“You needn’t call me Mother, if you don’t wish.”

Mother Miriam’s offhand remark to Dr. Livingstone illustrates the complexity of the play’s portrayal of motherhood. Mother Miriam suggests that the irreligious doctor need not use such a religiously charged term, but she also recognizes that the “familiarity” the word implies makes many uncomfortable. This demonstrates that Mother Miriam is willing to put herself and her title aside in the name of helping Agnes while also showing empathy for others’ feelings, but it also foreshadows the fraught nature of the play’s mother-child relationships.

“DOCTOR: Who taught her [to sing]?

MOTHER: I don’t know.”

No one taught Agnes to sing, yet her singing conveys a sense of spiritual transcendence to those listening. Agne’s singing, like her pregnancy, is a mystery tinged with religious meaning, adding to the ethereal sense of spirituality that surrounds her.

“And that’s when I realized that my religion, my Christ, is this. The mind.”

Dr. Livingstone insists that she is not religious, yet she metaphorically describes her dedication to the human mind as a religion. This complicates the play’s exploration of Science and Religion as Competing Arbiters of Truth: Rather than putting religion aside, she has swapped one religion for another. She becomes so impassioned later in the play because, as she suggests, psychiatry is as important to her as religion is to the nuns. The association with Christ in particular is significant because it implies that she looks to psychiatry for a form of redemption; that it fails to “save” Agnes contextualizes Dr. Livingstone’s ultimate turn toward agnosticism as a search for alternative forms of salvation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! You want to talk about the baby, everybody wants to talk about the baby, but I never saw the baby, so I can’t talk about the baby, because I don’t believe in the baby!”

Agnes has difficulty processing what happened to her and her child. Though she cannot quite grasp the reality of what took place, she is certain of her faith. As such, faith becomes her only real paradigm for interpreting reality; by not believing in the baby, she can dismiss it as unreal. Agnes uses this paradigm of faith because it is the only means she has to understand or comprehend the world.

 “I have to be eight pounds again, Mother.”

Agnes’s desire to lose weight becomes more impossible as Mother Miriam probes deeper. Agnes wishes to be the weight of a baby again, suggesting that she is not operating within the bounds of reality. This is a warning sign for Mother Miriam that Agne’s self-identity is built on a shaky foundation—specifically, one that rejects her mature body as shameful. The passage thus hints at The Sexual Politics of Sin and Purity.

“But she didn’t die, did she?!

(silence)

If anyone else had seen what I had seen, well, she’d be public property. Newspapers, psychiatrists, ridicule.”

Mother Miriam sincerely believes that there is something religiously significant about Agnes that would make her a celebrity if publicly known. In hiding Agnes’s situation from the world, Mother Miriam believes that she is protecting Agnes from the celebrity, the scandal, and the attention that—she believes—would harm Agnes. This conveys the complexity of Mother Miriam’s decision: She genuinely believes that Agnes is blessed by God, but she wishes to hide this blessing from the world.

“What finally happened was that I…well, I…I was pregnant and I didn’t exactly see myself as a…well, as my mother.”

Dr. Livingstone’s choice of words is telling. Discussing her pregnancy, she chooses to say that she did not see herself as her own mother, rather than a mother. She feared turning into her own mother and thus rejected the identity of mother outright. As with Agnes’s mother traumatizing her and affecting her understanding of parenthood, Dr. Livingstone’s understanding of how to be a mother is shaped by her relationship with her own mother.

“But I learned to live with my anger [over Marie’s death], forget it even…until she walked into my office, and every time I saw her after that first lovely moment, I became more and more…entranced.”

In her soliloquy, Dr. Livingstone explains why this particular case has become so personal for her. The sight of Agnes dredges up old pain; if she can help Agnes, Dr. Livingstone feels as though she can repair her own past. The Agnes case takes on new significance because it brings to mind the anger that Dr. Livingstone tried to forget.

“AGNES: It was a mistake!

DOCTOR: What, the child?

AGNES: Everything! Nuns don’t have children!”

Agnes points out that she could not have had a baby since she is a nun. This illustrates Agnes’s desperate way of thinking, in which she creates a paradox out of her own identity: Nuns are not supposed to have children but are not physically incapable of doing so. Her reference to a “mistake” suggests that she recognizes this on some level but is also ambiguous; it is unclear whether Agnes is referring to a “mistake” she made or to others’ misinterpretation of events, presumably because the events are unclear to Agnes herself.

“Catholicism is not on trial here.”

Mother Miriam diagnoses Dr. Livingstone, just as Dr. Livingstone diagnoses Agnes. Miriam recognizes that Dr. Livingstone’s emotional investment in Agnes’s case extends beyond the professional, realizing that there is something personal at stake. In turn, Miriam feels compelled to defend her faith, and she tries to do so by pointing out that her religion is not on trial.

“They won’t see me anymore. That’s their revenge. They’re both devout atheists.”

Like Dr. Livingstone, Mother Miriam has her own past regrets that inform her relationship to Agnes. She is so protective of Agnes in part because she hopes to undo the mistakes she made with her own children, whom she says she cast “into ‘the big bad world’” (35). Those children retaliated by cutting off contact but also, implicitly, by embracing atheism, so Mother Miriam is desperate to nurture and protect Agnes’s religiosity as a countermeasure to her own children’s lack of belief.

“They were two of a set of triplets.”

The riddle is significant because it implies the existence of a third person who is not identified when the question is asked. Dr. Livingstone poses the riddle in the context of speculating about an unknown person who might have murdered Agnes’s child. As Agnes herself turns out to be responsible, the riddle highlights the extent of her dissociation from the act. More broadly, the riddle frames the play’s three characters as “triplets” who mirror one another in key ways. It also gestures to the Christian concept of the Trinity, suggesting that those characters can be understood as different aspects of a single person.

“AGNES: How can I be a mistake if I’m really here? God doesn’t make mistakes. You’re a mistake! I wish you were dead!”

Dr. Livingstone prompts Agnes to confront her traumatic memories by playing the role of Agnes’s mother. In response, Agnes turns her mother’s accusation—that Agnes was a “mistake”—against her. The way in which Agnes chooses to defend herself shows the ways in which she was most hurt. The implication that Agnes was an unwanted child informs both the shape her mother’s abuse took and Agnes’s ensuing fear of sexuality and reproduction.

“[Agnes’s father] [c]ould have been any one of a dozen men, from what my sister told me. She was afraid that Agnes would follow in her footsteps.”

Mother Miriam’s revelations about Agnes’s mother’s sexual history contextualize her abuse of Agnes, which centered on shaming Agnes sexually. As Dr. Livingstone notes a few lines later, this abuse extended to molesting Agnes, contributing to the adult Agnes’s extreme sexual repression. The ambiguity surrounding Agnes’s paternity mirrors the mystery of her own pregnancy, highlighting a tragic irony: Agnes’s mother’s fear that Agnes would “follow in her footsteps” results in history repeating itself when Agnes harms her own child.

“[W]hen I was six I stopped listening and my [guardian] angel stopped speaking. But just as a sailor remembers the sea, I remembered that voice. […] And then one evening, while walking behind a convent wall, I heard a voice and looking up I saw one of our new postulants standing in her window, singing. It was Agnes, and she was beautiful; and all my doubts about God and myself vanished in that moment. I recognized that voice.”

Mother Miriam’s choice of analogy is telling. To her, religious experience is as vast, unknowable, and undeniable as the sea—something she can traverse but lacks mastery over. She goes on to identify this voice with Agnes’s in a passage that says as much about Mother Miriam’s reliance on Agnes to affirm her own faith and choices as it does about Agnes’s saintly qualities.

“I cannot make you say or do anything you do not wish to say or do.”

Recognizing that Agnes is frightened, Dr. Livingstone seeks to soothe her by returning her agency to her. Throughout her life, Agnes has suffered at the hands of those—such as her mother—who were meant to have her best interests in mind. Dr. Livingstone empowers Agnes by restoring this agency, assuring her that everything she says and does is her own choice.

“The mind is a remarkable thing, Doctor Livingstone. […] If she’s capable of putting a hole in her hand without benefit of a nail, why couldn’t she split a tiny cell in her womb?”

Dr. Livingstone has not hesitated to explain religion as she understands it to a nun. Now, Mother Miriam inverts this, ironically telling the psychiatrist that “the mind is a remarkable thing” (60). The response illustrates the play’s exploration of the tension between science and faith, inviting the audience to question who is empowered to speak with authority on these subjects. Indeed, Mother Miriam goes on to link the mind’s power to Agnes’s pregnancy, proposing that it was the result of psychologically induced parthenogenesis (a form of asexual reproduction). Since this kind of reproduction has never been observed in humans, Mother Miriam suggests that it would constitute a kind of miracle; she thus yokes a scientific explanation to her religious worldview.

“But I want to believe. I want the opportunity to believe. I want the choice to believe.”

For Mother Miriam, belief is not about definitive answers. Rather than simply believing, she wants the opportunity to believe, as she seeks agency over her spirituality. Absent any clear answers, having the opportunity to believe turns faith into an active choice.

“Don’t try to turn this into some kind of murder mystery, Doctor.”

In a literal sense, the investigation into what happened to Agnes’s child is already a murder mystery. Mother Miriam’s meaning is subtly different, however; she is asking Dr. Livingstone not to turn the investigation into a spectacle, disparaging any attempt to repurpose a tragic event into a gaudy personal vendetta or media sensation. Mother Miriam is asking Dr. Livingstone not to make Agnes the subject of public scrutiny that she fears might harm the young girl. In the context of their broader conversation, she is also implicitly asking Dr. Livingstone not to pursue the truth at any cost, as mystery is essential to faith.

“This is it. The unfinished thought. The last reel. No alternate in sight.”

As the play reaches the conclusion, Dr. Livingstone returns to the cinema imagery with which she opened the first scene. She fears that a tragic ending for Agnes is inevitable, yet she craves an alternative. The cinema metaphor shows Dr. Livingstone’s lack of agency, as she feels like a passive observer, hoping that the ending will change, rather than an empowered participant in events with the agency to change anything.

“A flower. Waxy and white. A drop of blood, sinking into the petal, flowing through the veins. A tiny halo. Millions of halos, dividing and dividing, feathers are stars, falling, falling into the iris of God’s eye.”

Agnes’s vision blends natural and spiritual imagery; in particular, the description of halos dividing suggests the division of cells in pregnancy, rendering the process mystical or even miraculous. At the same time, the image of blood staining the pure white flower symbolically suggests the violation of innocence, while the fact that God’s iris watches her reveals her fear that her actions have caused her to sin in the eyes of God. Agnes’s vision blurs the line between beauty and violence, echoing her broader relationship to religion.

“God! God did it to me! It was God! And now I’ll burn in hell because I hate Him!”

In the depths of the hypnosis, Agnes is unencumbered by her religious boundaries. She is asked the identity of the man who impregnated her and blames God, claiming that she hates God for what he has done. Her words are ambiguous; they could imply an immaculate conception, as Mother Miriam has suggested, but they can also be read as Agnes blaming God for allowing her abuse. Her fear that she will be punished for her anger speaks to the play’s interest in The Rationalization of Harm Through Faith.

“I tied the cord around her neck, wrapped her in the bloody sheets, and stuffed her in the trash can.”

Agnes is a Catholic, but her confession is secular in nature. Rather than delivering her confession to a priest, she confesses to her psychiatrist while under hypnosis. The direct, brutal nature of her confession suggests that she is not seeking atonement or forgiveness, as she might have done in a religious setting. Indeed, the aftermath of the confession—Agnes’s illness and death—tacitly questions whether anything was gained by unearthing the truth.