The principal character in the text is the unnamed narrator. She had her first child very young, meaning that she is only in her late thirties in the story’s frame, and her background is implied to be working- or lower-middle class: Though she is currently a homemaker, she has had to do service work outside the home before. She is the mother of five children but spends most of the narrative considering her efforts and failures raising her oldest child, 19-year-old Emily.

Because the story is told from the mother’s point of view, the reader sees her thought processes in addition to her actions. Her interiority is marked by self-blame that illustrates The Gendering of Guilt and The Competing Pressures of Motherhood: She is constantly comparing her efforts with Emily to her efforts with her other children. The following passage exemplifies this tendency:

I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn’t working. We had a new baby. I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home from school, too, to have them all together (752).