White Angel

From the first sentence of “White Angel,” shifts in perspective mirror how the family’s identity as a group will split and fracture under the weight of their tragedy. The first-person plural in the first paragraph establishes the importance of family as a theme for the story: “We were four […] We are not a fruitful or many-branched line. Our family name is Morrow” (1). This plural then shifts to the sensitive, introspective first-person singular perspective of Bobby Morrow. This move from the collective “we” to the singular “I” echoes the fragmentation of the family themselves as they are impacted by disappointment and loss. They will all be marked in some way by Carlton’s death, and their family unit will not be the same as they each retreat into their own separate sadness.

Setting is among the most fundamental constituents of the story’s symbolism. From the first page, Cunningham depicts the proximity of the cemetery, which borders the land next to the Morrows’ house. This presents dynamic symbolism: The cemetery is a playground for Carlton and Bobby, and while it symbolizes loss, it is also a place of beauty, imagination, and experimentation. Not only is it a separate world from the house, but it is home to the white angel statue, “small-breasted and determined” (1), standing out among the more conservative stones of the rest of the cemetery. This angel—which has enough symbolic importance to give the story its title—appears several times in the story as a kind of witness to Carlton’s and Bobby’s lives. The angel also represents Carlton: Like her, he stands out as “determined,” an individual in a sea of more conservative people. Finally, she is a marker of Carlton’s death, when he is buried in the cemetery “within sight of the angel’s blank white eyes” (14).

The cemetery is therefore a symbolic confluence of imagination and loss, but it further intermingles love with death, and pleasure with pain. Though Carlton is eventually buried there, the site is also where he makes love to his girlfriend (and where his facial expression of pleasure appears, to Bobby, to express pain). Cunningham links love and death, discovery and risk, within the grounds of the cemetery. Love and death live alongside each other, and risk is everywhere. And, just as the house borders the cemetery, so life borders death. Death can come from any direction, and often a direction that no one could have predicted.

Apart from the immediate locale of the house and cemetery, the story opens by grounding the reader in both time and geography. From the first four sentences, the reader knows this is Cleveland—and if they discern the allusion to the Cuyahoga River fire, they will realize it is also the 1960s. The city and decade are a key context, as the boys want to leave the uninspiring Cleveland for the countercultural Woodstock and join the hippies. This was also an era of enormous change and upheaval in the United States. Young people were listening to new music, dreaming of revolution and self-expression free of prior generations’ disillusionment and conservatism. In a way, Carlton symbolizes the ‘60s, in both his reckless experimentation with drugs and his liberal attitude about sex. He also symbolizes the revolutionary optimism of the age, the sense of possibility and harmony between the generations. When Carlton brings his friends to the party, Bobby understands it as a visionary act: “He has arranged a blind date between our parents’ friends and his own. It’s a Woodstock move—he is plotting a future in which the young and old have business together” (10). This idea appears again when Bobby’s father muses to his son about the new music that Carlton’s friends are playing; pondering his career as a music teacher, he thinks he might have been “too rigid” with his students and wonders what he could learn about music from his sons. There is a sense that Carlton’s optimism can inspire transformation, even refreshing the lives of the adults around him, who, Bobby imagines, are financially stressed and trapped in careers they don’t enjoy.

This sense of possibility is fragile, just like Carlton. There is an element of foreboding even as the story opens. Though the radios sing about free love and idealism, disaster is looming not just for the family but for the world around them: The narrator says the story’s events “happened before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire” (1). This alludes to the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, when the river was so polluted by industrial waste that it ignited. This was a major signal of the national ecological crisis, while the remark on going “broke” alludes to 1978 when the city defaulted on its loans to local banks—becoming the first city since the Great Depression to do so. These two events loom over the horizon from the start of the story, implying that the period of optimism and possibility will not last, even though the characters believe their futures to be full of possibility. Carlton and Bobby dream of escaping to Woodstock, New York, the site of the famous 1969 concert and a symbol of the hippie movement. Carlton even gives Bobby the new name of “Frisco,” which, for Bobby, signifies the possibility of his own radical transformation. It also provides a glimpse of Carlton’s idea of the future where “we all get released from our jobs and schooling. Awaiting us all, and soon, is a bright, perfect simplicity” (3); The death of Carlton is the death of this future.

These elements—imagination, risk, death—converge in the motif of flight. Bobby makes several references to flight and plane accidents, first when he recalls that a family across town was “sitting at home, watching television, when a single-engine plane fell on them” (2). He later recalls that his mother’s first husband died when his “plane went down in the Pacific” (9); the story clarifies only that this accident occurred in the 1940s, but it was presumably during the Second World War. Then, at the party, the partygoers rush outside because Carlton’s friend thinks he’s seen a UFO, but it turns out to be a false alarm. Along with its element of risk and sudden lethality, flight conveys possibility and magic. When Carlton and Bobby are high on acid, Carlton opens the window, and the two boys feel they are flying. Here, flight seems to be a matter of belief, not a question of possibility. Bobby reflects, “The secret of flight is this—you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying gravity” (4). Even in this moment of flight, however, there hides an allusion to death: To Bobby, this metaphysical flight seems no more remarkable “than the fact that airplanes sometimes fall from the sky” (4). He is thinking, again, of the airplane that crashed into the local family’s house.

The motif of flight ultimately portrays the inseparability of possibility and danger—and, potentially, death. Planes crash into unsuspecting families, and they carry first husbands to their deaths in the Pacific. Planes also soar overhead, bringing with them notions of “risk and invention” (14). Two young brothers believe themselves capable of flight while, underneath them in the basement, their father builds a coffin-like clock, foreshadowing the death of his oldest son. Youth itself is a risky flight, but there is possibility in this risk, something not available to the father who dances at the party like a “flightless bird.” The angel, with its wings, plays into this motif: When Carlton dies and is buried within sight of the white angel, it is as if he has taken a position of permanent flight, stationary and boundless at the same time.

This is not just a story of symbolic death, but a story of deep grief, regret, and the potentially isolating effects of those experiences. Bobby doesn’t warn Carlton about the sliding glass door—partly due to Bobby’s resentment toward Carlton at the time, and partly due to his naiveté, as he simply thinks Carlton should “bump his nose” (13) as punishment for having betrayed his little brother. Later, Bobby’s anguished guilt lingers, though he wasn’t responsible for the death. He can’t even look at Carlton’s girlfriend because her presence reminds him of what he didn’t do to save his brother. Nor can he speak her name. Regardless of his actual culpability, his remorse remains.