Fern

If there is a single main character, it is Fern Keating, who is the point of view character of a larger swath of the novel than anyone else. The narrator introduces Fern as “a mother and a wife and herself all at once” (1). Over the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear that Fern has chosen to emphasize the roles of wife and mother beyond any other aspects of herself. This choice is in no small part a reaction against her own mother’s rejection of motherhood and femininity. When Evelyn holds her daughter for the first time, she thinks: “Another perfectly wasted life. Maybe the girls would care about something along the way—art or history—but it would be pressed out of her slowly until she was nothing but a woman, nothing but a mother” (31). Fern tries to both prove her right and prove her...