Angels

Angels appear in the book not as independently developed supernatural characters but as figures in the religious and imaginative world through which a girl learns to understand authority, love, and her own expected role. Although theologians declare them sexless, they are given masculine names and depicted as handsome young men. Their significance lies in that contrast: even the supposedly transcendent realm takes a masculine form, while the girl is taught to approach it through submission and expectation.

Place in the Religious Imagination

The discussion places Angels within a wider hierarchy of male authority. In the Western religious traditions considered, God the Father is pictured as a man, and Christ as a man of flesh and blood. Angels, though said to have no sex, carry masculine names and appear as handsome young men. On earth, the pope, bishop, priest, and preacher are likewise men. The pattern makes religious authority seem continuous with the authority of earthly fathers and other men who lead public life.

The girl’s relation to the eternal Father is described as analogous to her relation to her earthly father. Because this relation takes place in imagination, the surrender can be experienced as more complete still. Angels belong to the gaze before which the pious child gives herself up: the sacred audience is not presented as neutral, but as masculine. Their role therefore reinforces the book’s account of how social arrangements and customs give meaning to experience; biological facts alone cannot explain why women occupy the position of the Other.

Images of Devotion and Renunciation

The book connects religious devotion with the language and gestures of submission. It describes women saints addressing Christ on their knees and the Virgin welcoming the angel’s words while kneeling. Such images make religious surrender a model available to the girl as she imagines a future shaped by love. The association is not treated as proof that religious feeling is always sexual. Rather, the argument is that the girl’s later erotic life can be permeated by religious feelings and forms of devotion learned earlier.

In this account, kneeling and abandonment carry a double promise: renunciation is painful, yet it is represented as a way to reach heaven and receive love. Angels frame that imagined ascent, appearing amid the clouds and glory through which surrender becomes a route to consolation. The book thus treats religious imagery not simply as doctrine, but as material through which a girl may learn that happiness depends on being loved and that love is something for which she must wait.

Angels and the Waiting Heroine

The angelic image joins a broader pattern in fairy tales and popular stories. Their heroines are placed in towers, palaces, gardens, caves, or other forms of captivity; the young man sets out, fights dangers, and comes to seek the woman who waits. The girl is cast as the one who receives and endures, while the boy is encouraged to imagine himself as the active hero. The book names the Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Skin, Cinderella, and Snow White as figures in this pattern and connects it to the expectation that a prince will eventually arrive.

The surrounding religious imagery gives that expectation a sacred counterpart: the girl’s imaginative surrender to a divine embrace resembles, without being identical to, the earthly future she is encouraged to anticipate in men’s arms. The pattern makes waiting appear not like an imposed limitation but like a path to happiness and elevation. It also helps explain why appearance and passive endurance can acquire such weight in the stories available to girls: the heroine is valued for being loved, while the man is shown acting and choosing.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Angels condense the book’s contrast between formal doctrine and cultural representation. Their supposed sexlessness does not prevent them from being marked as masculine in names and images. That detail belongs to a larger argument: a body or biological fact does not by itself determine a person’s social status; people live their bodies within customs, laws, and systems of value. In the religious imagination described here, masculine representation helps make male authority appear to extend even into the supernatural.

Their significance is therefore less a matter of plot than of formation. Alongside fathers, priests, stories, and admired male leaders, Angels help populate the world in which a girl learns whom to admire, whose gaze matters, and what kind of future she is taught to hope for. The imagery links devotion, renunciation, waiting, and romantic expectation, revealing how a supposedly transcendent ideal can echo the gendered roles of ordinary social life.