logo

58 pages 1 hour read

Ann-Marie MacDonald

Fall on your Knees

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1996

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Character Analysis

James Piper

James Piper is a pedophile who is drawn sexually to prepubescent girls. This sexual appetite drives his pursuit of the young Materia, whom he marries when she is 12 years old, and then his sexual assault of his daughter Kathleen. Every element of James’s character, from his professional life to his position as the emotional core of his family, reflects his psychological disorder, corruption, and dysfunction. He is opportunistic, predatory, and selfish. He is given to sudden anger and sees violence and physical domination as ways to assert rightness. Everything he touches he corrodes—including Kathleen’s once-in-a-generation voice. The single noble gesture James makes—joining the Canadian army to head overseas to fight the Kaiser in WWI—he only does to avoid giving in to his sexual obsession with his own daughter.

James’s rape of Kathleen and the lies he contrives to hide this event shape the toxic environment of the Piper family. The novel delays portraying the rape scene, the revelation of which becomes the climactic moment in the plot. Because of the secrecy forced on multiple generations of Piper women by the monstrous James, and the fact that he only confesses to the rape before he dies, peacefully, after being nursed by the very daughters he terrorized, James is never held accountable for this violation. In a novel invested in the vocabulary of Catholicism, James is the only character who stays outside the reach of salvation. He is as evil and irredeemable as the demon Kathleen invents and fears—the demon that is the product of her father’s incestuous pedophilic desire for her.

Kathleen Piper

Eldest Piper daughter Kathleen Piper haunts the novel, as her story is the crux of the disturbing secrets that imprison the family. After she goes off to New York to pursue her singing career, Kathleen finds joy and love—an experience cut brutally short at the hands of her predatory father. Her pregnancy and death in childbirth set in motion the tragedy that unfolds across three decades and multiple generations.

“I am burning,” Kathleen writes in her journal, “I have to live, I have to sing…to this I consecrate my body and my soul” (422). Kathleen, who “sang so beautifully that God wanted her to sing for Him in heaven with His choir of angels” (11), embodies purity in two ways. First, her sweeping voice, which already rivets audiences when she is not yet nine, is a talent that propels Kathleen from the backwater theaters of Cape Breton to aspire to be the greatest opera singer in the world. Second, her discovery of the power of love through her relationship with Rose transcends a childhood in which love is corrupted into emotional terrorism—together, Rose and Kathleen experience such an unsullied emotional connection that they exchange quotes from The Song of Solomon: “Milk and honey,” Rose whispers to Kathleen, “are under your tongue” (481).

That James ruins this love with his racism and pedophilia marks the tragedy of the novel. “I am amazed how blessed I am” (482), Kathleen writes in her journal just days before James storms into her apartment and destroys her life.

Mercedes Piper

If Kathleen represents the purest expression of the self, Mercedes Piper, driven by her embrace of Catholicism, represents the self-negating duty that defines women’s traditional family roles. After Materia’s death by suicide, Mercedes, the middle child, selflessly accepts her role as her sisters’ mother.

Mercedes never marries, never pursues a relationship, and rejects self-fulfillment through college (although she is the brightest student in her class). Her only flirtation, with the son of a local shop owner, fizzles because her rigid Catholicism cannot accept that he is Jewish. Mercedes adopts a nun-like embrace of obligation. She finds great comfort in prayer and studies with resolve the lives of saints.

This joyless and denying faith sours her disposition and weakens Mercedes’s sense of compassion. She is impatient with Frances’s “wild-child” behaviors and is too eager to embrace the possibility that Lily might be a faith-healer. When her family lapses into crisis, she heads to the basement to perform rigorous acts of self-punishment to encourage God to help. And it is this painstaking faith in God that leaves Mercedes unable, or at least unwilling, to accept the dark reality of her father’s incest, abandoning her to despair. Refusing to believe that her father is Lily’s father, Mercedes grows jealous that James, after his strokes, turns more and more to Frances for comfort. After Frances’s death, however, Mercedes understands she has spent her life not relying on God, but on herself—a revelation that allows her to bring Anthony back to the family and thus offer the Pipers a future: “Such a fine line between the state of grace and the state of mortal sin” (504).

Frances Piper

Frances Piper strikes a balance between the extremes of her sisters: She loves freely and sometimes recklessly; she is a model student when she wants to be, and a rebel when she needs to be; she loves upending the status quo, shocking others, and demanding they investigate their unexamined faith in conservative values.

Frances is selfish and compassionate. When she overhears her parents arguing over baptizing Kathleen’s twins, six-year-old Frances decides to baptize the twins at her own personal peril—unlike the rigid Mercedes, Frances’s crude spirituality fuses flesh and spirit. Later, Frances’s concern for Lily is uncomplicatedly wholesome—unlike Kathleen, Frances resists her urgent hunger for a life apart from her family because she cannot bring herself to leave Lily behind. If Mercedes is the nominal Christian who is let down by her charade of faith, Frances is a rebellious teenage sex worker who finds forgiveness for her vicious father and absolves her would-be murderer Teresa. In the stories she tells Lily, Frances fuses elements of realism with the paranormal, the inexplicable, and the miraculous. She is as much sensual as spiritual, as much sacred as profane.

Frances’s determination to bring down Ginger for something he did not do—father Kathleen’s babies—is one of the novel’s more problematic storylines. Her seduction of the honest Ginger, happy in a conventionally comfortable marriage, exposes Frances’s deeply dysfunctional understanding of sex. However, the son that results from their encounter will give Lily the opportunity to make whole her family. Anthony marks the family’s escape from the burden of secrets. In this, the wild-child Frances, not the passionately pure Kathleen or the joyless nun-like Mercedes, is responsible for the salvation of the Piper family.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text