Fall on your Knees

The Christian rite of baptism symbolizes the salvation of a soul, with the expectation that after the death of the body, the now-consecrated soul will join God in the afterlife. To be baptized, then, is to be warded from the finiteness of mortality.

Each generation of mothers in the Piper family struggles with the necessity of baptizing their children, burdened by the massive debts each soul has to God and the demand that bodily temptations be resisted. Materia battles James, whose pedophilia has doomed him to damnation, over baptizing their daughters. Six-year-old Frances has so internalized the necessity of this rite that she decides to undertake it on behalf of Kathleen’s newborn twins when she hears that James refuses the rite—he is driven by the knowledge that the twins are the result of rape and incest, but Frances knows only that Catholicism mandates the ritual. Eminently practical, Frances knows what to do: “Frances has never been up close at a baptism, but she’s heard the priest mumble, barely moving his lips, she’s seen him dip the baby’s head into the water” (142). That the rite Frances attempts ends so horrifically suggests that a war between the urgencies of the body and the aspirations of the soul is more toxic than redeeming.

Fall on Your Knees is threaded with allusions to music. The Pipers are a family of musicians, gifted as singers and players who can tap into the rich emotions of religious hymns, classical music and opera, and popular genres like jazz and ragtime.

In the novel, music symbolizes the tension between spirit and flesh. Readers can see this best through the juxtaposition of two songs that play pivotal roles: the Christmas hymn “O Holy Night” (1847) and the iconic Scott Joplin piano piece “The Maple Leaf Rag” (1899).

The novel takes its title from the lyrics of “O Holy Night,” which celebrates the Incarnation—the Christian belief that the birth of Jesus Christ forever consecrated the earth to God. The hymn exhorts listeners to “Fall on your knees / Hear the angels’ voices / O night divine / O night that Christ was born!” To kneel is to acknowledge the omnipotence of the Creator God and the crucified Christ. The hymn isn’t about pleasure or finding oneself; rather, it is about subsuming the individual to the universally rigid demands of religion.

On the other hand, the ragtime swing of Joplin’s song entices Kathleen during her excursions into the night-world of Harlem, and Frances, the family’s wild child, cannot resist playing the ragtime piece in the parlor knowing it upsets James. The song’s lyrics suggest an alternative way of being—one in which the individual is powerful, independent, and does not need to kneel to an outside force: “I can shake the earth’s foundation with the maple leaf rag.” Ragtime’s unexpected syncopations and energy promise freedom and escape.

Two medical events critical to the historic backdrop of the novel—the 1918 Great Influenza Pandemic and the constant threat posed by the polio virus—symbolize the limits and vulnerability of the body.

The flu pandemic, which lasted five harrowing years and claimed upward of 100 million lives globally, is a stark reality within the Cape Breton Island community. Despite the island’s isolation and remoteness, no resident is really safe from contracting the illness. As a result, while the Piper sisters are growing up, students are homeschooled, and hospitals are understaffed and overworked. Parents become de facto healthcare providers, seeking cures in both approved medical protocols and in homemade elixirs concocted from backyard vegetables. Funeral processions are a regular sight. James uses the pandemic opportunistically, hiding Materia’s death by suicide by claiming that she has died of the flu—a plausible lie that no one on the island questions.

Similarly, during the first half of the 20th century, the world was in fear of the polio virus, which attacked a child’s respiratory system and spinal cord, often resulting in disability, diminished mobility, which could only be mediated with painful and cumbersome leather braces, crutches, or wheelchairs. Because its transmission often happened within families, or though substandard sanitation systems and water supplies typical of poor neighborhoods (Lily contracts the virus after Frances dips her into the waste-filled creek), polio was regarded as a morally-inflected threat. In the novel, this misunderstanding of virology makes Lily’s polio a symbol of the Piper family’s massive moral failures.