Point of View

The majority of The Marriage Portrait is told through a third-person limited point of view. Throughout the novel, O’Farrell grants the reader access to the Lucrezia’s internal thoughts and emotions. The author choses this lens in order to focus the novel on the historical figure, whose life is largely unknown, while maintaining a level of narrative distance that evokes her isolation in sixteenth century Italy. If the author had employed a first-person point of view, that narrative would have suggested that Lucrezia had the autonomy to express her thoughts and ideas.

O’Farrell deviates from the third-person limited point of view when she grants the reader access to Eleanora’s internal thoughts and emotions in “The Unfortunate Circumstances of Lucrezia’s Conceptions”. Throughout the chapter, the reader is privy to the Duchess of Tuscany’s fears that she does not vocalize to her...