ABSTRACT
I must now openly state my own bias and say that I do not believe in Chance; I believe in Providence and Miracles. If photosynthesis was invented by chance, then I can only say it was a damned lucky chance for us. If, biologically speaking, it is a “statistical impossibility” that I should be walking the earth instead of a million other people, I can only think of it as a miracle which I must do my best to deserve. (Forewords & Afterwords 467)
It is a statement that might now appear-in an age that often conceives of itself as secular, even postsecular-recherché; yet it is one that Fitzgerald, herself profoundly attentive to the roles that chance, providence, and miracle play in our lives, would have undoubtedly seconded. This seems especially true when considering Fitzgerald’s 1990 novel The Gate of Angels, wherein a love story involving a young man and woman is set against the pre-World War I backdrop of Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, the site where much of the new, revolutionary work in physics was being undertaken. Thus it is that The Gate of Angels’ protagonist, Fred Fairly, might, when awakening after a plot-centered bicycle accident, exclaim to himself, “‘My God, what luck’” (54), for his rescuers, seeing the wedding band on the also hurt and unconscious Daisy Saunders, have placed the two of them, sans clothing, in the same bed. And as the beauty of the redheaded, nineteenyear-old Miss Saunders is the source of frequent, unwelcome attention (the wedding band itself being worn to fend against this), the twenty-five-yearold St. Angelicus (Cambridge) physics fellow might well consider himself
the beneficiary of great, good luck. At the same time that Fairly imagines himself the fortunate beneficiary of chance or luck-luck being “the name for chance that seemingly helps or harms”1-he also cannot escape the conviction that what is really on offer is something that smacks of necessity. “There is,” he thinks, “no God, no spiritual authority, no design, there are no causes and no effects-there is no purpose in the universe, but if there were, it could be shown that there was an intention, throughout recorded and unrecorded time, to give me Daisy” (104).2
