The Virgin by Kerima Polotan: Summary, Themes and Ending
Quick answer: The Virgin by Kerima Polotan: summary with the ending, Miss Mijares at the placement office, the carpenter and his child, the jeepney in the rain, themes and craft.
Miss Mijares is thirty-four, runs the desk at an employment agency, and has spent her adult life nursing a dying mother and keeping men at the length of a counter. A carpenter comes in looking for work, tells her he is not married, and later mentions a child. The story ends in the rain, in a stalled jeepney, with a decision she does not put into words.
Kerima Polotan (1925 to 2011) wrote The Virgin in the early 1950s; it won a Palanca award and is on Philippine college syllabuses as the country's classic study of a repressed woman. Polotan is in copyright, so this page summarises and analyses without quotation.
The story in brief
Miss Mijares processes applicants at a placement bureau with a precision that keeps everyone at a distance. Polotan gives her history in glimpses: the years of caring for her mother, the suitors who did not wait, the small vanities of dress she permits herself. A carpenter applies for a job; he is uneducated, physically at ease, and answers her form's question about marital status by saying he is single. She finds him a post and finds herself thinking about him.
Later he reveals, plainly, that he has a child. Miss Mijares takes this as a lie about his marriage, is cold with him, and is more disturbed than the offence warrants. Some evenings afterwards they are on the same jeepney in heavy rain; it breaks down, and the passengers scatter into the dark street. The carpenter is beside her. Polotan closes the story on Miss Mijares turning toward him, her control giving way, and leaves what follows to the reader.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Exam readings cover sexual repression, the spinster's social position in 1950s Manila, and class difference between an office woman and a labourer. The title is read as literal and as a judgement the character has internalised.
The sharper observation is that the carpenter never lies. He said he was unmarried and he is; the child is a fact he offers without shame. Miss Mijares's anger is at his freedom from the categories she has lived by, and the ending is less a seduction than a surrender of those categories.
The craft
The turn is the mention of the child, which shifts the story from observation to reaction and shows Miss Mijares's composure failing under a fact she cannot file. The jeepney breakdown is the second turn, a plot device that removes her from every structure she uses to keep order.
The technique worth stealing is the withheld ending. Polotan stops at the instant of decision, not after it, and the reader completes the act. Ending at the threshold works when everything before has shown what crossing it costs.
For class and essays
What writers can take from this
- Read the title both literally and as an internalised judgement.
- Show that the carpenter tells the truth throughout.
- Treat the rain and the stalled jeepney as the removal of structure.
- For your own fiction, end at the threshold of an act, not after it.
- Give a controlled character a fact that will not fit her forms.
- Reveal a past life in glimpses rather than a block of backstory.
Try it yourself
Write a story about a person whose life is organised by categories, met by someone who answers every question truthfully and fits none of them, and end at the moment the categories give way, without narrating what follows.
Questions
What is the summary of The Virgin by Kerima Polotan?
Miss Mijares, a thirty-four-year-old placement clerk, is drawn to a carpenter who applies for work and says he is unmarried. When he mentions a child she is angry. Later, stranded together when a jeepney breaks down in the rain, she turns to him, and the story ends there.
What is the theme of The Virgin?
Repression and its cost. Miss Mijares has organised her life around control and respectability, and one honest man and a rainstorm undo it.
Does Miss Mijares sleep with the carpenter?
The story ends before anything is shown. Polotan implies that she yields to him in the rain but leaves the act unnarrated.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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