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Abstract
The presence of angels in contemporary Western popular cultures has been noted, but not their presence in contemporary mourning. This study analyses online tributes for Jade Goody, a young British celebrity who died of cervical cancer in 2009; though a few of these tributes mention souls, many more refer to angels. Some refer to traditional Christian angels transporting Jade to heaven and caring for her there, while others draw on an unorthodox but popular tradition of the deceased herself becoming an angel, in which role Jade continues to care for her two young children. Ambiguity and fluidity of meaning are evident in many of the angel tributes. They portray neither a theocentric nor an anthropocentric heaven, but rather one in which the dead can continue to care for the living; for this the dead need agency, which angels have but souls do not. Through the symbol ‘angel’, Jade's lower-class and theologically uneducated mourners succeed in linking three levels – pre-mortem identity, a broadly Christian notion of heaven, and the ongoing agency of the dead in the lives of the living – something that often eludes both religious and bereavement professionals.
Acknowledgements
My main debt is to Hans Hauenstein who, in his unpublished MSc thesis (2009), broke new ground in interrogating Christian concepts of the soul in the light of contemporary bereavement theory. I also acknowledge other students from my MSc class of 2009 – Sarah Lyons who first got me thinking about Jade Goody, Helen Vaughan who showed me the potential of online data, and Wren Sidhe who helped me differentiate different kinds of angel books. For comments on a draft of this article, I thank Hans, and also Dennis Klaas, Thomas Quartier, Marion Bowman and Una MacConville.
Notes
1Perhaps this is why angels need wings – to fly from heaven to earth and back. On the historical development of angels' wings, see Guzzi (2005).
2E.g., ‘Angel who died in her sleep at 16’, Metro, 27 August 2009, p. 1.
3‘Angels by Robbie Williams is the song Britons would most like played at their funeral, a survey has suggested’, BBC News, 10 March 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/4336113.stm
5An analysis of condolence book entries for Diana found similar proportions of female authors, but a greater proportion of male entries: 24 percent online, 16 percent paper condolence books (Jones, Citation1999, p. 204).
6I make no claim that authors or regular Sun readers read the same meaning into these texts as I do; that would be another research project.
7Whether such experiences are consequence or cause of the cultural idea of the angel of death need not detain us here.
8Sleep may be taken as a metaphor for death. So for Jade to sleep, while being an angel, is to condense images, which Freud saw as a primary process of dreaming. (I am grateful to Dennis Klass for this connection.)
9Given the influence of Swedenborg and Andersen, it is possible that humans becoming angels is an idea particularly prevalent in Scandinavia. The Norwegian version of the Christmas carol A Child is Born in Bethlehem had until 1985 the line ‘We become angels like them’, a line missing in the English version.
10Hans Hauenstein, personal communication.
11In the 2009 anti-war movie Lebanon, about a Israeli tank crew in the 1982 war, dead male comrades are described as angels, as in ‘We have an angel here’, possibly used ironically given the film's gory depiction of post-mortem decay.
12On Victorian cemetery sculpture, see Heywood Citation(2005). For images of cemetery angels, see http://northstargallery.com/pages/AngelsHomePage01.htm For other images of the female body in cemetery sculpture, see Robinson Citation(1995).
13This polarisation may account not only for the heartfelt passion of those who mourned heart-icons such as Jade Goody or, 12 years earlier, Princess Diana, but also the equally passionate refusal to mourn by those with major psychological investments in rationality (Brennan, Citation2008, ch. 6).
14Mayumi Sekizawa, personal communication, February 2007.
15This is not to say that memory and care are the only ways in which bonds may be continued: linking objects, religious devotion, and identification are some other ways (Klass, Silverman and Nickman Citation1996).
16The assurance that the dead send their love is a standard message of contemporary spiritualist mediums (Walter Citation2007).
17For this question of the agency of the dead, I am indebted to Hauenstein Citation(2009) and Harper Citation(2008).
18As a medium herself, Newcomb seems willing to put her own profession out of business by empowering lay people to experience the dead directly.
