Lizzy’s outsider status at the Catholic school

Lizzy Enders’s outsider status at the Catholic school begins with a clear distinction: she is the only Methodist among her classmates. But her estrangement is not simply a matter of belief. She enters a school whose language, rituals, rules, and social loyalties are unfamiliar, and her efforts to keep promises and help vulnerable people sometimes make her still more conspicuous. At the same time, the school’s religious life offers moments of quiet, and some of Lizzy’s most meaningful connections there are with adults rather than girls her own age.

Identity and Daily Life

Lizzy is academically behind the other girls, whose French comes more readily to them, and she is trying to find her place in a Catholic institution whose practices she does not share. She attends its services and lives among Catholic prayers, incense, Latin, and chanting. In a letter to her father, she describes the strain of being the school’s only Methodist and says that she has no friend among her classmates. Her grades, however, are respectable enough for Mother Magdalena to praise her when she is not correcting her. Lizzy’s outsider position therefore does not mean she is incapable of succeeding at school; rather, academic effort and social belonging remain separate.

The contrast is particularly sharp during the novena to Saint Joseph. At first, the evening prayers are an oasis in the confusion of school life: the day students have left, the chapel is quieter, and the ritual gives Lizzy time to sort through her thoughts. It is also the one time she lets herself think fully about Mama. Her grief surfaces in ordinary moments during the day, when she imagines telling Mama about something or wonders what her mother would think. The chapel does not make Lizzy Catholic, but its pattern of prayer temporarily gives her a protected space for mourning and reflection.

Adult Alliances and Practical Faith

Although Lizzy has no friend among her classmates, she recognizes that some of her friends are adults. Sister Roberta, who teaches French, becomes one such ally. Lizzy notices the nun’s strength and mischievous humor beneath her imposing appearance, and comes to care for her deeply. Sister Roberta’s kindness is expressed not only in personality but in small acts of care: she keeps Mrs. Lacey’s medicine beside sweet coffee with milk and nutmeg, and explains that disobedience can be forgiven when it helps someone in need. For Lizzy, this lived compassion gives religious principle a form she can trust, even while the institution’s demands remain difficult.

Her dealings with Delvina show how that practical ethic pulls her across the boundary between student and caregiver. Mother Magdalena orders Lizzy to keep Delvina’s circumstances secret, warning that Delvina’s husband is a dangerous brigand and that disclosure could threaten the girls’ safety. Lizzy cannot reconcile that decision with the obligation to help a pregnant woman living in an abandoned fort. Sister Roberta has also explained that Santa Fe requires midwives to hold a municipal license and a parish priest’s certificate confirming they can administer baptism. The rule makes the convent’s help urgent as well as charitable: Delvina needs a qualified midwife, and Lizzy worries about the baby while returning for assistance.

The conflict exposes two competing ideas of what the Catholic institution should provide. Mother Magdalena emphasizes protection of the school community from a violent husband; Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy insists that the church, school, and convent are a safe house and a place of asylum. The Bishop also recognizes that Lizzy is exhausted after going with Sister Roberta to gather herbs. Lizzy’s outsider status gives her no formal authority, but her concern for Delvina makes her a witness to the disagreement over whether institutional safety means excluding danger or sheltering someone endangered by it.

Religious Difference and Institutional Conflict

The most direct confrontation over religious identity comes when Lizzy learns that Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy baptized Mrs. Lacey into the Catholic faith while Mrs. Lacey was unconscious. Lizzy objects that Mrs. Lacey is Methodist and did not want the baptism; the Bishop answers that they did not know whether she had ever been baptized and wanted to make certain. Lizzy cannot offer a theological argument about which church’s heaven is correct. What she can insist on is that Mrs. Lacey trusted her and had plainly refused the rite. Her protest is rooted in personal loyalty and consent as much as denomination.

Lizzy promises Mrs. Lacey that she will try to undo the baptism, and she continues to regard that promise as binding even after the Bishop has challenged her understanding of his authority. She asks a man who is sewing a sandal whether a bag of asafetida could void the baptism, explaining that Mrs. Lacey had asked her to use one if the nuns baptized her. His answer does not offer a ritual solution. Instead, he presents a loving God who does not keep an account book in order to punish people, and connects that belief to the beauty of the world and to baby Elena. The exchange gives Lizzy a religious perspective outside the school’s formal hierarchy without making her own Methodist identity disappear.

Isolation and Reputation

Lizzy’s resolve to keep her promises carries a social cost. After the dispute around the schoolgirls’ protest, rumors spread among the day students that she cannot be trusted: she is treated as a snitch who might report their notes, remarks about the nuns, or meetings with boys. The suspicion reaches beyond the complaints already circulating; Lizzy fears the girls will also learn that she reported Elinora St. Clair for blinding her cat. She experiences their turned heads and silence as a palpable rebuff. Rather than abandon her concern for Mrs. Lacey, she concentrates on her schoolwork and on keeping her promise.

This rejection reveals that Lizzy’s exclusion is social as well as religious. Her classmates judge her through the danger she poses to their secrets, while she measures loyalty by whether she can keep faith with a person who has entrusted herself to her. The difference between those standards leaves her isolated, but it also clarifies why she does not simply trade her convictions for acceptance. Her school standing is complicated: she is a diligent student, yet among the girls she has acquired a damaging reputation.

Change and Significance

The novel does not resolve Lizzy’s outsider status by showing her assimilate into the school’s peer group. In her letter to her father, she still describes herself as the only Methodist, says that she has no friends among the girls, and considers returning to Independence to keep house for Uncle William. She also acknowledges that she has not yet had time to tell her father everything she has endured. The letter makes her isolation ongoing rather than a misunderstanding quickly cured, while her successful grades show that she continues to meet the school’s demands.

Her position nevertheless becomes a source of ethical independence. Lizzy learns religious practice through several forms: the chapel’s calming prayers, Sister Roberta’s discreet care, the rules governing a midwife, the argument over asylum, and her defense of Mrs. Lacey’s wishes. After the attack that makes the convent reconsider Elena’s safety, the decision to seek a home for the baby again shows how care and institutional protection can conflict. Lizzy’s experience does not settle those conflicts, but it gives her a standpoint from which to recognize them. As the school’s lone Methodist, she is separated from its dominant community; as someone who acts on promises and responds to need, she also tests what its professed duties of faith and refuge mean in practice.