Point of View

Forbidden Notebook is written through a first-person point of view, exclusively through the eyes of Valeria Cossati. The author chooses this lens in order to give the reader access to the narrator’s internal thoughts and emotions, that she hides from the other characters. While she tells her daughter “When she hears the child cry, needing her to eat, to live, she’ll never dare neglect the child for the vanity off a flattering success in court”, this contradicts her internal desire to be rid of the social strictures of motherhood (116). Outwardly, Valeria continues to uphold patriarchal notions of womanhood, through her domestic labor and conversations with her daughter, belying her private world in which she challenges the notion that her individuality is staked in the family unit. The dichotomy of her conversation and her narration serves to expand the author’s thematic inspection of...