Mrs. Lisbon Character Analysis

Mrs. Lisbon is Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese’s mother. She’s very strict and is reluctant to give her daughters more freedom after Cecilia’s first suicide attempt, even though this is what Dr. Hornicker—the hospital psychiatrist—suggests she and Mr. Lisbon should do. She ultimately goes along with the plan, allowing the girls to have a party in the basement, but this only leads to Cecilia’s second (and final) suicide attempt. In turn, the party perhaps solidifies Mrs. Lisbon’s conviction that her daughters should be kept under close watch, and she goes back to carefully policing their lives. When Lux disobeys her by staying out late and drinking with Trip Fontaine after the homecoming dance, Mrs. Lisbon forces Lux to burn all of her rock and roll records, revealing her own old-fashioned belief in the corruptive power of pop culture. The neighborhood boys interview Mrs. Lisbon years after she loses her daughters. She and Mr. Lisbon have divorced, and she’s hesitant to talk about what went wrong with her family—in fact, she goes out of her way to besmirch people like Dr. Hornicker, who she thinks blame her and Mr. Lisbon for what happened. There was nothing wrong with the way she and her husband raised the girls, she says, insisting that what happened had nothing to do with how they ran their family.