Rebecca Saint John

Rebecca Saint John is the new education director at Moorehead whose arrival transforms Eileen Dunlop’s sense of possibility. First imagined by Eileen as a beautiful, almost magical rescuer, Rebecca becomes her intimate ally and then a source of painful disillusionment. Eileen’s retrospective account gradually revises that idealized image: Rebecca’s attention may have been strategic, and when the moment comes to leave X-ville, she does not go with Eileen.

Identity and Arrival

Rebecca enters the story in late December, when the warden introduces her to the Moorehead staff as the institution’s first director of education. Her position has been made possible by a federal donation, and she has recently completed graduate work at Harvard. The warden presents education as part of the prison’s institutional routine, but Eileen doubts that teaching can reach boys whose lives at Moorehead are governed by confinement and control. Rebecca therefore arrives not only as a new employee but as a challenge to Eileen’s bleak understanding of what the institution can offer.

Eileen’s first impression is shaped by Rebecca’s appearance and manner. She notices her unusual clothes, long gold pendant, cigarette, and self-possession in the office. The contrast with the provincial, emotionally constricted world of Moorehead makes Rebecca seem almost like a performer who has wandered into the wrong place. Eileen quickly decides that such beauty must conceal a shallow interior, a judgment that says as much about her own envy and defensiveness as it does about Rebecca. At the same time, she cannot stop watching her.

In the locker room, the details of Rebecca’s appearance become an occasion for Eileen to measure herself against her. Rebecca’s accent, polished bearing, and apparent ease intensify Eileen’s self-consciousness. Yet their exchange turns unexpectedly toward women’s bodies and the pressure to treat appearance as a measure of worth. Rebecca expresses a preference for a less conspicuous figure and dismisses the importance of breasts; Eileen, who has long felt ashamed of her own body, experiences the exchange as recognition rather than ridicule. The moment gives her a rare sense that her private discomfort might be shared and understood.

Eileen’s Idealization and Their Alliance

Eileen interprets the locker-room conversation as the beginning of an unusually close bond. She has no real confidantes and has relied on imaginary companions in her dealings with her father. Rebecca’s apparent solidarity therefore carries disproportionate force: Eileen feels that her resentment and sense of being different have briefly been accepted. She thinks of Rebecca as a match and an ally, and imagines their understanding as the start of a pact. That intensity belongs partly to Eileen’s loneliness; the scene establishes her longing for connection before it establishes what Rebecca herself intends.

Rebecca soon becomes the focus of Eileen’s hopes for a different life. On a Tuesday morning, Rebecca arrives through the snow in a crimson coat with a fur collar. Eileen has dressed carefully in clothes from her mother’s wardrobe, hoping to appear more cosmopolitan, and follows Rebecca to the locker room when she asks for help opening her locker. Eileen recalls the encounter in heightened, almost dreamlike terms. She regards Rebecca as the embodiment of qualities she wishes she possessed and concludes that she cannot become Rebecca, but might find fulfillment by remaining close to her. Rebecca’s arrival thus redirects Eileen’s attention from her imagined escape route toward a more personal fantasy of rescue through friendship.

That fantasy also changes Eileen’s feelings toward Randy, whose presence had once made prison visiting hours bearable. After watching him at work, she realizes that she is no longer in love with him. In her recollection, affection vanishes as Rebecca’s presence reorganizes her emotional world. The reversal makes clear how quickly Eileen’s attachment can move from distant longing to concentrated idealization, and how thoroughly Rebecca has come to occupy the role of the person who might make her life meaningful.

Intimacy, Attention, and Distance

An evening at O’Hara’s deepens Eileen’s sense of being seen. Outside the bar, Rebecca tells her that her face is unusual and fascinating and imagines that she has brilliant dreams of other worlds. For Eileen, who has spent years thinking herself ugly and insignificant, the compliment confers importance. Rebecca also alludes to regretting her drinking the following morning, then leaves in a dark two-door car. Eileen stays behind, takes Rebecca’s former seat, and orders whiskey. The contrast is telling: Rebecca’s attention briefly makes Eileen feel beloved, but Rebecca departs while Eileen remains alone with the night.

The following morning Eileen wakes slumped over the steering wheel of her car, disheveled and missing several belongings. The account presents this as the aftermath of Eileen’s continued drinking, not as an action Rebecca caused. Still, the sequence exposes a difference between the two women’s positions in Eileen’s imagination: Rebecca can offer a moment of affirmation and then leave, while Eileen is left to reckon with what the night has done to her.

Strategy, Disillusionment, and Departure

Later, Eileen understands that the friendship may not have begun for the reasons she wanted to believe. When Rebecca reveals more of her purpose, Eileen recognizes that Rebecca had cultivated rapport partly because she thought Eileen could be useful. Eileen feels hurt and humiliated; she had preferred to think Rebecca’s attention arose entirely from admiration and affection. Her reaction also reflects her own earlier indifference to the prison files and the suffering they recorded: she had treated other people’s stories as material for her imagination, while Rebecca’s revelation makes her feel personally used.

Eileen initially tries to withdraw. She says she is unwell and heads for the door, unwilling to expose how disappointed she is. Rebecca catches her arm, admits that she is in trouble, and asks for her trust. Eileen sees that Rebecca is frightened. The appeal reverses the balance between them: the figure Eileen had treated as a rescuer now presents herself as someone who needs Eileen. Eileen relents, persuaded that Rebecca respects and trusts her after all. Her choice shows how powerfully the hope of being needed can draw her back into the relationship, even after she has recognized its strategic dimension.

When Eileen finally prepares to leave X-ville, Rebecca does not appear. Eileen expects her absence and calls her a coward, but the older narrator does not sustain a simple condemnation. She describes Rebecca as a strange person who entered her life at a moment when she most needed to escape, then insists that the story is Eileen’s rather than Rebecca’s. The ending neither fulfills Eileen’s fantasy of escape together nor erases the importance of their bond. Rebecca remains both the person who made Eileen feel visible and the person whose absence confirms that Eileen must leave on her own.