Angel has inspired three previous articles. I
have described her imagination, her life and personality and her resemblance to
various witches. So what more can there be to say about this strange and
impossible woman?
There are some more familiar features and
scenarios in her story to be described, and more details to come about the way
she wants and gets things.
Wants and obsessions
Angel is an all-or-nothing person; she wants
what she wants, how and when she wants it, on her own terms.
People like Angel are so single-minded in the
pursuit of what they want that they may behave like addicts desperate for their
next fix. They want nothing and no one except whatever they are currently
obsessed with; if they are offered anything else they behave as if they have
been given a stone when they wanted bread.
I have already mentioned Angel’s visit to her
publisher in which she ignores his wife. Angel mostly ignores her aunt, except
when she hears her say something interesting about life in the big house,
something that she can use in her fantasies.
As a schoolgirl, Angel spends as much time as
possible in her imagination, dreaming about living a life of luxury as a member
of the family that owns the local big house. She surprises her aunt by actually
asking her some questions after hearing her say something that catches her interest
and provides food for her imagination. I have seen this behaviour in real life;
it is not a good sign. The perpetrator blocks someone completely, then suddenly
pounces on them if there is a chance of getting something they want from them.
Invitations to visit the big house
One of the oldest articles in this blog is
about something I think of as psychological black magic and how it can go
wrong.
Some people for example get what they have
been wishing obsessively and continuously for, but it is just a cheap copy or a
fifth-rate travesty.
In Angel’s case, she gets an invitation or
two to visit the big house of her dreams but not in the way she has envisaged. She
is outraged when her aunt twice offers her an opportunity to go there, but only
as a servant’s visitor and as a servant.
On the one hand, it is likely that even if
Angel had been an ordinary girl or had never even thought about the big house she
would have been offered the same opportunities; on the other hand, there are many
signs that say to me that unseen influences are at work in her life: she has
many experiences common to people who practise psychological black magic.
We learn that Angel doesn’t just daydream and
let pictures drift into her mind, her fantasising places a severe strain on her
powers of concentration. Obsessively concentrating on something to the
exclusion of everything else for long periods is dangerous; being able to do
this is one of the requirements for practising black magic.
Another example of disappointed wishes
There is a scene in Angel where she sits
alone in a public park at dusk, overwhelmed with an agony of longing for a
companion, someone who, unlike her aunt and mother and the inhabitants of her
drab and dreary little town, would understand her bitter loneliness and feel
compassion for her. She hears someone coming towards her but it is only the
park attendant, shouting for everyone to leave because it is time to shut the
gates.
There is nothing unusual about this – it
might have happened to anyone sitting there - and the park attendant is not an
unpleasant man: he asks her whether she is all right. It is just very jarring
when, once again, there is such a big difference between what she desperately
wants and what she actually gets.
Not only that, but other people of interest
had similar experiences.
This scene from Angel reminds me of something
that I read in Antonia White’s very autobiographical novel The Sugar House. She
recalls how, at a time when she was walking alone on the Downs, she felt a
sudden, intense longing for a companion, someone she could share her secret
thoughts with. No one appeared - apart from a horrible man her father’s age who
leered at her and called her ‘Missy’!
Then there is Charlotte Brontë. I mentioned in this article how she dreamed of Arthur Wellesley, the dark
and glamorous Duke of Wellington, and many years later was stalked by a dark
man called Arthur!
When such practitioners of unconscious
witchcraft desperately wish for something, it can act rather like a spell and
draw people in; the problem is that people with no defences against the spell
are the wrong sort of people!
Getting what she wants
Once Angel becomes successful, she finds
other ways of getting what she wants. These include giving orders and spending
huge amounts of money.
She makes inordinate and inappropriate demands
on her long-suffering publishers. She bombards them with commands, errands and
commissions. It is less trouble for them to give in to her pestering, and
anyway she is making huge amounts of money for the company. She compels her
unfortunate mother and other people to do what she wants too.
Angel has no financial sense at all. For a
while, her writing brings in huge amounts of money but she wastes a lot of it.
She spends a fortune on unsuitable clothes
that look dreadful and attract ridicule.
She stockpiles stuff. She buys things on
impulse from the classified advertisements in the papers. She buys a suit of
armour, bronze statues of centaurs, a sable muff...whatever takes her fancy.
Even if the item turns out to be unsatisfactory, it is too much trouble to send
it back.
She would have been even worse with eBay,
shopping channels and one-click buying!
When Angel gets something that she wants from
someone, she doesn’t usually feel any gratitude or appreciation; she takes it
all for granted as her due. When she
buys an item, she does not cherish it; she ignores or neglects it. She lets her
cats ruin it. She doesn’t always take good care of the pets she buys either: some of them fail to thrive or they even die before their time.
This makes me think of a crocodile dragging
prey to its lair then burying it in the mud and forgetting it. It is
dog-in-the-manger behaviour.
Insisting on getting something followed by
immediate abandonment in favour of the next want or obsession is no way to go
through life.
More to come
There is still more to be said about Angel
and her dreadful behaviour. There are more connections to be made and some
symbolic elements to be described.
