Who is Sarah?
We are given few details about the young woman who shows up at the family's house when her baby is discovered in their garden. However, her arrival sets the biggest events of the story in motion. The family sort of adopts her and her baby, which makes Mother more of a prominent and independent character and brings Coalhouse into the narrative. Sarah's death intensifies Coalhouse's feelings of injustice, leading to his vigilantism and eventually to the family going to Atlantic City and meeting Tateh and his daughter. I believe that Sarah is meant to be more of a plot device than a character in the ways that the others are. While other main characters' growth can be tracked (such as Tateh's beliefs and standing in society), Sarah seems at the whim of the universe more than her own agency. What little we know about her life before meeting the family, including allegedly killing her baby, seem to be the result of the social class she was born into. With Mother's hel...