In Five Years

Bella is a foil to Dannie, but she also fills the role of a tragic heroine. There is a long literary history of essentially “good” women dying and imparting wisdom and forgiveness to those they leave behind. Examples include Cathy in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Clarissa in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. These tragic literary women often share a wildness and freedom of character, for which their deaths and death-bed forgiveness often atone. Serle breaks from this tradition in that Bella’s death is not figured as a punishment, but she maintains the mechanism of a young woman’s death as a means to impart important lessons onto her survivors.

This motif may be most interesting for its lack of interrogation. Each of the characters in the novel is financially well-off. The benefits and privileges of wealth are not questioned, nor is there any commentary on its absence. None of the significant characters struggle with poverty or worry about the consequences of a lack of wealth. Instead, wealth is taken for granted and presumed normal. Dannie does perceive Bella as being more affluent than herself and has a carefully laid-out plan to achieve that level of wealth, but a lack of access to money and resources is not a challenge that our main characters have to overcome in the novel. Despite this, the print that Bella searches for and gifts to Dannie says, “I WAS YOUNG I NEEDED THE MONEY.”