Aunt Sissy Character Analysis

Katie’s older sister, as well as the sister of Evy and Eliza and the eldest daughter of Thomas and Mary Rommely. Sissy is born three months after her parents arrive in the United States from Austria. When Sissy first appears in the novel, she is thirty-five and works at a rubber factory. She has “roving black eyes, black curling hair, and a high clear color.” Sissy never goes to school because Mary does not know realize free public education is available to poor immigrants, too. Though Sissy is uneducated, she makes up for it by being witty, clever, warmhearted, and vivacious. She also loves children. Sissy is also openly sexual from a young age, to the shock of her family and members of the community. At ten, she develops the body of a thirty-year-old woman. At twelve, she has a twenty-year-old boyfriend. At fourteen, she is dating Jim, a twenty-five-year-old firefighter. She marries Jim after he beats up her father in a physical challenge. Sissy gets pregnant one month after they marry and plans to name the baby Mary, if it is a girl, and John, if it is a boy, but gives birth to a stillborn baby on her fifteenth birthday. By the time she is twenty, she has had four more children, and all of them are stillborn. She leaves Jim, but never divorces him due to her Catholic faith. She marries a second time and has four more stillborn children before leaving this man, too. Sissy is perceived as naïve, though quite adept at getting what she wants, especially from men. She is also warm and protective, particularly of Francie. After her third marriage, she has given birth to ten stillborn children in all. When she illegally adopts Sarah from Lucia, Sissy settles into domestic life with her latest partner, Steve. She has a second child with Steve, a biological son named Stephen Aaron.