57 pages • 1 hour read
Ann PatchettThe Patron Saint of Liars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Mother-Daughter Relationships
At its core, The Patron Saint of Liars is a novel that explores the power and complexities of mother-daughter relationships. These relationships shape the female characters—like Rose, Helen, Sister Evangeline, and Sissy—giving them purpose and an identity.
Rose’s close relationship with her mother, Helen, establishes that mother-daughter relationships can shape characters in subtle and enduring ways. Helen is a very beautiful woman, and Rose inherits her beauty, which shows that one way that mothers can affect their daughters’ lives is by passing down traits to them. Rose and Helen bond over the power their beauty gives them and experience the world through this shared identity as beautiful women. Rose is deeply attached to her mother; after she decides to leave California, she misses Helen the most. To punish herself for leaving Thomas, Rose decides to give up her relationship with Helen as penance since this is “the thing [she] love[s] most in the world” (37). However, even after this, being Helen’s daughter is a firm part of her identity, and she always carries her guilt about abandoning her mother. Many years later, Rose tells her own daughter, Sissy, that she’d “done such a bad job being a daughter. She never could get over that” (328).
Rose’s sorrow over losing Helen affects her so deeply that she is never able to invest in her role as a mother to Sissy. Her unresolved pain as a daughter ends up making her a distant mother to her own daughter. She admits to Sissy that she’d “been wanting [her] own mother back for so long it never really occurred to [her] that [she] was supposed to be one, a mother” (328). Rose’s yearning for Helen’s love makes her incapable of showing her daughter affection. She does not like to spend time with Sissy—this is a contrast to how Helen enjoyed spending time with Rose, with Rose even accompanying her mother to work and Helen keeping Rose company and chatting with her while she got ready for her first date with Thomas. However, from Sissy’s early infancy, Rose is happy to leave her in the care of others, and Sissy comes to resent her mother for this.
In the absence of Rose’s care, Sissy finds mother figures in women who are not mothers: Sister Evangeline, June, and the residents of Saint Elizabeth who are not allowed to be mothers because of societal stigmas. In this way, the novel shows that mother-daughter relationships do not have to be biological in order to be meaningful. Rose assumes that these “many mothers” will be enough for her daughter, and though Sissy loves these women and connects with them, she never stops feeling abandoned by her mother. Sissy is also very unlike Rose in appearance and personality—she looks like Thomas and has Son’s temperament. While her relationships with her fathers help her to move beyond her fractured mother-daughter relationship, she also longs to find some connection to Rose, but this eludes her.
Rose and Sissy are similar in their roles of daughters who are hurting about their unhappy relationships with their own mothers, and like Sissy, Rose also seeks maternal comfort in mother figures. When she arrives at Saint Elizabeth’s, Rose becomes very close with Sister Evangeline. The novel implies that she decides to marry Son and parent Sissy just so she can continue to be with Sister Evangeline. Interestingly, Rose and Sister Evangeline also bond over their shared longing for their own mothers. During Rose’s first Christmas at Saint Elizabeth’s, Sister Evangeline tells her, “You’re not the only one in the world who misses her mother at Christmas” (111), and she reveals that she misses her mother every day of her life.
As Sister Evangeline gets older, Rose cares for her much like someone would care for an ailing parent. Following Rose’s departure from Saint Elizabeth’s, Sissy “refuse[s] to take over what [her] mother had left behind in the kitchen […] [but does] fill her place in other ways” (361). Sissy begins helping Sister Evangeline, inheriting this daughter role from her mother. However, even at the end, Rose doesn’t tell Sister Evangeline everything about her past—like the fact that she’s leaving Saint Elizabeth’s to avoid seeing Thomas. Notably, she does at least tell Sister Evangeline about her departure, which is something she didn’t allow herself to do with Helen, showing that Rose has become a little more forthcoming with time.
Ultimately, the novel shows that there are many ways to be a mother and a daughter, and these roles can be filled in non-traditional ways. Regardless of their nature—whether biological or not—mother-daughter relationships have extreme power in their ability to create and mend generational trauma.
The Benefits and Shortcomings of Tradition and Faith
Characters in The Patron Saint of Liars rely on both tradition and faith in times of strife. While they may get frustrated with the outdated natures of tradition and faith, they still rely on them to make sense of their changing worlds.
The majority of the novel takes place in Habit, Kentucky, and the townspeople of Habit are known for being “true to their name” and stuck in their ways (or habits) (9). They avoid Saint Elizabeth’s because it is located in the building that used to be the Hotel Louisa, which they avoided when it was operating because it was ornate and ostentatious. They avoid the nuns of Saint Elizabeth’s because the town is primarily Baptist and is skittish and suspicious of the Catholic Church. The times when the townspeople break tradition—during June’s funeral, for example—are often awkward and tense: “The town stood on one side of the open grave and [the residents of Saint Elizabeth’s] stood on the other: pregnant girls, nuns, and one man too tall to blend in anyplace” (252). While the townspeople of Habit become more accepting of Saint Elizabeth’s and its residents toward the end of the novel, everyone nevertheless feels a sense of relief and comfort when they can go back to their traditional spheres of living. This shows that all the characters prefer the unchanging traditions of Habit (and habit), despite its inconveniences.
The novel also points to how traditional, religious views about unwed mothers result in many characters experiencing sorrow and trauma. Saint Elizabeth’s operates because traditional society has no place for these women, refusing to acknowledge their rights or choices. Traditional views on motherhood and sexuality weigh heavily on these women and deeply affect how they see themselves and their futures. Most of the young women at Saint Elizabeth’s are unhappy that they will be forced to put their babies up for adoption; as a result, they even put their lives in danger to experience brief instances of motherhood. For instance, Beatrice insists on trying to have her babies at Saint Elizabeth’s just so she can hold them while riding in the ambulance to the hospital in Owensboro. However, even though Saint Elizabeth’s is an institution that is born out of traditional views about women, it is nevertheless a sanctuary for these young women and a place where they find warmth and companionship during a difficult time in their lives. In this way, Saint Elizabeth’s represents how tradition and faith have both benefits and shortcomings.
Similarly, many of the characters in the novel find strength in their faith even while struggling with it. Interestingly, a nun’s veil is called a “habit,” just like the name of the town, which highlights how tradition and faith are intertwined in this novel. Sister Evangeline in particular loves to talk about saints and can come up with a saint associated with every day of the year or specific situation, seeing them as figures of love and comfort. When Rose leaves Saint Elizabeth’s, Sister Evangeline turns to the saints for comfort—she remembers that there is a Saint Thomas, who shares the name of Rose’s first husband, and she takes it as a sign from God that things will work out.
This is not the only time a sign from God is important in the novel. Rose continuously searches for signs from God to tell her how to live her life, though these do not always turn out to be right. She interprets her desire for Thomas as a sign from God that she must marry him, but later, when she is unhappy as his wife, she realizes that she misinterpreted this. However, this doesn’t affect her faith—she might struggle with it, but she never abandons it since it always gives her comfort. Likewise, Sissy, too, inherits Rose’s faith and her belief in signs from God: She ultimately makes peace with her mother’s departure by believing she is Lorraine’s sign from God to stay at Saint Elizabeth’s and take on Rose’s role. While the characters may misread incidents and events as signs from God, their faith always brings them comfort and helps them reconcile themselves with life’s challenges.
The Complexity of Truth and Lies
Despite only one section of the novel being from her point of view, Rose is the main character of the book, primarily because she is the titular “Patron Saint of Liars”: All the important lies in the book are related to her in some capacity. When she leaves Thomas, she declares that she will “be a liar for the rest of [her] life” (13), understanding that her decision not to tell Thomas that she is pregnant with their child is such a big lie that she will always feel its consequences. Subsequently, Rose constantly punishes herself for her decision to leave and the lies she associates with that decision. Due to this, she is extremely sensitive whenever she is accused of lying. For instance, her final fight with Mother Corrine occurs because Mother Corrine angrily tells her, “I don’t know where you come from […] [and who] taught you to lie the way you do” (265). This offends Rose deeply because not only is Mother Corrine calling her a liar, but she is also implying that Rose comes from a line of liars. Rose cannot bear the thought of her own poor decisions reflecting badly on her mother, Helen, whom she loves. In many ways, Rose keeps her new life at Saint Elizabeth’s a secret from Helen to protect her from knowing about Rose’s many lies. At the end, Rose does not flee Saint Elizabeth’s because Helen has died; she flees because she is about to get caught in her biggest lie of all: the fact that she is married to two men, both of whom she has lied to. Rather than face up to this, Rose disappears, leaving other people to sort through her lies and truths.
However, despite Rose’s lies being hurtful, several characters also benefit from lies throughout the novel. For instance, Sissy lives a happy life for the most part, believing that she is Son and Rose’s daughter; she is completely ignorant about her mother’s history and about her biological father, Thomas. Interestingly, when she is unhappy with Rose as a mother, she invents a story about her “dead mother,” imagining that she was placed for adoption by a former Saint Elizabeth’s resident; this story—or lie—she tells herself brings her comfort. While Son is visibly nervous when Sissy tells her parents about this, Rose is calm and collected, simply bringing out Sissy’s birth certificate to disprove her idea. Of course, the birth certificate is both a lie and a truth. Sissy is legally Son and Rose’s daughter; however, the birth certificate is incorrect in listing Son as the biological father. Regardless, Sissy holds onto one truth: that Son loves her deeply and will do anything to protect her. The lie on her birth certificate—that he is her biological father—is irrelevant because he loves her like his own. In this way, the novel suggests that the idea of truth itself is subjective and malleable.
In addition, the novel also points out that lies can often be acts of kindness. For instance, when Sister Evangeline, who has psychic powers, divines that Angie’s baby will die, she doesn’t tell her this; instead, she only discloses that the baby will be a girl. On this occasion, Rose lies to Angie, too, assuring her that Sister Evangeline always behaves oddly when foretelling the babies’ genders. Sister Evangeline and Rose know that Angie is excited about her baby, so they don’t want to break her heart by revealing that her pregnancy might end in tragedy. Instead, they lie, which is an offering of kindness and hope.
There are few simple lies in this novel about lying. Instead, characters must navigate the murky areas between truth and lies, finding peace in the gray areas.
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