The Subtle Difference in an Angel and a Banshee

Oh golly. Maybe I was right to be afraid.

Whether you’re heathen or God-fearing, you’ve likely seen the guardian angel picture.

It hung in my childhood bedroom to convey a sense of safekeeping, but it had the opposite effect on me. There floating above two huddled children is a massive woman, pleasant in face, but so incredibly embiggened in her flowing robes. 

The common interpretation of the painting is that she’s helping the kids cross the bridge, but the problem is that when you’re a kid and you haven’t seen much of the world, you draw from your limited experiences and impose them on new ones. You don’t so much encounter a new face as an old one in new circumstances. Hence I believed that the angel was Fruma Sarah.

Have you seen Fiddler on the Roof? My mother always fast forwarded that scene, but what are you really losing. It’s the same banshee, just faster. And I had the soundtrack, so I knew the details about the woman’s vendetta against her husband and the credible, violent threats to the new wife. 

And so Fruma Sarah hung on my wall as I slept. “How does anyone expect me to sleep tight” I asked myself, “with Lazar Wolf’s dead wife looking at me.” Granted, she was smiling sweetly. She had none of that tormented look, no rings around the eyes or bluish white skin. She wasn’t clutching pearls or strangling anyone. It was simply her size and the billowy folds of her robe.

As an adult I look at the painting with fresh eyes. Perhaps more rooted in reasoning. The star above the woman’s head indicates that she is the Evening or North Star, the fixed point that leads the children home. Jane Eyre drew something similar to this when she was at Lowood, while she herself was an orphan looking for some sense of direction in a “wide world.” 

But now that I’ve inspected this painting like a jeweler, I have a new theory to add.  Perhaps because the little girl on the bridge shares the same color and texture of the angel’s hair, the angel is the children’s deceased mother. The little girl is confidently leading the younger boy across the bridge with calming stories of their mother, and he is in wide-eyed wonder from hearing them.

If you don’t like that one, here’s a third. The children have in fact died, and the angel is leading them to eternal glory, as indicated by the blossoming flowers on the left side of the bridge versus the lack of life on the right. They are “crossing over” in the heavenly sense. 

Option four: this could actually be Fruma Sarah but she has made her peace in Purgatory, having converted from Judaism to Catholicism.

I can keep going. As a child, your repertoire is small. One face has to make do for fifty. But just wait till you grow up and become an English teacher. Then you can read anything into anything. You can make mountains out of molehills and discover the mole is also a Messianic figure. You can find the hero’s journey in a grilled cheese sandwich. 

I saw the angel painting recently at a booth in a flea market. It sat on the floor, frameless, against a rusted Speedwagon. The angel in that version was a blond rather than a redhead. There are several variations of the scene thanks to later artists who borrowed the image and converted it to lithographs. In a slightly skewed version, there’s a welcoming cottage in the background, and yet the children appear to be walking away from it, right off the edge of the bridge. The angel is just barely holding it together.

At some point I outgrew the painting. When I was old enough and truly ready to face the harsh realities of the world, it was replaced with a scene from an English fox hunt. In the background merry aristocrats are floating along on sleek horses. In the foreground a sea of spaniels, one of them clamping down on a fox’s hindquarters.

But all that is a metaphor, of course. I can explain to you what it really means, if you like.