Sunday tries to stop Cissie from being sent to an asylum

Sunday Small’s attempt to stop Cissie Burns from being sent to an asylum is a turning point that reveals the force of the workhouse’s control over its inmates and the danger facing unmarried mothers who challenge it. When Cissie recognizes the asylum carriage and says that Albert Pinnegar was responsible for her pregnancy, Sunday acts against the officials and attendants who are taking her away. She fails to prevent the removal, but her intervention makes visible the conflict between the institution’s official power and the testimony of a vulnerable young woman. The punishment that follows also shows the cost of refusing to accept that power in silence.

Institutional Background

The workhouse’s arrangements had already made family separation a visible part of daily life. Women, boys, girls, and men were divided into separate sections, with work assigned according to gender and ability. Men and stronger boys might pick oakum, crush bones, or tend the gardens; women and girls sewed, cooked, cleaned, and laboured in the laundry. Inmates rarely met except on Sundays, when they were permitted to attend church. Sunday had seen the damage that separation could do to families, so Cissie’s threatened removal is not an abstract fear to her: it extends a system in which institutional decisions can divide people and leave them with little say over what happens next.

The asylum is presented not as a temporary refuge but as a place from which inmates are rarely seen again. Cissie fears that she will be confined indefinitely and lose the chance to care for her child. The prospect is especially stark because, as the scene explains, she has no family member expected to come and claim her. Her situation reflects the coercive treatment of unmarried mothers: rather than being supported in keeping their children, they risk being labelled and removed from ordinary society. Cissie believes she was promised a place where she could care for her baby. The arrival of the asylum carriage overturns that expectation without warning.

The Attempt to Stop the Removal

The episode begins while Sunday is working in the laundry. She hears the large yard gates open and sees a horse-drawn carriage arrive with two men. Cissie comes out with Miss Frost, carrying her belongings. At the sight of the carriage, she recognizes it as the one used to take people to the asylum and understands that this is not the benign arrangement she had expected. Her fear escalates when the two men approach.

Cissie calls for Pinnegar, naming him as the person who caused her pregnancy and insisting that he will not allow her to be sent away. Miss Frost does not investigate the accusation. Instead, she rebukes Cissie and discredits her, claiming that she had been sexually available to male inmates and suggesting that she could not know who had fathered her child. Cissie counters that inmates were not permitted to mix with the men. The contradiction is significant: the workhouse’s separation policy makes her denial intelligible, yet Miss Frost uses the stigma attached to an unmarried mother to make Cissie appear unreliable. The accusation against Pinnegar is answered not with scrutiny but with an attack on Cissie’s character.

As the attendants try to restrain Cissie and put her into a straitjacket, Sunday intervenes. She kicks one man to make him release Cissie, then pulls at his hair when Miss Frost tries to drag her away. Sunday’s actions are improvised and defiant, a direct effort to interrupt the seizure rather than a calculated plan. The commotion brings female staff running from the rear entrance, but the arrival of more staff does not turn the balance in Cissie’s favour. They hold Sunday while the men take Cissie to the carriage. The attempt ends with Cissie being carried away and the gates closing behind her.

Punishment and Immediate Aftermath

Miss Frost treats Sunday’s intervention as insubordination, not as an effort to protect a friend from a feared and unjust confinement. She orders the staff to take Sunday to the punishment room and withholds food and water until she decides otherwise. Sunday resists as she is taken downstairs, but she is locked in the cell. There, alone, she tries to take in what she has witnessed and grieves for Cissie, whom she fears she will never see again.

Sunday remains in the punishment room for three days. When the door eventually opens, she is weak from the deprivation and must recover before she can resume ordinary life. The duration gives the episode a second consequence: the workhouse not only fails to protect Cissie but uses its disciplinary power to penalize the witness who tried to help her. The punishment also makes Sunday’s resistance costly without making it meaningless. Her actions establish her refusal to accept Miss Frost’s account of what has happened, even when the institution can confine and silence her.

Wider Consequences

Cissie’s removal does not settle the question of her fate. Later, Lady Lavinia Huntley goes to Hatter’s Hall to seek her release, where the superintendent says that Cissie’s baby died at birth. He refuses to release Cissie to Lady Huntley, explaining that authorization must come from a family member or the person who placed her in the asylum; in this case, that is Pinnegar, the very man Cissie had accused. Lady Huntley’s position on the Board of Guardians gives her a route to challenge the restriction, and she states that she has a position ready for Cissie. This later confrontation confirms how the initial removal has placed Cissie under a system whose rules protect institutional control rather than her own account or wishes.

The episode also anticipates scrutiny of the asylum itself. Lady Huntley encounters an institution marked by distress among its inmates, and is told that patients are subjected to water treatment in which they are held under water to quiet them. This evidence does not establish what treatment Cissie received, but it clarifies why the asylum carriage signifies more than a change of address: Cissie fears confinement in a place where patients have little control and where release depends on authorization. Later, Verity reports that conditions in the workhouse have improved after Miss Frost’s departure, including the end of the bullying and the removal of her split cane. Against that change, Sunday’s punishment and Cissie’s removal stand as evidence of the abuses that the institution had permitted, and of the need for oversight beyond its own staff.