Diane Setterfield's Narrative Theory

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”

― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

               Not only does Diane Setterfield exemplify the power of a story well-told in her, but she comments on it throughout her works. Throughout her books, she identifies the elements of a good story, and suggests that each element has a specific purpose, working on the reader to produce specific effects.

              The Thirteenth Tale is a prime example of this technique. In this novel, Setterfield creates a cast of characters that each serve specific narrative purposes (often more than one), and places them in settings that play on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In twisting the original narrative to create suspense and question the roles depicted by Bronte, Setterfield appears to ascribe to both the Structural and the Rhetorical theories of narrative.

              Like any good structuralist, Setterfield carefully chooses and plays with her narrative elements, crafting a story in which characterization is carefully determined by action rather than thought, setting plays a key role in the story, and plot is consciously structured to both echo and reject an earlier narrative (Jane Eyre). However, Setterfield takes these elements further through her meta-commentary, revealing that she not only believes that each element of a narrative has a purpose, but that this purpose is to produce a specific cognitive response in the reader. By creating an embedded narrative through Vida Winter's story of her life, Setterfield also calls out her own narrative elements by having the events in the larger narrative closely follow and reflect the events as they unfold within the embedded narrative. 
              Through this meta-narrative technique, Setterfield consciously creates a novel in which all narrative elements are blended to create suspense and subvert expectations. Through this blending, she also carefully places subtle hints about the surprise ending without overtly drawing attention to them, in the end creating a sense that we as readers should have seen it coming. In this, Setterfield simultaneously draws the reader's attention to the rhetorical purpose of her suspenseful, reflective narrative while satisfying the structural need for closure.