Granny Weatherall
Old woman on her deathbed who is in her delirium passes back and forth between the present and her past, with the focus on her being jilted by the man who would have been her first husband. She dies with a sense of peace at reconciling this bitterness.
Maria Concepcion
Teenage Mexican girl who husband runs off the join the Mexican Revolution with another teenage girl named Maria, leaving her all alone to give birth to a baby that dies shortly thereafter. When her husband, returns the rival Maria is now pregnant and Maria stakes a claim for traditional family values through blood and justice.
"He"
Unnamed mentally disturbed son of the Whipple family in the story titled after him. He represents a threat to his mother’s carefully construction delusion that she is preserving her family’s status in society and will eventually become her sacrificial lamb to maintain that delusion.
Rosaleen
Middle-aged woman married to an old man who views the reflection of herself in a cracked mirror. After an attempt to chase a fantasy that will revive her image as the fairest of them all, she returns home with the grudging acceptance that reality can be just as distorted as a mirror.
Violeta
Young virginal girl with romantic fantasies about her cousin which are shattered when the cousin actually tries to make a predatory romantic play. The young girl raised by nuns comes is instantly transformed in her attitude toward sexuality and the virgin attached to her name in the title of her story becomes secured.
Laura
Ethereal protagonist of the collection’s title story who receives the fruit of the Judas tree from one of the many admirers whom she rejects during a dream. Her acceptance of the flowers are an indication that what may seem to have been act of love could in fact have been an act of betrayal.
Ruben
A talented painter but also one of the many submissive men dominated by women in the collection. His martyrdom is to the woman he loves and his sacrifice for that woman is his art. And, eventually, such martyrdom claims his own life.
