Lucille

Lucille is the mistress of the household where Penelope Cruz works as a servant, and her decisive function in the story is to turn another woman’s pregnancy into an object of possession. She wants a child, but instead of respecting Penelope’s decision to keep her baby, she uses wealth, employment, public shame, and violence to pressure her. Through Lucille, the narrative makes reproductive control inseparable from class authority: Penelope supplies the labor and bears the bodily risk, while Lucille assumes that money and status entitle her to the result.

Identity and Position

Lucille belongs to the rich white family that employs Penelope and provides her room and board. Penelope initially remembers Lucille and Marvin as having treated her well for most of her employment, which makes the later hostility especially disorienting. The apparent benevolence of the household depends on Penelope’s obedience, however. As a servant, she understands that refusing the master’s sexual attention could jeopardize her job, and her pregnancy becomes the consequence of that unequal arrangement.

Lucille’s position gives her practical power over Penelope’s livelihood. When Penelope approaches Marvin hoping for enough money to return east and give birth privately, Lucille’s interests are already bound to the pregnancy. She is not presented as someone who merely discovers a child she wishes to adopt; she is part of a plan in which Penelope’s body has been treated as a means of producing an heir for the household. The arrangement therefore converts domestic employment into reproductive vulnerability.

The Demand for Penelope’s Child

Marvin tells Penelope that Lucille wants a baby and had proposed using Penelope’s pregnancy to obtain one. He explains that Lucille had suspected he might be infertile, but medical information has shifted the blame to her, and the couple now intends for Penelope to remain in the household until delivery and then surrender the baby. They offer payment for the pregnancy and for her discretion, presenting the transfer as a financial arrangement rather than asking whether she consents.

Penelope rejects the proposal immediately. She has decided to keep her child and came only to request funds that would allow her to leave without bringing shame on the household. Lucille and Marvin’s assumption that she would exchange her baby for a few gold coins shocks and offends her. Their offer reveals the central imbalance between them: they can imagine the pregnancy as a service because they do not bear its physical and emotional cost, while Penelope understands that carrying the child for nine months creates a relationship she has no intention of surrendering.

When Penelope refuses, Marvin threatens to dismiss her without her final paycheck and leave her to starve. Although this threat is voiced by Marvin, it represents the household power Lucille shares and seeks to enforce. The couple’s desire for a child is thus pursued through coercion rather than mutual agreement. Their language reduces Penelope from a worker and person to an incubator, while the threatened loss of wages and shelter makes refusal dangerous even before Lucille confronts her directly.

Apology, Attack, and Public Retaliation

Lucille later seeks Penelope out in an isolated place and initially appears to soften her position. She says that she is not there for Dave, but to ask Penelope to reconsider giving the baby to the couple. Lucille acknowledges that they overreacted, admits that Marvin pressured Penelope when her job was at stake, and apologizes for failing to ask permission before creating their plan. Her apology recognizes the ethical wrong, but it does not relinquish the underlying demand: she still wants Penelope to give up the child.

Penelope listens cautiously. She understands Lucille’s desperation for a baby but tells her that trying to steal another woman’s child is not an acceptable solution. She points out that adoption services and women willing to surrender children already exist, whereas she cannot carry a baby for nine months and then simply hand it over. Lucille’s tears briefly invite sympathy, yet Penelope remembers that the household expelled her into the snow without concern for her safety or the baby’s survival. The memory prevents emotional display from erasing the earlier abuse.

Lucille’s response destroys the possibility that her apology was a genuine reconciliation. She suddenly attacks Penelope and strikes at her repeatedly. Penelope falls over a water bucket while trying to protect her face, then draws the pistol kept in her apron and warns Lucille to leave. The weapon gives Penelope a temporary means of self-defense, but she knows that the confrontation has occurred without witnesses and that Dave may not be able to protect her effectively if Lucille returns. Lucille’s attempted violence demonstrates that her claim to the baby is not merely verbal; when persuasion fails, she attempts to impose her will physically.

The conflict continues at Penelope’s wedding to Dave. Lucille publicly announces that Penelope is pregnant with Marvin’s child and will not give it to the couple, using the church and its assembled witnesses as a stage for humiliation. The declaration exposes Penelope’s private circumstances before the congregation and presents her refusal as wrongdoing. Penelope shakes with embarrassment and realizes that Lucille and Marvin may have deliberately created the scene to punish her for denying them the baby.

The confrontation becomes armed when Dave and Travis intervene. After a shot is fired into the air, Travis points a rifle at Lucille while Dave orders Marvin to release Penelope. Lucille insists that Penelope deserves the attack and lunges toward her with a stick. Dave shoots Lucille in the shoulder, forcing her to drop the weapon and fall to the ground. The injury ends her immediate assault, while Marvin releases Penelope under threat of being shot himself. Lucille’s attempt to transform public shame into physical retaliation consequently leaves her wounded and the couple expelled from control of the situation.

Reproductive Power and Narrative Significance

Lucille’s story is built around a contradiction between the desire to become a mother and the refusal to recognize another woman’s motherhood. She wants the emotional and social status of having a child, but she pursues it by denying Penelope’s right to decide what happens to her own pregnancy. The proposed payment, the threat of homelessness, the apology that preserves the demand, the public disclosure, and the attack form a progression from economic pressure to bodily violence.

Her relationship with Penelope also illustrates how intimate arrangements become contracts when wealth and dependency determine the terms. Penelope’s employment supplies Lucille’s household with labor, shelter, and access to her body through Marvin’s authority; once Penelope becomes pregnant, Lucille attempts to convert that access into ownership of the child. Penelope’s refusal breaks the household’s assumption that service includes obedience to every private demand. Lucille therefore embodies the story’s critique of reproductive arrangements in which the person with money claims the child while the poorer woman bears pregnancy, danger, disgrace, and the cost of resistance.

Lucille’s final appearance leaves her neither reconciled with Penelope nor granted the baby she sought. Her apology does not restore trust, her public accusation does not destroy Penelope’s marriage, and her attack ends with Dave’s intervention and a gunshot to her shoulder. She remains the antagonist of Penelope’s reproductive autonomy: a woman whose legitimate longing for a child is transformed, through entitlement and coercive power, into an effort to confiscate another woman’s future.