Point of View

Sue Monk Kidd tells her novel The Invention of Wings in the first-person, limited omniscient perspective, from the points of view of both Sarah Grimke and Handful. This is done for primarily three reasons. The first is that the stories involved in the novel are those of Sarah and Handful, and there is no one better to tell their stories than themselves. Secondly, the first-person narrative mode is an intimate frame of story-telling, allowing the reader to understand the experiences of both Sarah and Handful firsthand through their own words. This removes the middle-man, or third-person narrator, from between the reader and the personal thoughts and feelings of the characters. Finally, the first-person narrative mode allows two women to tell their stories, in a time when women did not have their own voice, or very many rights. This defies the nature of the times in...