This section of the novel focuses on the build-up to the Minor Saint’s funeral and details the violence and horror of the House of the Sacred Sisterhood. The narrator is steered by anger, resentment, and jealousy, and her rivalry with Lourdes is a central conflict. The narrator feels “an overwhelming joy at the possibility of seeing [Lourdes] fail” (35), and when the funeral goes perfectly, she and the other unworthy “detest her.” The women’s hatred of Lourdes stems from jealousy. She is the Superior Sister’s favorite and an obvious choice for Chosen or Enlightened. She is also violent and eager to tattle, punish, or spread harmful rumors about the other women, offering a prime example of how the dogma of the Sisterhood uses the women to oppress and control one another, sowing fear, distrust, and suspicion to keep them weak and compliant. This dynamic underscores the theme of Misogyny, Oppression, and Organized Religion, as it reveals how patriarchal systems replicate themselves by turning women into enforcers of their own subjugation. Lourdes’s “radiance” and performative piety make her both an aspirational figure and a cautionary one—proof that even within this hierarchy, status is achieved through cruelty. The narrator plays her part willingly, taking pleasure in the possibility of Lourdes’s failure, hiding her smiles when women are punished and even “betraying” Helena, the woman who rescued her by admitting her to the Sisterhood.

In this section, the narrator is reluctant to write about Helena. She often scratches out her descriptions of Helena, removing the word “fearless” and calling her the “undisciplined one” instead. When Helena read some of the narrator’s forbidden writings, she retaliated by telling the Superior Sister about the cross hidden beneath Helena’s mattress. The act marked the narrator’s loss of self to the Sisterhood. Instead of acting from a place of compassion and mercy, she sacrificed her only friend in the name of her own self-interest. Now, writing, she tells herself over and over that Helena was “disobedient,” that she “oozed indecency, debauchery” for worshiping “the erroneous God” (24-5). She repeats these teachings of the Sisterhood to absolve herself of the responsibility she feels for Helena’s death. This passage demonstrates the narrator’s deep internalization of the Sisterhood’s doctrine and its violent erasure of intimacy, further aligning with the theme of Misogyny, Oppression, and Organized Religion. Helena’s memory becomes a site of struggle where guilt, grief, and indoctrination clash, and where language is weaponized to rewrite the truth in the Sisterhood’s image. At the same time, the narrator’s continued return to Helena in her writing suggests that memory resists total suppression, especially when it is bound to love.

These pages also introduce Lucía, who the narrator sees in the forest for the first time. Finding her in the woods, Lucía is immediately a symbol of hope and purity. She is “resplendent” and “majestic,” looking like a “white deer” and “radiat[ing] an otherworldly light” (47). A dragonfly, which the narrator assumed was extinct, lands on her stomach, indicating a sense of hope from the outside world. Lucía’s presence begins to challenge the narrator’s assumptions about what is sacred and what is profane. Her beauty is not born of mutilation or obedience but from something elemental and free. This moment subtly introduces the theme of The Redemptive Power of Love and Connection, as Lucía’s arrival marks the first time the narrator experiences wonder not induced by violent ritual. 

The women are kept completely isolated and taught that the Sisterhood is a “small, pristine Eden” (41) protected by the Enlightened. “He” and the Superior Sister tell them over and over “without faith, there is no refuge” (41), and dangers from the outside world, like the poisonous fog or wind, require self-flagellation and sacrifice so the women can prove their faith and protect the Sisterhood. Their only path of survival is to believe the Sisterhood completely: They “don’t understand, logically, how the miracle occurs, [they] just accept it” (41). This unwavering demand for faith without understanding connects back to Misogyny, Oppression, and Organized Religion, particularly in the way it encourages women to mistrust their own reason, instincts, and memory. The narrator’s spontaneous joy at seeing the dragonfly—and her bodily longing for Lucía—begin to disrupt this obedience. The dragonfly is also the first hint that the outside world might not be as bad as “He” and the Superior Sister claim.

These chapters also continue to develop the theme of The Role of Language in Constructing Identity and Humanity. The narrator explicitly struggles with the limits of language, lamenting that writing about the forest never brings the past back into the present. Her difficulty capturing the fullness of sensory experience—especially the beauty of the natural world—highlights the gap between institutional language and personal meaning. This tension deepens when she compares the death of a bird “surrounded by beauty” to Helena’s brutal end, revealing how narrative itself becomes an ethical act: Who gets mourned, and how, determines whose life is remembered.

Even the rituals surrounding the funeral reflect this theme. María de las Soledades, whose name was violently imposed upon her, is marked by scars spelling out “Rain”—a name she longed to keep as her own. The word is literally carved into her body, showing how identity is overwritten not just linguistically, but physically. The narrator herself continues to censor her words, skipping over what she knows about the Superior Sister’s gender, for instance, out of fear or habit. Yet she also creates moments of quiet rebellion—writing in berry ink, hiding her pages, and dreaming of a future reader. These small gestures illustrate how writing becomes a space of survival and resistance.

Finally, this section is saturated with the bodily consequences of belief: Vomiting blood, eating eye-less fish, carrying corpses barefoot, and enduring starvation and mutilation all become signs of devotion. These grotesque practices render the women’s suffering both visible and sacred, inverting the logic of care. The Sisterhood’s theology sanctifies violence by calling it purification, and the narrator, caught in the throes of jealousy and longing, both upholds and questions this logic. Her resentment of Lourdes stems in part from envy of her closeness to power, but also from a frustrated longing for genuine connection that cannot be met in the current system.

Taken together, this portion of the novel reveals a system built on weaponized language, enforced ritual, and isolation disguised as refuge. And yet, seeds of change are being planted through memory, through writing, and through seeing Lucía in the forest. As the narrator glimpses beauty beyond the convent walls and reflects on her betrayal of Helena, she begins to experience doubt as a form of awakening. Her story is still cloaked in fear and envy, but underneath it, the stirrings of love, language, and longing begin to take root.