Petition to Suspend the Staircase Work

The Petition to Suspend the Staircase Work is Elinora’s effort to stop the carpenter’s work through a signed appeal to her uncle, Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy. It is more than a written request: paired with a schoolwide fast and circulated among the girls, it turns the students’ religious claim into organized pressure. The Bishop accepts the petition, but the carpenter is still at work when the campaign is announced, leaving the document’s practical effect distinct from its immediate success as a means of protest.

Purpose and Terms

Elinora presents the petition as a request that the Bishop stop the carpenter from working for the week and allow Saint Joseph to come to the girls’ aid. Her argument depends on a religious condition she asserts with certainty: the saint will not come while the carpenter continues. The petition thus links a concrete demand about the work schedule to the girls’ belief that divine intervention is at stake.

The request is directed to the Bishop not only because he has authority over the work, but because he is Elinora’s uncle. She tells the other girls that he has to accept their petition and points to the consequences of refusal: if they stop eating, he will face a crisis, particularly because some students come from important families whose relatives give money to the school and convent. The appeal therefore combines religious conviction with an explicit calculation of institutional and financial pressure.

The text of the petition itself is not reproduced. Its terms emerge through Elinora’s instructions and her later account: the girls ask that all work cease for the week and that Saint Joseph be given the opportunity to help them. That distinction matters. The petition does not simply oppose the carpenter; it frames stopping his work as a necessary condition for the aid the girls expect.

Making the Petition a Collective Action

Elinora proposes that the girls write the petition that night and obtain signatures the next day. She places the writing alongside a fast, directing them to refuse supper and to conceal any treats sent from home. At the same time, she clarifies that they need not actually starve: they need only give the appearance of doing so. The plan deliberately joins a formal document to a visible demonstration, making the petition harder to dismiss as an isolated complaint.

When the campaign reaches the meal table, the girls sit with their hands in their laps and their eyes downcast. Elinora wears a black lace mantilla and moves her lips in prayer; other students look to her for resolve, while one watches the platters and another appears close to tears. Their stillness gives the protest a public form, even as its discipline is imperfect: at noon, some girls secretly wrap bread in handkerchiefs, and the students drink tea and water. Elinora urges them to drink water to fill themselves. The scene shows both the performance and the strain of the fast that supports the petition.

Circulation and Confrontation

Elinora tells Mother Magdalena that copies of the petition are already being passed among girls gathering in classrooms and predicts that by noon nobody will be eating unless the Bishop heeds the request. Mother Magdalena challenges the action as a threat. Elinora denies that characterization, insisting that the girls are asking the Bishop to stop the carpenter and let Saint Joseph aid them. The distinction is central to her presentation: she casts collective pressure as a petitionary appeal rather than defiance.

Mother Magdalena disputes Elinora’s religious justification. When Elinora invokes a recent calling and suggests that Saint Joseph may have spoken to her, Mother Magdalena answers that the calling was actually a note from Abeyta summoning Elinora to meet beneath the Comanche moon. Her rebuke exposes a conflict between Elinora’s public explanation for the protest and the private correspondence Mother Magdalena cites. The petition remains a real collective demand, but its leader’s authority to speak in religious terms is contested within the scene.

Later, Elinora tells Lizzy that all the girls at the school have signed. She has also engaged a courier to take the petition to the Bishop at his farm, where he is to receive it that night. She predicts that the carpenter will be gone by the following day. The courier and the destination give the campaign a route beyond the convent: signatures gathered among the students are carried directly to the person able to decide the request.

Acceptance and Limits

The Bishop accepts the petition. His decision does not mean that he agrees with Elinora’s claim about Saint Joseph: he explains that he cannot have girls fasting and fainting in class, and that some day boarders depend on the food at school as their only decent meal of the day. He also recognizes that a bishop cannot always do what he wants and must sometimes do what he does not want. His acceptance is therefore presented as a response to the girls’ welfare and the consequences of the fast, not as confirmation of the supernatural argument used to support the appeal.

Acceptance also does not erase the campaign’s immediate tension. Elinora had said that the carpenter was still hammering in the kitchen while the girls refused food, and she had promised Lizzy that the carpenter would be gone the next day. The available account establishes that the Bishop has accepted the petition, but does not confirm that the work stops or that Saint Joseph appears. The document’s clearest consequence is that it compels the Bishop to respond to the students’ coordinated action.

As an object in the story, the petition gathers several kinds of authority without resolving their disagreement: the girls’ signatures, Elinora’s religious claim, the convent’s concern for its students, and the Bishop’s responsibility for both the work and the school. Its force comes not from a reproduced text but from the actions organized around it. The fast makes the cost of refusal visible; the signatures make the appeal collective; and the courier carries that appeal to the Bishop’s farm. Its acceptance marks the success of that pressure even while the promised religious and practical outcomes remain uncertain.