Character Analysis
We all know a Madame Raphael: a joiner at heart, but with no club or church or sorority or clique that either suits her or will accept her. Perhaps you've even been like her. Madame Raphael is the teacher at the French school where American girls Gabrielle and Michelle are spending their summer.
Madame Raphael has looked for acceptance in all the wrong places, and she continuously dreams of the day she will find her tribe: "All her life she had looked for a circle of men and women with whom she could hold hands in a ring dance, at first in the Methodist Church...then in the Communist Party, then in the Trotskyist Party, then in a Trotskyist splinter party..." (III.V.5).
She hopes, at least, to find her tribe in the company of her star pupils, Gabrielle and Michelle. When she sees Sarah's attack on the girls, Madame Raphael suffers from a lack of proper perspective (literally) and thinks her moment has come.
In her own way, Madame Raphael lives up to the name of that awesome archangel when she redeems the stupidity of Gabrielle and Michelle by rising into the heavens with them. But what is up with that ascension? Who is Madame Raphael? Or rather, what is she?
Your guess is as good as ours. But we can tell you, her desire to create her own society is a force of nature. And that may be the point: Madame Raphael's unfettered idealism literally sends her rising into the heavens with a couple of airheads. It's not a good look.