Mother Magdalena

Mother Magdalena governs the convent through firm rules and visible authority, but her role is not limited to discipline: she assigns care, weighs danger, and helps shape the community’s responses to its crises. For Lizzy Enders, who arrives grieving and resistant to the Catholic school’s customs, Mother Magdalena is at once a formidable superior and an adult who entrusts her with consequential responsibilities. Her authority is strict, sometimes harsh, and repeatedly tested by the difference between enforcing order and meeting the needs of the people in her care.

Identity and Authority

Mother Magdalena is the convent’s senior authority, responsible for the girls’ conduct and the household’s response to events inside and outside its walls. Her rules are explicit. She tells Lizzy, “RULE NUMBER ONE,” followed by the prohibition against leaving the grounds without permission and roaming the streets of Santa Fe. The rule gives a name to the boundary Lizzy has crossed, but it also expresses the convent’s wider effort to control where its girls may go and what risks they may encounter.

Her presence is physically imposing. She is very tall, and the pointed wimple she wears makes her seem taller still. Her complexion is ordinarily red, reddening further when she is angry; her blue eyes blaze. The girls fear the force of her tongue, though Lizzy says she herself is not frightened by it. This contrast establishes a difference between Mother Magdalena’s standing in the institution and her personal hold over Lizzy: the younger girl challenges her even while she must live under her authority.

That challenge becomes explicit when Mother Magdalena expects Lizzy to address her as Mother. Lizzy refuses, explaining that Mother Magdalena is not her mother. Mother Magdalena answers that in the True Faith the title is symbolic. Lizzy, a Protestant in a Catholic convent, says she does not belong to that faith and prefers to call her ma’am. Their exchange makes the title more than a form of address: it exposes the distance between the convent’s religious language and Lizzy’s experience of being left behind by her father. Mother Magdalena’s insistence reflects the institution’s expectations; Lizzy’s refusal preserves a distinction she will not surrender merely to comply.

Discipline and the Limits of Lizzy’s Defiance

Mother Magdalena’s authority becomes punitive after Elinora St. Clair returns from a secret outing and tells Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy that she went only because Lizzy wanted to sneak out and needed a friend. Mother Magdalena seizes Lizzy by the arm and takes her inside, treating her as responsible for the night’s trouble. Sister Roberta is present and silently signals that Lizzy is the wrong culprit, but Mother Magdalena proceeds with the punishment.

That night, Mother Magdalena switches Lizzy with a rod kept in her office. The blows penetrate Lizzy’s long purple uniform and underclothes. For Lizzy, who has never been switched before, the humiliation is worse than the physical pain. Mother Magdalena then sends her to the room the girls call the dungeon, which is actually a small room off the kitchen used as a penance chamber. It has a hardboard bed without a mattress or pillow, a thin blanket, a high small window, a crucifix, a pitcher of cold water, and one candle in a wall alcove. The setting makes the punishment both bodily and isolating: discipline extends from the switch to the austere space in which Lizzy must spend the night.

The next morning, Mother Magdalena asks whether Lizzy has reflected on the consequences of lying and disobedience. Lizzy answers humbly, giving the response she understands Mother Magdalena wants, while privately doubting whether the girls tell her the truth. The exchange shows that punishment can produce outward compliance without securing inward agreement. Mother Magdalena then tells Lizzy that the Bishop wants to see her after mass and instructs her to wash, comb her hair, dress properly, and eat breakfast in the kitchen. Even after the night’s severity, the day resumes according to the convent’s ordered routine.

Assigning Care and Responding to Danger

Mother Magdalena also assigns Lizzy work that rests on trust in her ability. After explaining that Violate Lacey sometimes becomes confused and that the asafoetida bag around her neck is intended to prevent croup and colds, not to punish her, Mother Magdalena cuts off Lizzy’s attempt to object. She declares that Violate Lacey will be Lizzy’s responsibility for as long as they are together and Violate Lacey remains alive in the convent. Each day after lessons, Lizzy is to accompany her to Fort Marcy, where she brings flowers to her son’s grave. Lizzy calls the place creepy and asks for another punishment, but Mother Magdalena says she has proved adept with Violate Lacey and that Violate Lacey likes her.

The assignment is demanding, but it makes Mother Magdalena’s governance more complex than simple enforcement. She places an older woman who sometimes becomes confused in the hands of a girl who has herself recently suffered bereavement and abandonment. The daily visit to the grave joins practical supervision to an act of remembrance. Mother Magdalena’s decision also gives Lizzy a continuing responsibility beyond the convent’s punishments and lessons.

When the question of Delvina’s condition arises, Lizzy tells Violate Lacey that Sister Roberta wants updates and hopes to bring Delvina into the convent shortly before her baby is born. Violate Lacey urges Lizzy to ask Delvina that very day. The episode shows that concern for Delvina circulates among the convent’s residents and that Lizzy is involved in passing information and seeking help. Later, Mother Magdalena receives a note from Lizzy while Lizzy is holding the newborn Elena. The available scene establishes Mother Magdalena as a recipient of information during the unfolding crisis, though it does not by itself show what she concludes from the note.

After an attack by Ramon Baca, Mother Magdalena announces that Elena must be placed with a family outside Santa Fe. She explains that the Bishop does not want the convent to endanger the girls by risking another attack and warns that Ramon Baca, though imprisoned, may not remain there long. Her decision prioritizes the children’s safety over keeping Elena within the convent. It also shows the limits of the institution’s shelter: care inside its walls cannot remove the threat posed by a violent father with influence beyond them.

The School’s Disputes and the Staircase

Mother Magdalena’s authority is tested not only by individual acts of disobedience but also by collective resistance. During the girls’ hunger strike, she stands over the five boarders and insists that they eat the fresh fish, eggs, and corn bread. They refuse the food and drink tea instead. Elinora announces that copies of the girls’ petition are being circulated and that by noon the other girls will also be refusing food unless Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy heeds their request. Mother Magdalena confronts a coordinated protest whose aim is to reach the Bishop, not merely to defy her personally. Her insistence on meals cannot settle the dispute, because the girls have turned refusal into a public appeal.

The staircase problem likewise places religious expectation beside practical uncertainty. The convent’s nuns have been conducting a novena to Saint Joseph, while Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy acknowledges that he cannot perform the miracle they expect. He agrees to let Lizzy’s hungry carpenter examine the chapel’s staircase problem. When the carpenter’s work is found complete, the nuns and girls gather in the back of the church to look up at the staircase. Mother Magdalena interprets the result decisively: “It can mean only one thing,” she says, and identifies the carpenter as Saint Joseph. The nuns kneel and pray.

Lizzy does not share Mother Magdalena’s certainty. She knows the carpenter as a man who spoke with her, listened to her troubles, held her kitten, and confided his sadness at leaving his own family. The contrast is central to Mother Magdalena’s place in the novel: where Lizzy retains the ordinary human details of the carpenter, Mother Magdalena gathers the completed staircase into a religious explanation. Her declaration does not end the uncertainty for the reader, but it makes the convent’s communal act of belief visible.

Narrative Role

Mother Magdalena embodies the convent’s capacity to impose order and to organize care, and the novel presents both sides through Lizzy’s encounters with her. Her rules keep the girls within the grounds; her punishment makes the cost of crossing those rules unmistakable. Yet she also entrusts Lizzy with Violate Lacey’s daily visits, and she acts on the danger to Elena after Ramon Baca’s attack. These duties and decisions prevent her from being reduced to a stern obstacle in Lizzy’s story.

Her authority is nevertheless never identical with Lizzy’s understanding of events. Lizzy can obey outwardly while questioning the truth of the answers expected from her, and she can witness the same staircase as Mother Magdalena yet resist the conclusion that a saint built it. Mother Magdalena’s certainty gives the convent a way to interpret an extraordinary event; Lizzy’s doubt leaves room for the carpenter’s humanity and for belief that remains unresolved. In this tension between institutional conviction and a child’s guarded judgment, Mother Magdalena helps define the novel’s larger balance between religious explanations and human action.