The secular angel in contemporary children's literature: David ...

male desire in Milton. Especially by locating it in the angels of Paradise Lost, who in their
ability to eat and make love, are embodiments of Milton’s monism […]” (Goldberg, 2009,
181). This challenge, undertaken by Pullman, has earned the author a barrage of negative
criticism, as it was viewed by many religious readers and reviewers as sacrilegious. 1
However, as will be shown in Chapter 2, with this relationship the author aimed to show that
in love there should be no boundaries, and that each person should be free to be with the
person of their choice. The notion that angels are a higher form of human also relates to
Chapter 3, on McNish’s Angel, where I explore the nature and relationships between angels
and human beings as well as their ideological and existential proximity.
Harry Morris writes that “After Milton the angel in English literature is never again so
important unless it be in Blake, and Blake’s iconography is his own” (Morris, 1958, 44).
Blake’s representation of the angelic persona is multifaceted, and may “often serve more than
one symbolic purpose” (Sahm, 2010, 131). In every work, whether it is poetry or painting, the
angel, for Blake, may assume a different role. For example, in Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1790), “Blake’s Angels are, satirically, the orthodox, ‘good’ people, the contraries of the
Devils, who are the unorthodox geniuses, the ‘evil’ upsetters of established orders” (Damon,
1988, 23), while in ‘The Angel’, one of the poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience
(1794), “the guardian angel served as the speaker’s ‘leading virtue’ before she drove him
away” (Sahm, 2010, 131). This motif seems to coincide with Almond’s use of his own partangel
creature who does not only assume the role of the guardian, but acts as a symbol for the
otherworldly, the unknown, but also possibly even an example of evolution, his origins being
both bird and human. In fact, it is important to note that Skellig embodies the principle of the
reconciliation of contraries that Blake suggests; one needs both scientific and faith-based
understandings to understand who he is. Yet, even this does not stray far from Blake’s angelic
tradition as “Bird and angel are very closely related in Blake’s mind” (Easson & Easson,
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