Angela by Bharati Mukherjee
"Angela" by Bharati Mukherjee is a poignant short story that explores the complex psychological landscape of a teenage refugee from Bangladesh. The narrative unfolds in a hospital setting where Angela, having survived a life-altering car accident, grapples with deep feelings of guilt and obligation in the aftermath of the tragedy that left her adoptive sister, Delia, in a coma. The story delves into Angela's harrowing past, including the loss of her parents and the violence she experienced in her homeland, juxtaposing her survival with the weight of her perceived indebtedness to others, particularly the Brandons, her adoptive family.
Angela's journey is marked by a struggle for identity and autonomy, as she confronts societal expectations and the burdens placed upon her by those who have offered her refuge. The character's internal conflict is further complicated by the advances of Dr. Menezies, a physician eager to marry her, which symbolizes the tension between her desire for self-development and the societal pressures to conform. Mukherjee employs rich imagery and symbolism, contrasting notions of grace with the darker realities of exploitation and obligation.
Ultimately, "Angela" presents a nuanced examination of survival that challenges traditional narratives of success and happiness, highlighting the complexities of human relationships and the often unacknowledged costs of survival in a new world. The story leaves readers contemplating the intricate interplay of guilt, grace, and the true nature of freedom.
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Angela by Bharati Mukherjee
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1984 (collected in Darkness, 1985)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
This story is included in Mukherjee’s collection Darkness and in The Best American Short Stories, 1985, edited by Gail Godwin and Shannon Ravennel.
“Angela” is not a happily ending story of a refugee successfully finding life and liberty, and pursuing happiness, in the United States. Rather, it is a subtle psychological analysis of a survivor, of how survival can entail feelings of guilt and obligation, and of how survivors can be exploited by their rescuers.
The story begins with Angela, a teenage refugee from Bangladesh, at the bedside of her adoptive sister Delia Brandon in Van Buren County Hospital, Iowa. Delia is comatose after an automobile crash, one which Angela survived with hardly a scratch. Naturally, Angela feels guilty that she, not Delia, has survived the accident unscathed—Delia was the one who had instigated Angela’s adoption by the Brandons. Besides, Sister Stella at the orphanage had taught Angela a Christian account of salvation, as if it were some institution of savings and loans: “The Lord saved you. Now it’s your turn to do him credit.”
Indeed, Angela’s list of indebtedness to the Almighty for letting her survive is lengthy: Surviving the death of both parents at the age of six, she also survived the political upheaval of Bangladesh, racing through “leechy paddy-fields” to avoid “the rapes, the dogs chewing dead bodies, the soldiers.” The only scars she retains are those that occurred when her nipples had been sliced off. Afterward, Angela had found refuge in a Catholic orphanage, and eventually she was adopted by the Brandons, a farming family in Iowa, where Angela is now a cheerleader in high school.
Angela’s survival is little short of a marvel, a miracle, a holy mystery—terms which occur in Angela’s first-person narrative. She would even seem to be an angel—or at least to be under the guardianship of one, a manifestation of God’s “grace” to fallen and violent humankind. If Angela is an angel, however, she is a dark one, and not by virtue of complexion only. She says that the cook at the orphanage used to “chop wings off crows . . . so I could sew myself a sturdy pair of angel wings,” and she continues, “I visualize grace as a black, tropical bat, cutting through dusk on blunt ugly wings.” This is not the usual dove of light. Through such imagery, Mukherjee makes the reader approach grace and miracle with circumspection and irony.
The reader is also led to question how unmixed a miracle Angela’s apparent good fortune may be and under what a load of obligation and guilt she is placed thereby. Clearly, she is obligated to the Brandons and feels guilty that the Almighty had visited injury on the Brandons’ daughter rather than on herself during their accident. Further, it would appear that the Brandons, in turn, are obligated to a Dr. Menezies, an Indian physician who is attending to Delia and who also seems to be helping the Brandons fend off foreclosure on their farm.
Dr. Menezies, who is nearly forty years old, wants to marry Angela, but she is not attracted to him. Angela herself yearns for the self-development of going to college and the freedom of pursuing a career. Such desires would, of course, be dashed if she were to accept Dr. Menezies’s marriage proposal, entailing duplexes and babies. Yet marriage to Dr. Menezies would, under the circumstances, be tantamount to a discharging of Angela’s indebtedness to the Brandons, as well as an assuagement for the guilt of having somehow undeservedly survived her accident unscathed. Exploiting Angela’s sense of obligation, Dr. Menezies tries to dissuade her from going to college: “I don’t think you are so selfish.”
Mukherjee ends the story with this dilemma exquisitely and excruciatingly imaged by Angela: As Angela falls asleep, she dreams in a sensuously ambiguous image of leeches feeding on her nippleless breasts—a richly ironic conflation of the repulsive and the medicinal, of suffering and nurturing, of the appearance of grace and the reality of exploitation.
Bibliography
Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Desai, Anita. “Outcasts: Darkness by Bharati Mukherjee.” London Magazine, December, 1985/January, 1986, 143-146.
Dhawan, R. K. The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Critical Symposium. New Delhi, India: Prestige, 1996.
Mukherjee, Bharati. “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties.” In Race: An Anthology in the First Person, edited by Bart Schneider. New York: Three Rivers, 1997.
Mukherjee, Bharati. “A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman.” In The Writer on Her Work: II, edited by Janet Sternberg. New York: Norton, 1991.
Mukherjee, Bharati. “An Invisible Woman.” Saturday Night 96 (March, 1981): 36-40.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Interview by Alison B. Carb. Massachusetts Review 29 (Winter, 1988): 645-654.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Interview by Geoff Hancock. Canadian Fiction Magazine 59 (1987): 30-44.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Interview by Suzanne Ruta. Women’s Review of Books, July, 2002, 13.
Naipaul, V. S. “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul.” Interview by Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers. Salmagundi 54 (Fall, 1981): 4-22.
Nazareth, Peter. “Total Vision.” Canadian Literature 110 (Fall, 1986): 184-191.
Nelson, Emmanuel, ed. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993.