The Hunting Wives

Because the use of first-person narration provides intimate access to a specific character’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, this literary technique is often employed to twist and warp the novel’s vision of reality. Whenever this particular narrative structure is used, there is always a possibility that the narrator is either actively concealing certain facts or else does not have the full picture. Thus, such narratives contain an inherent element of unreliability, and the narrator’s position within the story and inherent biases can drastically affect how that story is told.

Because the events of The Hunting Wives are filtered through the perspective of Sophie, who has a direct stake in these events, her descriptions are immediately suspect and must be analyzed in tandem with her own faults and insecurities. The trope of the unreliable narrator originally gained popularity in the English novels of the 18th century: Tales such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels feature the first-person perspectives of male English travelers whose analyses of their surroundings are deeply colored by their own social biases. Similarly, novels such as Pamela and Evelina, which focus on female protagonists, often make use of letters and journals to combine first-person narration with the epistolary mode. Novelists quickly realized that such techniques add complexity and dynamism to a narrative by utilizing the perspective of a character who may or may not be presenting an accurate, objective account. A prime example of this dynamic can be seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which is told from the perspective of a murderer who is desperately trying to convince his interrogator that his crime was entirely justified.

The literary device of the unreliable narrator greatly enhances novels in the domestic noir genre, which is a subgenre of crime fiction characterized by a focus on the experience of female characters, personal relationships (especially marriage), and the threat of secrets or violence within the private space of the home. The Hunting Wives incorporates aspects of the domestic noir genre by exploring the secrets, adultery, and murders that run rampant within a small, privileged, and seemingly idyllic community. Like The Hunting Wives, two of the most famous novels in the domestic noir genre, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, also utilize an unreliable narrator. In the latter, the narrator struggles to make sense of the mysterious and sinister events she witnesses, and her unreliability stems from the fact that she drinks heavily and sometimes blacks out, experiencing gaps in her memory. She is also motivated to represent events in ways that align with her desires and biases, even if these may not be objectively accurate. Likewise, Sophie (the protagonist and narrator of The Hunting Wives) often has fuzzy or inebriated memories of key events because she was either drunk or had been drugged, and she also consciously withholds important information.

The use of an unreliable narrator in a domestic noir novel can deepen themes that examine memory, subjectivity, power, and misogynistic stereotypes. By exploring dark secrets that lurk behind the façades of domestic bliss, the domestic noir genre questions the common assumption that appearances reflect reality. While some unreliable narrators are deliberately deceptive, others may merely be perceived as unreliable because of persistent social stereotypes. For example, a female character may be unfairly perceived as untrustworthy, or a character who has an addiction may be accused of misremembering certain events. Thus, the use of this literary technique in domestic noir sheds light on the dynamics between those who have power and those who lack it, exploring the common societal issues of threats and limited agency that many women still face.