Imogene Herdman and Alice Wendleken’s rivalry

Imogene Herdman and Alice Wendleken’s rivalry makes the Christmas pageant’s casting into a contest shaped by fear rather than an open choice. When Alice stays silent instead of claiming the part of Mary, Imogene’s threats explain her withdrawal; afterward, Alice tries to counter the Herdmans not by confronting them directly, but by documenting their behavior and hoping it will get them expelled.

The Mary casting

Narrator’s Mother presents Mary as a role with a moral expectation attached to it: the girl who plays her should be quiet, gentle, and kind. She asks for volunteers, then proposes that the group decide together who should have the part. The arrangement seems routine because Alice has been the only girl to raise her hand on previous occasions. This time, however, Alice sits chewing a piece of her hair and looking at the floor. Imogene raises her hand instead, making the usual assignment suddenly uncertain.

Narrator’s Mother asks Imogene whether she has a question, apparently unable to think of another reason she might volunteer. The moment does not establish what Imogene intends to do with the role, but it exposes the pressure surrounding Alice’s familiar place in the pageant. The casting decision is presented as a communal choice; Alice’s silence reveals that the choice has already been shaped by a private threat.

Threat and withdrawal

As people leave, Narrator’s Mother takes Alice by the arm and asks why she did not volunteer. Alice says she does not know and looks angry. The narrator, however, has heard Imogene tell Alice what would happen if she dared to put herself forward. The threatened acts include hitting her on the head, drawing over her homework, and putting worms in her coat pocket. These are ordinary forms of Herdman intimidation, but their familiarity is part of their force: Alice has reason to regard them as credible, not as empty bluster.

Imogene adds a more grotesque threat involving a pussy willow. She says she will push one so far into Alice’s ear that it will sprout and grow into a bush. The narrator recalls that Ollie Herdman once had a pussy willow growing in his ear; a school nurse discovered it, and Ollie had to be taken to the hospital, put under, and have it dug out. That remembered incident gives Imogene’s threat a concrete precedent. Alice’s silence is thus not simply a failure to claim a role she says is hers. It is a response to the prospect of a specific and frightening injury.

The narrator tells Alice that Imogene would not really do what she threatened. Alice rejects the reassurance, insisting that the Herdmans would do anything. She maintains that she is always Mary in the pageant, but the claim does not overcome her fear: she has already kept her hand down. Instead, she argues that Narrator’s Mother should have told the Herdmans no and that Imogene and the other children should be put out of the pageant before they ruin it.

Rivalry beyond the audition

Alice’s opposition continues after the casting confrontation. The Herdmans are angry about the pageant arrangements, but they do not quit. They keep coming to rehearsals on time and do what they are supposed to do. Their attendance undermines the hope of people who expect them to get bored and leave, while Alice remains unwilling to forget who they are outside rehearsal. The rivalry therefore persists even when the production’s practical routine appears to be working.

At one point, Alice writes something on a small pad and tries to conceal it with her other hand. When challenged, she says it is none of the narrator’s business. The note records that Gladys Herdman drinks communion wine. The detail shows Alice turning observation into a private record of alleged misconduct; she is not merely afraid of Imogene but watching the Herdmans for evidence that might support their removal. Her pad gives the rivalry a quieter counterpart to Imogene’s direct threats: one girl intimidates, while the other gathers material against the family.

Alice also treats the Herdmans’ remarks about the Christmas story as possible ammunition. When she hears discussion of the baby Jesus being murdered, she objects that it is not nice to talk that way and regards the remark as another item to write down and report to her mother. She hopes, the narrator believes, that the Herdmans will commit one sufficiently serious sin to make Alice’s mother telephone and have them thrown out. Her campaign is therefore not limited to recovering Mary’s part; she wants the whole family removed from the pageant.

Conflict over Mary and the baby

Alice offers a fallback plan that would restore her to the central role: she says she can step in as Mary if necessary, and that the Perkins baby could play Jesus. She believes Mrs. Perkins would not let Imogene handle the baby. The proposal makes Alice’s opposition concrete: she sees herself as a suitable replacement and imagines a different arrangement for the infant, one that keeps Imogene away from him. Yet the pageant has no baby at all at this point, a problem that worries Narrator’s Mother because the chief character is missing. Alice’s preferred solution is thus conditional, not an actual change to the production.

Significance and limits

The rivalry exposes the gap between the pageant’s public language of volunteering and the unequal conditions under which the girls make their choices. Alice is invited to raise her hand, but Imogene’s threats have already made that invitation unsafe for her. Her subsequent effort to record the Herdmans’ behavior gives her a form of resistance, though it is indirect and aimed at exclusion rather than reconciliation.

The conflict also remains unresolved in the available scenes. The Herdmans continue attending rehearsals, and Alice continues to view their presence as a danger to the production. Her claim that she is always Mary sits beside her failure to volunteer; Imogene’s disruptive reputation sits beside the family’s punctual, compliant rehearsal attendance. Those contrasts keep the rivalry alive without showing Alice and Imogene reaching an understanding or Alice succeeding in having the Herdmans expelled.