I Have Been Half in Love with Easeful Death: Angels & Insects by A.S. Byatt – Liv Golvin
November 24, 2025
AS Byatt’s Angels and Insects, a diptych of related and deeply symbolic novellas, is set in an anxiety ridden Victorian England. Darwin’s recently published work has set science and religion against each other. Some scholars cling to the immortal soul, while others argue that God is dead. In The Conjugal Angel, Mr. Hawke explains that because the Soul retains its shape after death, there is a “delicacy… felt as to the advisability of second marriages, particularly now it is known that the integral human partner survives the Grave, as spirit.” He is discussing this with Mrs. Papagay, a medium whose husband was lost at sea years ago. She has never been able to contact him on the spiritual plane, but understands logically that he is probably dead, and listens patiently to Mr. Hawke as he discusses soulmates and marriages in a preface to seducing her.
In Spiritualism, second marriages are considered adultery if the person you married was indeed your soulmate, for it is agreed that “true conjugal love comes to us all but once, that our souls have one mate, one perfect other half, whom we should seek ceaselessly. That an angel, properly speaking, joins two parts in one, in conjugal love.” He means in this case that Emily Jesse, née Tennyson, did ill by marrying after the death of her betrothed, despite never being actually married to Arthur Hallam. He also means, in common parlance, that one should never let one’s boyfriend stop one from finding one’s husband. Taking the point one step further, it also means that in God’s eyes, no marriage that was not to that mysterious soulmate would ever be real, in fact, it would be one’s duty to commit adultery in order to have true conjugal love.
In Morpho Eugenia, humans are again contrasted to things that fly in the heavens. William Adamson returns to England with the eponymous butterfly after being shipwrecked on his return from the Amazon to visit with Sir Harald Alabaster. At a fête, he meets his host’s daughter Eugenia Alabaster, a lovely pale golden girl decked out in purple silk, with violets on her crown and accenting her bust and waist. Somewhat like the male bee, William’s thought as he sees her is “If I do not have her I will die,” and then finds that, curiously in sync with this, her previous fiance has committed suicide.
Insects do not risk never meeting their soulmates. They mate and die; practicing sexual cannibalism and probably never joining hands in low lit rooms to contact the spirit world. I won’t comment on the justice of sexual cannibalism because I am not Andrea Dworkin. But William gets his wish, and marries Eugenia, and has a death of a different type– he is not happy. She is alternating sexually warm and cold, using him only for the birth of children who look exactly like her. She has bewitched him into thinking that she is his prized beautiful purple butterfly, but she is actually an ant queen, becoming grotesque and enormous as she wraps herself in the white nest of her bed. She is revealed to be in an incestuous relationship with her brother, leading her husband into the arms of Matty Compton, a companion (see: poor relation relegated to small rooms and unpaid governess position) of Mrs. Alabaster. Ms. Compton has been on William’s side all along, encouraging him to continue doing his scientific work and sell a book to obtain his own passage back to the Amazon, instead of relying on his in-laws. William and Mathilda set themselves free from the Alabaster clan. In recognizing that they are outsiders, they find each other mated together, not in marriage, but in conjugal love.
Though Mrs. Papagay became interested in the spirit world via her widowhood and a desire to know the true fate of her husband, she finds instead a purpose. By communing with the dead for a profession, she chooses life now, she chooses joy and whimsy and socializing. She finds that “this traffic with the dead was the best way to know, to observe, to love the living, not as they were politely over teacups, but in their secret selves, their deepest desires and fears. They revealed themselves to her, … as they would never have done in usual society.”
Emily Jesse is the focal point of their seances; spirits often use her brother’s famous poem about her lost betrothed, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, to communicate with the assembled group. Everyone seems to be aware, or so they think, that Emily is looking for Arthur Hallam in the spirit world, despite having married Captain Jesse. When we get to her narration later in the story, she reveals that she resents her brother and the rest of society for looking down on the way she handled her own grief. Society had so beloved her as this romantic figure of a young almost widow, dedicating herself to the memory of her almost husband. But Emily Jesse rejects this fate, and like Mrs Papagay, chooses life. When Arthur’s spirit finally comes to visit their seance, he says he is waiting, and makes a proposition that they “shall be joined and made one Angel.” She recognizes that he is a stranger, and that this is a threat, and that her soulmate is her husband. Captain Jesse is surprised at this outcome, as he has kindly and patiently understood her to be waiting for this message, but she bravely and sensibly chooses her real love over an imagined one, and tells him “we may not always have gotten on together as well as we should, and our marriage may not have always been a success, but I consider that an extremely unfair arrangement and shall have nothing to do with it. We have been through bad times in this world, and I consider it only decent to share our good times, presuming we have them, in the next.”
After rejecting Mr Hawke, Mrs. Papagay is rewarded by the return of her husband, whose smell and body she has missed for long years. She never truly believed he was gone; she just had to move on with her life. Sometimes this uncertainty is so much louder than clarity that one only has the option of keeping faith alive. We, in our earthly and ego-filled minds, cannot be sure, really, if our husband is dead, if he was our soulmate, but that soul part of us knows. We only need to be quiet and still enough to be able to hear.