Sometime this month, I’ll be sitting on the couch, or making supper, or writing, and I’ll be called to come outside; to come quickly. The moon is out, one of my daughters will tell me. The full moon is shining over our Massachusetts home.

Sometime over the next year, we’ll hear about a special appearance of the moon, a must-see event, according to the person on Channel 5, or an internet post, or The Old Farmer’s Almanac. It will have a poetic name, Strawberry Moon, Harvest Moon, Supermoon, Wolf Moon. Or perhaps, the full moon will be the closest to Earth it has been in fifty years or the closest it will be again for another sixty. Or maybe there will be a lunar eclipse, where the moon will appear as a red ball, a Blood Moon with depth and shadow that make it appear close enough to hold.

We’ll wait for the moment the newsperson or the internet or the almanac has promised is best to view the moon in some spectacular disguise. We’ll leave the house in slippers, trying first the backyard, then standing in the middle of the street, then wandering toward the railroad bridge, until the moon becomes visible over the peaked roof of the corner store or the train tracks heading to Concord, or emerges through a hole in the clouds, appearing first as a hopeful yellow-white glow before showing us its gentle face.

Or we might be driving home at night and see the full moon rising over the Mystic River, huge and low, and know that by the time we get home it will have returned to its normal size. We must look now, we know. Look, look at the full moon. How had we forgotten that this was the night?

Or maybe it’s daytime, and we’ll see it iridescent against the bright blue sky. The moon is always there, always visible, even in the day, or so we are told. Still, each time seems like a new discovery, one that must be shared.

When my youngest daughter was little, she loved the moon so much that I made her a toy one, an embroidered pillow with a softly smiling face, because it’s the face she likes best—the face made of craters, that children around the world see as a rabbit, a toad, a holy name.

When I was very little, I was told, and believed, that the moon was made of cheese. I wonder what those other children believe. I wonder how many of those children, sometime this month, will rush outside—calling to their mothers—to seek the full moon as an old friend.

As long as my daughters are with me, we will rush out to see the full moon and feel cheated if we miss it. We’ll wake up at night to look for it, bright and round in the sky. We’ll watch and exclaim and take pictures that never come out the way they should, not as big, not as clear, not as radiant against the blackness of the night sky. But we’ll try anyway, because we want to remember, to mark this small moment of connection to each other, to the people everywhere, who—as our mothers often tell us—are looking up at the same sky.

When we come back inside, my own mother will be waiting on the phone. “Did you see that moon?” she’ll ask us. “How did it look from your house?”

Portrayals of angels abound in popular culture. With compelling personalities and forceful wills, angels appear as heroes and villains in books and film and on television, interacting with humans as friends, antagonists, allies, even lovers. But these fictional angels are a far cry from angels as they are depicted in Scripture. For these modern angels, we can thank the artists, scholars, and writers of the Renaissance.

In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy texts, angels were regarded as God’s messengers, beings of pure spirit who acted as extensions of God’s will. They served as guardians, messengers, or avengers but generally had no individual will of their own. In Scripture, angels might appear in human or animal form, or with no form at all. This multiplicity of angelic depictions persisted in Jewish and Christian art until the late Middle Ages, by which time angels were mostly portrayed in human form, with wings representing their role as intermediaries between heaven and earth. As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, images of angels began to reflect the humanistic values of the period.

While Renaissance philosophy and art celebrated the beauty of the human spirit, religion still played a central role in society. In Renaissance Italy, many works of art were commissioned by the Catholic Church, which meant that the vast majority still had religious subjects, often depicting angels. In “Thomas More, Raphael Hythlodaeus, and the Angel Raphael,” scholar Elizabeth McCutcheon writes that “angels and archangels particularly fascinated Renaissance man, who saw in them a group of rational spiritual beings who were still close to mankind and mediated between the divine world and earth below.” In Renaissance art, angels not only took human form but also seemed to express human feelings.

Italian Renaissance paintings show angels with unique personalities. This is particularly true of the depictions of the few angels to be mentioned by name in the Bible. The archangel Gabriel, for example, is first mentioned in the Book of Daniel as an interpreter of visions and then appears later in the Gospel of Luke, announcing to Mary that she has been chosen to be the mother of Jesus. This latter episode is known to Christians as the Annunciation and is widely represented in art. Unlike medieval paintings of the Annunciation, which were more concerned with symbolism than realism, Renaissance painters depict Gabriel and Mary in direct interaction with one another in shared space. Their expressions and physical bearing portray awe, humility, and respect.

In Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, art historian Meredith Gill notes, “The Annunciation is the instance at which divine potency meets frail human potential, and it is the instance at which they are both transformed.” Gill sees this transformation at work in Sandro Botticelli’s Cestello Annunciation (1489), in which Gabriel’s “ardent, genuflecting form communicates empathy” with Mary. Gill also notes the “purposeful optimism” of Gabriel in Alesso Baldovinetti’s Annunciation (1447), his “starstruck naivety, arms crossed and smiling.”

This human-inflected version of Gabriel is also evident in a fresco of the Annunciation found in the convent of San Marco in Florence. It was painted by Dominican friar Guido DiPietro (c.1395– 1455), better known as Fra Angelico. The fresco portrays Gabriel bowing to Mary with clasped hands while they look each other directly in the eyes, both blushing.

The painter’s use of vibrant color adds to the realism of the scene and to the angel’s human affect.

For Renaissance painters, another favorite subject was the archangel Raphael, whom McCutcheon calls “the most humane of all the archangels.” Raphael appears by name in the Book of Tobit, which is included in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles and as part of the Apocrypha, or noncanonical texts, in Protestant traditions. In the story, Raphael takes on a human disguise and becomes the traveling companion and mentor of Tobias, son of Tobit. Raphael heals Tobit’s blindness and helps Tobias exorcise the demon Asmodeus, who has been troubling Tobias’s soon-to-be bride, Sara. According to McCutcheon, “pictures of Raphael, usually with Tobias, became more and more popular in the 15th and 16th centuries.” The paintings usually show the figures walking hand in hand, as in Filippino Lippi’s Tobias and the Angel (c. 1475–1480) and Titian’s The Archangel Raphael and Tobias (c. 1512–1514). Like many such works of the period, Titian’s painting presents Raphael looking down into Tobias’s face with an expression of affection and concern, while Tobias smiles up at his angelic companion.

Renaissance depictions of the archangel Michael are intertwined with the Christian understanding of Satan as a fallen angel. Michael is mentioned by name in the Book of Daniel, where he is called the “guardian” of the people of Israel, and in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, in which he is the leader of the army of Heaven. In the painter Raphael’s Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan (1518), the angel’s youthful, sensitive, human face is set in contrast to the horned, animalistic Satan lying at his feet. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) by Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder portrays Michael and the loyal angels in human form, while the rebel angels appear to become beasts as they fall. This reflects Christian theological understanding that demons are fallen angels.

And yet, despite his fall, or perhaps because of it, Satan may be the Renaissance angel with the most human personality, at least as he is portrayed by English poet John Milton. Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost was published in 1667, in the last decades of the Renaissance, and it introduces Satan as Lucifer, the most beautiful of the angels. Lucifer rejects his role as subservient to God and humanity, thus precipitating a war in heaven. Throughout the poem’s narrative, Lucifer/Satan displays humanlike characteristics: will, agency, pride, and the ability to rationalize his bad actions. Maybe it was these traits that led William Blake to note that Milton was “of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.”

In recent years, Satan/Lucifer’s rebellion and fall have been revisited with varying degrees of sympathy in author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, in the television shows Supernatural and Lucifer, and in films such as Constantine, Legion, and many others. These works often also depict Gabriel, Michael, and other angels with distinct humanlike personalities. Meanwhile there are also films like Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and David Almond’s novel Skellig, which create original angelic characters, further exploring our fascination with these creatures of pure spirit. The humanized angels developed in the Renaissance have become even more recognizably human with the passage of time— proving our fascination with angels is in fact part of what defines our culture.

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of a library.” —Jorge Luis Borges

 

I remember my first vision of the paradise Borges imagined. My teacher had taken us to the children’s library in Montreal’s Notre Dame de Grace neighborhood to sign up for our first library cards.

I was seven. At first glance an unlikely paradise, the library then occupied a small space in the community center that also housed the local swimming pool, all within earshot of the teeming Décarie Expressway.

I chose a book with pages and pages of cat pictures, including what I now know to be the Egyptian goddess Bastet and a white Persian cat I dreamed of owning. I have never owned a white Persian cat, but I think of that book almost every day. And I remember the librarian, her pink lipstick and honey-colored hair set in stiff waves above her shoulders, the way she spoke to children as equals and fellow book lovers.

That experience is stamped on my memory, the joy and magic of holding that book in my hand, of being surrounded by all those books (were there millions?) I couldn’t read. Before I’d ever learned to sound out words, the library was already heaven.

I didn’t learn to read until that summer, visiting my grandparents in Georgetown, Prince Edward Island. My grandmother was the school secretary, which also put her in charge of the school library—enough to make her a librarian in my eyes and thus even more beloved to me than she already was. She made it her mission to teach me to read, bringing home primers and easy readers to help me practice. Then she introduced me to Georgetown’s tiny public library, in a room upstairs from the redbrick post office and filled with vanilla scented, three-color illustrated treasure. By the time I returned to Montreal and the library near the expressway, I was checking out my limit of books each month. My love of libraries—and librarians—began in small rooms, with kind women, dedicated to children and books. It grew to encompass multiple paradises.

Nobody is sure what the oldest library in the world is or which library was first, although there are some candidates. The al-Qarawiyyin Library in Fez, Morocco, is said to be the longest continuously running library. It was founded in 859, though only opened to the public in 2017, thanks to the work of architect Aziza Chaouni. The legendary great library of Alexandria, Egypt, one of my childhood fascinations, was host to scholars from throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. Every claim about the library is controversial—from how many papyrus texts it held (40,000? 400,000?) to when it was

established (third or second century BCE?) to when and how it was destroyed. Still, its mythic legacy endures. In 2002, the Egyptian government founded a new Bibliotheca Alexandrina “dedicated to recapturing the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original” library.

Still, it was the establishment of public libraries that eventually opened the gates of paradise to seven-year-olds everywhere. The Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Puebla, Mexico, is the oldest public library in the Americas, founded in 1646 and housed in its present building since 1773. According to the American Library Association, the first public library in the United States is “in dispute.” Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, with access by subscription, but the ALA notes that the first free modern public library opened in 1833 in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The Boston Public Library was “the first free municipal library in a large community,” founded in 1848.

Public libraries have often been referred to as the “people’s palace,” a term used to describe libraries from New York to Kansas City to Birmingham, UK. The phrase is sometimes attributed to Andrew Carnegie, the morally complicated steel magnate and philanthropist who founded and helped support more than 2,500 public libraries in the U.S. and Canada, partly in memory of the library he frequented as a boy in Pittsburgh. Although I can’t find any evidence for this attribution, Carnegie did say, “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.” And he put his money where his mouth was, donating the funds for library buildings on the condition that communities raise taxes for upkeep and collections.

Carnegie money helped establish the Melrose Public Library in Massachusetts, where I worked through high school and college, shelving books in the glass-floored upper stacks, or at the front desk, where I came to know and love the library patrons: gentle Mr. Snow from Maine, who visited at least once a week; the gentleman from Edinburgh who looked a bit like Sean Connery and was reading his way through Sir Walter Scott; the sweet-faced young woman with her stack of Harlequin romances. I remember the librarians too: tough-talking, soft-hearted Marie, who waived everybody’s fines, and the two Dianes, one who knew everything about art and the other, my boss, whose smile and musical voice were the heart of the library.

At another Carnegie-funded library, the Somerville Public Library, I wrote my dissertation and first novel by a window that looked over hills and housetops and factories but not quite to the sea. As a young mother I took my children to story time. With Miss Anne and Miss Cathy, they learned to sing “Where Is Thumbkin?” and “The Eensy Weensy Spider,” took part in the summer reading program, and watched movies on the lawn in August. One October, Ellen in Reference planned a memorable Halloween party.

Paula Sakey, of the Boston Public Library Fund, notes that people have had first dates, gotten engaged, and even married at the city’s glorious Central Library—which offers $200 “equity weddings” so almost any patron can make use of the space. The library “lends itself to that kind of love,” she says, but also to the love of community, of humanity. Like many public libraries throughout the world, the Boston Public Library has social workers on staff and trains “empathetic” security workers to deal kindly with “housing-insecure patrons.” She calls the library an “antidote to the loneliness epidemic,” where you can sit in the beautiful Italianate courtyard—open to all—“and feel you’re not alone.”

Wherever I go, I look for the library. And when I’m there, I never feel alone. How can you be alone in paradise?

I’ve graded student papers in the Boston Athenæum, the subscription library once frequented by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with its fireplace and precious artworks. I’ve visited the original Winnie the Pooh toys at the New York Public Library and

hugged its famous stone lions, Patience and Fortitude. I’ve written essays like this one in the high-ceilinged reading room at Harvard. I cried for joy in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., just because I was there.

But paradise also exists in the libraries of small towns and city neighborhoods. Sometimes it’s at the center of everything, like the public library on the hillside above Littleton, New Hampshire, with its cozy children’s room and statue of Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna. Sometimes it’s on a quiet street like the tiny two-room library twenty miles away in Lincoln, New Hampshire, presided over by a friendly librarian named Teasha. Maybe paradise sits by the river in the fishing community of Cardigan, Prince Edward Island, home to the smallest library in Canada, where loans are on the honor system. Or it could be in the North End neighborhood branch of the Boston Public Library, with its Italian language newspapers and marble relief of Dante Alighieri. Or maybe paradise travels through poor and rural communities in Mexico with the venerable Biblioteca Palafoxania’s mobile library project. Maybe paradise is a bookmobile in the Appalachian Mountains.

Where there are libraries, there’s no need to imagine paradise. It’s in a brick building near the expressway, next door to the public pool.

Regina M. Hansen is the author of the young adult novel The Coming Storm. Most days, you can find her in the library. Learn more at reginamhansen.com.

Feature Image: 
Frontispiece from The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe / London: G. & J. Robinson, 1803. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images

With their haunted castles, underground crypts, and catacombs, their derelict abbeys hidden within dark forests and moldering swamps, the gothic novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries promised readers adventure and escape from the values and social expectations of comfortable middle-class English life. No wonder they were so popular with women—and that so many women found fame writing them.

Considering the enduring popularity of the gothic, it is startling to remember that the term started out as an insult. The British Gothic Revival was a response to the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and rationality, seen in the clean-lined aesthetic of classical architecture. The late 18th century left behind that aesthetic for high ceilings and hidden passageways, pointed spires and turrets, all reminiscent of medieval castles and cathedrals. Such architecture was called Gothic after the tribes that sacked the Roman Empire, ushering in what Enlightenment thinkers believed to be an era of superstition and barbarism. The novels that were becoming popular at that time embraced both the gothic aesthetic—its castles and abbeys, as well as other elements of an imagined brutal and superstitious past—with plots that focused on hidden secrets, doomed families, and ancient rites.

Rather than reason and order, gothic novels depicted—even celebrated—the irrational and supernatural, and the naïve English heroines of these novels moved through what scholar Kate Ellis calls “a landscape of imprisoning spaces.” They encountered villains, usually older men from cultures that readers would have considered both exotic and debauched: Italian nobleman and Spanish priests and monks bent on seizing the heroines’ virtue or fortune, often both.

While these narratives put their female protagonists in physical and moral peril, the stories also offered them a chance at what scholar Fred Botting describes as “adventurous, romantic independence,” a reprieve from the buttoned-up morality expected especially of the young women who formed such a large part of their readership. While gothic novels like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk boast violence and sexual content that even some modern readers consider explicit and shocking, many gothic novelists nonetheless used the genre to ultimately reinforce tradition, flirting with transgression only to reinstate the values supposedly embodied in Englishness, Protestantism, and whiteness, and return the narratives’ heroines to a subservient domestic role. In fact, many of the most popular gothic novels were written by women who fulfilled that role, including Ann Radcliffe, who achieved literary success while maintaining her respectable image as the wife of journalist William Radcliffe.

Mrs. Radcliffe, as she was known, is noted for having tamed some of the wilder impulses of the gothic novel and bringing it into the mainstream. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, her most famous work, young Emily St. Aubert is first orphaned and then preyed upon by her aunt’s husband, the evil Montoni. Montoni tries to force Emily into marriage with the dissolute “Count” Morano before imprisoning her in the isolated castle Udolpho in an attempt to steal her inheritance. At Udolpho, Emily experiences strange echoes and visions that are all explained by the end of the novel when she escapes the castle, eventually to marry her soulmate, the young and noble Valancourt. In Radcliffe’s books, the virginal heroines might have adventures among the catacombs and their virtue might be threatened by villains with Italian names, but in the end the dark secrets and strange sounds are always explained away, and the heroine is married off to a suitable young man.

As the English novel developed throughout the 19th century, writers employed gothic elements to create new and more challenging narratives. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the (again)  orphaned heroine shows more grit than Radcliffe’s heroines (and also faints less). Jane arrives at the suitably ancient and isolated Thornfield Hall to serve as a governess for the ward of  the brooding but suitably English Edward Rochester, a fusion of the threatening older man and the young lover of the early gothic. At Thornfield, Jane hears screams and laughter in the night while the surrounding woods exude a supernatural effect on the reader, suggesting that the house and its owner harbor dangerous secrets. As in Radcliffe’s work, the supernatural noises are eventually explained, but unlike in Radcliffe, the air of shame and scandal persists. Just as she is to marry Rochester, Jane discovers that he’s been keeping his wife Bertha, who is mentally ill, locked away in the attic. The supposedly ghostly laughter Jane has been hearing is Bertha’s. With her “madness” and Creole heritage, Bertha represents Rochester’s secret shame, and scholars have argued that her death and Jane and Rochester’s eventual marriage represent a reinstatement of the values of Englishness, reason, and whiteness. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) Still others argue that Jane’s marriage to Rochester, who is now blind, represents less a happy ending for Jane than her acceptance of a social system that cannot be overcome. It depends on how we hear the words that open the final chapter: “Reader, I married him.”

The gothic continued to evolve during the 20th century while retaining its haunted aesthetic and preoccupation with the supernatural and irrational. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor Vance becomes a tragic parody of the gothic heroine. A kind of orphan, naïve, and (probably) virginal,  Eleanor, who dreams of adventure, stone lions, and a “cup of stars,” is also thirty-two years old and has spent the past decade caring for a mother she hates and whom she may or may not have purposely let die. When Eleanor arrives at Hill House, ostensibly to work with a group of researchers documenting psychic activity, we find a sprawling mansion with a dark history. Hill House is described in the novel’s perfect first paragraph as “not sane,” another echo of gothic madness and irrationality. The house soon fills the role of  the charismatic villain of  the early  gothic novels, seducing Eleanor (or does she seduce herself ?) with the promise that “journeys end in lovers meeting.” The novel does not end in marriage but in a terrible consummation, as Eleanor crashes her car into Hill House rather than being forced to leave it.

As we move through the 20th century, the gothic finds its place in an ever increasing variety of stories, and the easy resolution of Radcliffe’s novels becomes ever more elusive. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the author employs the gothic fundamentals of the haunted and hidden to force into the open a cruel and oppressive history. In it, the haunted house is not an ancient ruin but the simple Ohio home of escaped slave Sethe, who is plagued by the specter of her dead child—known only as Beloved—whom she was forced to kill rather than return her to the horrors of slavery. Though initially banished, Beloved returns in the form of a human woman, a representation both of Sethe’s guilt and of the trauma she has escaped but that haunts her still. With the help of others, Sethe is eventually able to send Beloved away, but Morrison makes clear that the scars of slavery are not so easily erased. Sethe and her family will carry them forever. While set in a gothic framework of hauntings and dark secrets, the issues that Beloved brings to light are not the kind that can be exiled with a marriage or an inheritance. Beloved is a gothic novel that uncovers the cruelties of the past but recognizes them as beyond resolution.

Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic is in some ways a novel in the tradition of  Radcliffe. A young woman, Noemi, travels to an isolated mansion inhabited by an old aristocratic family, the Doyles. There she investigates a mystery (in this case, the disappearance of her cousin), is threatened, and is subjected to trauma and strange visions, not to mention sexual assault, all orchestrated by a powerful older man. She also discovers that the Doyles seek to use her to rescue their decaying bloodline. A strange fungus that gives the Doyle family long life but also oppresses them with wild hallucinations recalls the representations of hostile nature in the gothic tradition. With its ancient decrepit English family, Mexican Gothic questions the values and structures that writers like Radcliffe championed and subverts early gothic novels’ emphasis on a particular set of cultural and ethnic norms. At the same time, Noemi, a university student with a sharp sense of humor, is a far more sophisticated heroine than Radcliffe’s sentimental orphans. Noemi eventually escapes and unites with a suitable love interest, but while the novel ends with the resolution of a love story, the continued presence of the fungus leaves open the possibility of further threats.

The gothic survives and continues to evolve. And the women who found escape and power in these novels will continue to shape their narratives—as heroines, readers, and writers—as long as there are houses to haunt.