ABSTRACT
The novella The Wrong Shoe follows an educational researcher named Martha West as she relentlessly interrogates her research intentions while completing an ethnographic study of a private girl's school. Through continuous self-scrutiny, Martha West emerges as a conflicted witness to the often cruel and always complex power relations of school culture. The novella explores Martha West's dilemma through the use of third-person narration. The third-person narration used in The Wrong Shoe is a form of free indirect discourse that conjures an amorphous dislocated space as the narrator's point of view. Free indirect discourse often merges with stream of consciousness whereby language pulses through the character, which is then constituted through the flow of affects and sensations. As an experienced writer in both fiction and nonfiction formats, de Freitas has developed a style that is unmistakably her own. De Freitas's personal writing style comes through both in her use of literary tools and in her content-based choices.
