Point of View

The novel is written in the first person point of view. The narrating character is Catherine Dollanganger, the first daughter of four children. Catherine and her siblings were once held prisoner in their ancestral home, Foxworth Hall, while their mother schemed her way back into her father's good graces and his will. The children would later learn that their mother attempted to poison them because if the world learned of their existence, she would lose all she inherited. Catherine tells her story of revenge for those acts in this novel, written as though a memoir of an older woman looking back on her life from the comfort of experience.

The point of view of this novel works well with the plot because it gives it some authenticity, giving the reader the sense that the novel is almost a work of nonfiction that has been fictionalized to...