Point of View

The narrator writes The Mad Women’s Ball from the third person point of view. This third person narrator alternates between an omniscient narrative stance and the use of free indirect discourse. When the narrator is employing a more omniscient gaze, she is describing the narrative world in a sweeping and overarching manner. The first of such examples appears in Chapter 1, when the narrator shifts away from Geneviève’s storyline and reorients to the world beyond “the walls of the Salpêtrière”: “in fashionable salons and cafés, people speculate about what Professor Charcot’s ‘clinic for hysterics’ might entail. They imagine naked women running through the corridors, banging their heads against tiled walls, spreading their legs to welcome some imaginary lover, howling at the top of their lungs from dawn until dusk” (7). These descriptions do not represent the opinions or impressions of...