Keene begins with a writing style akin to historical textbooks, utilizing an impersonal, unemotional tone that he seems to criticize through subtle moments of irony. For instance, when Grace de L’Ecart is considering how she will deal with “mulattoes grown so presumptuous as to declare themselves on equal footing with their former masters” and is said to be willing to “weather it” (98) and when describing the convent’s estate as being on the grounds of “one of the region’s first white settlers” with the acknowledgement that it was also “partly constructed on the site on an Indian burial mound” (111) briefly thrown into the midst. The only personal glimpse we get into Carmel’s character is through her perplexing drawings until Keene departs from this narrative style into a section wherein Carmel’s diary entries are presented. This section poses a challenge for the reader in understanding what is being said through her various language transitions and adapted grammar. In creating this space, Keene seems to similarly emphasize Hartman’s belief that understanding lost voices is incredibly difficult, especially those that would be so differently constructed from the prose contrasted at the beginning and within our history books; this does not however mean it is unimportant. In the final section, Keene shifts into a first-person narrative of Carmel, wherein the reader finally gets a deeper understanding of Carmel’s unmuted reality. As Kat noted, this shift from her diary entries to her inner voice allows for the readers to confront the fact that Carmel cannot be fully realized until we can see her from her own perspective and not our own or others’ presumptions. She is only recognized by the other characters and readers as she vanishes at the end with the covenant, initially described as a “forget-me-not” (86) and now pronounced to be a scene that “reminded (her) nothing less of a forget-me-not” (158). This interestingly mimics Hartman’s point that such individuals are often “only visible in the moment of their disappearance” (12).  Lastly, I found it significant that Carmel gains power and a voice in the end when she is able to mute the voices of oppressive characters, which seems to say that for voices such as hers to be actualized, certain ones must be silent.