Here’s a question for your doctor:  Should you diagnose fictional characters with imaginary illnesses?

CLUNK! 

You lay down your head.  Did you know that Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley had anorexia?  No, nobody did.  Sure, she is thin, but a fellow reader diagnosed her with an eating disorder because she was “languishing.”

“Maybe she just needed a day in bed,” someone else in the group said wisely.

I mean, I’m languishing, too. I flip through my books listlessly, because I only want to read the Brontes.  I don’t ever want to read anyone else again. And there are only seven published novels by the Brontes:  four by Charlotte, one by Emily, and two by Anne – hardly enough to last a month and a half.

Oh, yes.  Let me pass on that Emily’s Wuthering Heights is a veritable mental hospital.  Lo and behold! Ups, downs, love, betrayal, tantrums, nervous breakdowns, vengeance, hanging a dog from a tree, depression, bipolar – I can’t keep up with the diagnoses.  Fascinating, but can you believe I used to think this was a romantic novel?  I miss those days.

“Catherine and Heathcliff are bipolar for sure,” a psychologist said authoritatively.

Finally!  A doctor! Can she cure them?

But please, take away our other friend’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Everything with her is a gynecological illness that could be cured if you did your own pelvic exam.

I love Esther Summerson in Dickens’ Bleak House, an  angelic woman who is kind, helps the poor, makes her friends laugh, and gently gives good advice in such a way that it seems to be their own idea.

But alas! I am human, not a darling fictional character.  The angels are all in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and The Bishop’s Wife.  In Wings of Desire, an angel falls in love with a trapeze artis, and tumbles down to Earth to be human with her. In The Bishop’s Wife, Cary Grant the angel is here on Earth to help the bishop, but he falls in love with Loretta Young, the lovely bishop’s wife. Cary is charming and takes Loretta Young skating, and still she doesn’t fall in love with him. Poor Cary!

I LOOK angelic these days. I am sure of it.  If the light is dim – I am the soul of angelic beauty. I And yet I don’t get assigned to work in Heaven with Cary Grant,  who by now surely is an angel and could be my mentor. 

I can only be an angel at book group.