Identity and the Self

Agnes DeWitt’s transformation into Father Damien Modeste instigates the author’s explorations concerning identity and the self. In the prologue, the reader learns that Father Damien is in fact a woman. Then, in Chapter 1, “Naked Woman Playing Chopin,” the narrator reveals that Agnes has occupied a range of alternate identities. Six months prior to her entrance into the convent, “she was Agnes DeWitt” (14). Shortly after her arrival, “she was Sister Cecilia—shorn, houseled, clothed in black wool and bound in starched linen of heatless white” (14). When she later leaves the convent and arrives at Berndt Vogel’s farm, she sheds the dress and thus the costume of Sister Cecilia, and returns to her former identity as Agnes. Following Berndt’s death and her escape from the storm and flood on her piano, Agnes then dons the robes and thus the identity of...