Point of View

The novel is told through the point of view of a third-person omniscient narrator. The events are told in the past tense by a narrator contemporary to the readers, evident when the narrator describes herself as the Fletchers’ “faithful historian” (83). The narrator identifies with the contemporary readers of the time, referring to the Puritans as “our ancestors” (197). In this way, the narrator becomes a translator of the past to those in the present: “Where there are now rows of shops...were, at the early period of our history, a few log-houses” (9). When the narrator directly addresses the contemporary reader, including the use of aphorisms and universalities the tense shifts to the present. This contextualization indicates the class and culture of the intended audience: “Make all due allowance for a heroine of the seventeenth century...who had not learned, like some young ladies of our enlightened...