“At nearly six feet, she was taller than the grooms; she would ruin the photographs, and image was everything to the Wolcotts. Her parents prized it above all else.” 

For years, Elsa’s parents tell her she is not pretty and that no man would want her, and she believes them. Her isolation is largely self-imposed, but it suits her parents just fine. As one of the most important families in town, the Wolcotts have a certain social standing to maintain, a standing based on appearances, formality, and tradition. A gangly, unwed daughter doesn’t fit their rigid social standards, and so she must be sequestered like a contagion.

“Dalhart was a town—fast becoming a city—of box suppers and square dances and Sunday morning services. Hard work and like-minded people creating good lives from the soil.” 

Dalhart, Texas, thrives with the prosperity of its farmers, but that economic success breeds conformity and a strict adherence to rituals: church on Sunday, participation in social events, unquestioning patriotism. While virtues like hard work benefit both the town and its residents, this conformity doesn’t tolerate any deviation, such as a gangly, unwed woman who dares to dream of an education or her olive-skinned baby fathered by an Italian Catholic. Obsessive devotion to rituals creates in the town’s residents an irrational fear of abandoning those rituals. The slender thread by which Dalhart’s prosperity—or the Wolcotts’ social standing—hangs elicits enough anxiety for the Wolcotts to disown their own flesh and blood.