Illegitimacy and social stigma

Illegitimacy and social stigma operate in the novel not merely as labels but as forces that influence whose testimony is trusted, whose children are wanted, and who is granted a place in a family. The consequences vary with gender, poverty, race, and institutional power: unmarried pregnant girls are threatened with confinement and separation from their babies, while Sunday Small and Mickey carry different forms of uncertainty and exclusion connected to their origins.

Birth, stigma, and belonging

The idea of illegitimacy reaches Sunday through the circumstances of her own infancy. Abandoned on the steps of the workhouse on the day she was born, she has no knowledge of her parents or of why she was left. When Daisy Branning fears that her pregnancy will leave her with a child she does not want, Sunday asks her to consider what it means for a child to grow up believing that its mother did not want it. She recalls having imagined that her own mother might one day return, then having to accept that her mother might be dead or might simply have abandoned her. Sunday cannot confirm that she was born outside marriage; she suspects that she may have been illegitimate, but what she knows for certain is that she was left without an explanation or a parent to claim her.

That distinction matters. The novel presents the social meaning attached to illegitimacy alongside the concrete pain of abandonment, without making Sunday’s unknown parentage proof of her legal or familial status. Her appeal to Daisy arises from personal knowledge of a child’s vulnerability, not from an abstract judgment of unmarried motherhood. The family Sunday later finds with Mrs Spooner and Jacob, together with her bond with Daisy and Tommy Branning, offers a lived counterexample to the assumption that belonging depends only on acknowledged birth. She is grateful for this chosen family even while the memory of the workhouse shapes her understanding of what an unwanted child might endure.

Unmarried pregnancy and institutional punishment

Cissie Burns confides to Sunday that she is pregnant and expects to be sent somewhere in the countryside where she can be cared for and keep her baby. Her hope depends on the promise that motherhood will give her someone of her own to love. Instead, when she is to leave, an asylum carriage arrives. Cissie recognizes it and understands that she is being taken to Hatter’s Hall, where she fears she will be confined indefinitely. The men sent to collect her restrain her and bring out a straitjacket as she struggles. Sunday intervenes physically, kicking one of the men in an attempt to help her friend.

The institution’s treatment of Cissie turns pregnancy into grounds for coercion rather than care. When she identifies Albert Pinnegar as the man who caused her pregnancy, Miss Frost dismisses the accusation and attacks Cissie’s character, claiming that she had been sexually available to male inmates and might not know who fathered the baby. Cissie answers that girls and male inmates were not even allowed to mingle. Her denial exposes the gap between institutional rules and the degrading story used to discredit her. Later, Sunday recounts Cissie’s history to Lady Lavinia Huntley, including Pinnegar’s interest in bringing her to his office, her fear of refusing him, and the sudden illness that preceded her disclosure of pregnancy. Sunday has not heard from Cissie since she was taken away.

When Lavinia investigates, Mr Crackett tells her that Cissie has been classified as dangerous because she becomes upset and needs restraint. Asked what happened to the baby, he says that it died at birth. Lavinia privately suspects that the child may instead have been sold, but the evidence does not resolve its fate. The account thus leaves the mother and child separated, with the institution’s record supplying an official explanation and Lavinia’s suspicion pointing to the possibility of concealed exploitation. Stigma helps make Cissie’s confinement appear administratively plausible: her distress is treated as evidence against her, while her allegation against Pinnegar is left to be spoken by others after she has been removed.

Daisy, fear, and the choice to keep a child

After Sunday has left the workhouse, Pinnegar begins summoning Daisy to his office and sexually assaults her. He threatens to send her brother Tommy Branning to Hatter’s Hall if she tells anyone. When Sunday recognizes Daisy’s pregnancy, Daisy confirms what happened and explains the threat. Sunday remembers what happened to Cissie and fears that reporting Pinnegar could expose Daisy to the same treatment. She decides that they will keep the pregnancy secret for a time, suggesting that Daisy wear a loose dress while they consider what to do.

Daisy’s reaction to the unborn child is shaped by the violence associated with its conception. She calls the baby evil because she believes it will contain a part of Pinnegar, and asks whether someone might take it. Sunday sees the child’s possible rejection through the lens of her own abandonment and asks Daisy to imagine the pain of growing up knowing that one’s mother did not want one. The exchange does not erase Daisy’s anguish: she remains ashamed of her feelings and understands the pregnancy as a burden she must carry herself. The novel sets Sunday’s argument for the child’s future belonging against Daisy’s immediate experience of assault and fear, showing the unequal weight of a choice made under coercion.

The parallel with Cissie is especially stark. Both girls are sexually exploited by Pinnegar, and both pregnancies place them at risk of being treated as morally suspect rather than as victims. Cissie is threatened with lifelong confinement; Daisy is intimidated through the threat against her brother. Sunday’s attempt to protect Daisy begins in secrecy because she has reason to fear that institutional authority may punish the vulnerable girl instead of the man who harmed her. Pregnancy, in these circumstances, does not confer security or recognition: it exposes a girl to further control over her body, her reputation, and her relationship with her child.

Race, parentage, and unequal acceptance

Mickey’s account broadens the novel’s treatment of birth-based exclusion. His mother became pregnant by a Black African docker in London; the man disappeared after learning of the pregnancy, and she returned to her mother. Mickey’s mother died giving birth, and his grandmother cared for him until her own death. He was then taken into the workhouse. Mickey recalls that people seeking a child to take into a home did not choose him because he was mixed-race. His experience connects family origin and social judgment to racial prejudice, but it is not interchangeable with the stigma directed at unmarried mothers or abandoned children.

At the cattle market, Sunday sees people step away from Mickey, sneer, and one man spit at his feet. She links her arm through his in defiance and urges him to hold his head up and look back at those who demean him. Mickey says that he is neither one thing nor the other, revealing how racial categorization makes him feel placed outside accepted belonging. Sunday responds that, unlike her, he knows his parents and knows that his mother and grandmother wanted him. Her comfort holds both similarity and difference: each has been marked by circumstances of birth, but Mickey was loved by relatives before losing them, whereas Sunday has never known whether she was wanted at all.

That distinction is sharpened when Sunday and Mickey arrive at the farm where she is to work. The woman who meets them, wrapped in blankets beside the fire, asks bluntly who Sunday is and reacts to Mickey with open contempt. Sunday immediately bristles and identifies him as her good friend, refusing to let his presence go unchallenged. The scene shows prejudice entering an ordinary encounter over work and welcome, while Sunday’s response turns solidarity into a practical refusal to accept the insult as an adequate description of him.

The limits of stigma and the novel’s contrasts

The novel distinguishes illegitimacy from other forms of shame rather than treating every painful birth story as the same. Near the beginning, Zillah delivers Lavinia’s newborn daughter, whose father is present and demands to know the child’s sex. When told it is a girl, he orders that she be got rid of and threatens silence. This is not presented as an illegitimate birth; instead, the scene shows that secrecy and rejection can also be imposed within a marriage, here under the pressure of the father’s response to a daughter. Its contrast with Cissie and Daisy makes clear that a woman’s marital status does not alone determine whether she or her child will be protected.

Against these different forms of rejection, the novel repeatedly gives weight to care freely offered: Mrs Spooner and Jacob become the nearest thing to family that Sunday has known, and she recognizes the value of being wanted by them. Yet chosen affection does not undo the fear created by institutional punishment, abandonment, or public prejudice. The treatment of illegitimacy and social stigma is therefore inseparable from questions of power: who can impose a label, whose account of violence is believed, and whether a child or mother can remain with the people who love them.