beyond departure: it asks Angel to imagine a marriage not organized as a purchase or an exchange of bodily access.

Michael describes marriage as a promise to build a life together and to love one another regardless of what comes. Angel doubts that such a promise can include someone with her past; Michael distinguishes who she was from who she is. His vision is concrete as well as devotional: he imagines a grape arbor, additions to the cabin, a west-facing porch, shared evenings, and children someday, God willing. Angel hears the scale of that future and recognizes that it presumes a life together lasting a long time.

Recurrence and Significance

The proposal’s promise is measured against Angel’s departures and returns. When Michael asks why she went back, she says she wanted her gold so she could have a little cabin in the woods. Later, she tells him that she had sex with Paul to pay for the ride back. These disclosures show how survival and mobility remain entangled with money and transactional intimacy, even as Michael offers a home and a lasting bond.

Michael treats marriage as a lifetime commitment, not an arrangement to be discarded when it becomes difficult. The recurring invitation gathers these contrasts into a single expression: leaving the old life is not, for him, merely a change of place, but the beginning of a shared future. For Angel, the words remain difficult to trust because she has learned to understand promises through payment, obligation, and the risk of dependence.