This blog was originally published on WFTHN
As part of my PhD research, which explores and analyses representations of women in the Third Golden Age of Television,[i] I have been watching many female-centric series. During this research, I have noticed the recurring presence of a narratological device that was virtually non-existent before this period: the voiceover. This blog post draws on one chapter of my thesis, in which I explore the rise of the voiceover and how it is used to assert the authorial voice.
Desperate Housewives was not the first television series of the late 1990s and early 2000s to use a female voiceover. Premiering a mere six months after Sex and the City ended, it shared several similarities with its predecessor – friendship, camaraderie, and the lives of four very different women – as well as the use of voiceover. Yet Desperate Housewives’ voiceover, delivered by the posthumous Mary Alice Young, presented something distinct: an omniscient, disembodied, and unreliable narrator who moralised on the suburban lives of the women of Wisteria Lane.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Desperate Housewives ran for eight seasons on ABC (2004 – 2012). It told the story of close friends Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), who initially come together to investigate the suicide of their friend Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong). A mixture of soap opera and film noir, the series’ influences and intertextuality encompasses “the suburban dystopia of The Stepford Wives (1975); to the narrative conventions of soap… to the festering dysfunction of David Lynch’s small-town America (both Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet [1986]”,[ii] as well as belonging to a rich history of “female fictions, from the eighteenth-century Gothic novel to the contemporary chick lit … [that is] predicated upon the act of confession”.[iii]
Desperate Housewives offered a groundbreaking approach to voiceover narration. Mary Alice’s posthumous voice became central to the series’ moral architecture, framing suburban women’s lives with a distinctive blend of irony, empathy, and omniscience, granting her an unusual narrative authority.
Mary Alice frames every episode, and her persistent presence becomes a self-conscious metanarrative device – one that foregrounds the artifice of storytelling itself while exposing the constructed nature of suburban ideals. Once the reason for Mary Alice’s suicide is revealed – that she killed her son Zach’s biological mother, Deirdre Taylor, in ‘One Wonderful Day’ (S01E23) – her narration takes on a new complexity, straddling the line between authoritative omniscience and unreliable subjectivity. Yet Mary Alice’s narrational function is less about truth-telling than about framing. The revelation, then, is less a deception than a means of guiding the audience through irony, selective revelation, and moral commentary. In withholding or controlling the flow of information/knowledge, Mary Alice’s voiceover challenges the boundaries of “acceptable” female behaviour, opening up an interpretive space for viewers to engage critically with suburban and domestic morality.
Mary Alice’s suicide is paradoxically the act that grants her narrational power. In death, she becomes a disembodied voice with omniscient and omnipresent capacities, subverting patriarchal dominance and privileging female authorship over the series’ storytelling. This posthumous position affords her a wisdom and empathy that enable moral reflection and a gendered gaze on the lives of the women of Wisteria Lane – a narrational authority that both embodies and complicates Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmêtre.
Michel Chion’s concept of the Acousmêtre
Michel Chion (1999) defines the acousmêtre as a character whose voice we hear without seeing (or not fully seeing) them, and this absence gives them power over the narrative. Chion identifies and defines four key powers of the acousmêtre: “the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete power. In other words: ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence”.[iv] The acousmatic voice occupies a liminal space between presence and absence, destabilising the visible and asserting narrative control precisely because it remains disembodied, at least until the moment of deacousmatisation. Chion identifies cinematic examples, including The Wizard of Oz (1939, dir. Victor Fleming), The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933, dir. Fritz Lang), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick).
In cinema, the narrative arc of the acousmêtre often moves toward de-acousmatisation (the Wizard revealed behind the curtain), in which exposing the body strips the acousmêtre of its ‘magical’ powers. This is the first way in which Mary Alice complicates Chion’s acousmêtre, as she attains her acousmatic power through death. Her disembodiment is permanent, her voice irrevocably detached from the show’s living world (except in flashbacks). There is no revelation, climax or pulling back of the curtain that can de-acousmatise her, because the body that once produced her voice is definitively absent. Whereas cinema’s acousmêtre builds toward unveiling as climactic event, Mary Alice’s voiceover functions as a structural framing device whose authority does not culminate in demystification but endures across episodes and seasons. She embodies, in this sense, a distinctly televisual acousmêtre.
That Mary Alice acquires her ‘powers’ through death introduces a paradox to her empowerment. Unlike Chion’s acousmêtre, the absence of Mary Alice’s body creates the very condition of her authority; she becomes a disembodied woman who can never be silenced, inscribed, or reabsorbed into a body, and thus patriarchal closure. Because her narrative power and authority are situated in her enduring invisibility, Mary Alice offers a female reworking of the acousmatic voice, one whose power derives from death rather than being stripped away by embodiment.
A further way in which Mary Alice challenges Chion’s acousmêtre is not just in the acquisition of her powers, but also in how she chooses to use them. Chion’s acousmêtres are typically malevolent figures, wielding their disembodied power to control or destroy, their sinister intent rendering them comparable to apparitions or ghosts. Mary Alice, by contrast, embodies something closer to the angelic. She occupies a reflective, compassionate position over the narrative, her voiceover nurturing empathy and understanding rather than menace. This renders her acousmêtre intrinsically feminine.
However, Mary Alice’s acousmatic power is built on the concealment of a secret. Once revealed, her narratorial position and authority could be undermined, or retroactively marked as unreliable. Yet as the all-powerful narrator, Mary Alice chooses to conceal the truth about her suicide, shading her position with irony and moral ambiguity. This concealment complicates her acousmatic authority, introducing a destabilising tension akin to Chion’s cinematic acousmêtres, whose power dissolves upon revelation. Rather than Mary Alice becoming an unreliable narrator, it is precisely because of her complicity in Deidre’s death, and her remorse, regret, and posthumous reflection on that act, that enables her to challenge and claim a moral authority.
From her vantage point beyond the grave, Mary Alice uses her acousmatic power not to judge or condemn, but to offer a voice steeped in empathy, compassion, and insight. Her narration humanises the women of Wisteria Lane, narrativising their secrets, lies, traumas, and vulnerabilities with care. In doing so, Desperate Housewives positions Mary Alice’s voiceover not as a symbol of narrative omniscience in the traditional (often male-coded) sense, but as a feminised, empathetic form of storytelling. Mary Alice’s position complicates the binary between moral authority and narrative reliability, recasting the female voice as a powerful tool for rendering women’s trauma universal. Her voiceover offers moral commentary on suburban femininity and the hypocrisy of domestic bliss, fostering communal understanding and emotional resonance.
A final way in which Mary Alice complicates Chion’s acousmêtre – creating a distinctly televisual and gendered version – can be explored through two specific episodes: ‘Guilty’ (S01E08) and ‘Putting It Together’ (S08E09). Throughout Desperate Housewives’ eight seasons and 180 episodes, Mary Alice’s voiceover remains a consistent structural presence, opening and closing each episode. She appears embodied in only 17 of these, mostly through flashbacks to her life before suicide. Two exceptions, however, see her acousmatic powers extend beyond the purely aural: in moments of crisis for Lynette and Bree, Mary Alice manifests as a spectral or angelic presence.
In ‘Guilty’, Lynette is on her ‘last nerve’ looking after her four children (three highly active boys and a baby girl) while her husband Tom is away with work. To help her cope, Lynette has resorted to taking her son’s ADD medication.
Overwhelmed by maternal responsibilities, Lynette eventually breaks, screaming at her children and hurling a tub of peanut butter through the window. As she stares through the shattered glass, Mary Alice emerges from a bright light as if descending from the heavens. She hands Lynette a revolver; Lynette takes it and holds it to her head as Mary Alice recedes into the light. A clatter of trays wakes her – the visitation, it seems, has been a dream. Still in crisis, Lynette abandons her children with Susan and flees. Later, Susan and Bree find her sitting in a field, clutching her son’s ADD medication. The three women open up about the demands of parenting, offering Lynette the relief of shared experience: she is not alone in feeling like a terrible mother, a failure.
As the episode closes, Mary Alice’s familiar voiceover returns, reflecting on sin and the hope of forgiveness. In characteristic fashion, her narration accompanies a montage revisiting each character and the episode’s central threads. Over Lynette, she speaks compassionately of those who vow to do better and pray for forgiveness. The epilogue finds Lynette on a picnic rug, nurturing her daughter while her sons play. She glances off-screen, and Mary Alice emerges ethereally from behind a tree, glowing with angelic light. Her voiceover concludes with an invocation of answered prayers as we see Lynette asleep on her couch, finally granted rest.
Mary Alice uses her spectral powers only once more, in season eight’s ‘Putting It Together’. The episode opens with a familiar visual grammar: the camera descends from the heavens, this time to observe Bree through her kitchen window. The four friends of Wisteria Lane are at their lowest ebb, and Mary Alice’s voiceover signals the gravity of their isolation: “Just when my friends needed each other most, they found themselves utterly alone… But for one of my friends, the sense of isolation was so complete, there might be no escaping it”.
That friend is Bree, who has reached one of her lowest points in the series. In a desperate attempt to restore her fractured friendships, she reverts to her idealised notion of the perfect wife, mother, and friend: baking. Mary Alice’s voiceover traces this coping mechanism through Bree’s previous traumas: “Whenever Bree van der Kamp was feeling low… she found solace in the act of baking. When her first husband passed away, she made coffee cake. When her second husband went to jail, she made sugar cookies, and when her teenage daughter got pregnant, she made crème brûlée. So, when Bree’s best friends stopped speaking to her, she hoped that her warm cherry scones might thaw their chilly relationships”.
What distinguishes this crisis from those before, and renders it worthy of Mary Alice’s spectral intervention, is its finality. Lynette’s rejection is absolute: “Don’t you get it, there is no ‘us’. There is no friendship. Not anymore. You’re on your own”.
Both encounters could be interpreted as imaginings from two desperate women who conjure their dead friend, who herself died by suicide, at moments when they are contemplating ending their own lives. Alternatively, if we take Mary Alice’s apparitional arrivals as visual extensions of her acousmatic powers, then each sequence sees her intervening at the darkest possible moment. Notably, neither encounter sees Mary Alice exert power or control over the women. Her response to Bree is ambiguous, offering neither comfort nor a directive. And while handing Lynette the gun might appear to signal complicity in her suicidal ideation, it could equally be read as an act of compassion – Mary Alice sharing her own experience, acknowledging Lynette’s desperation, and recognising the feeling that suicide is the only option left.
If Mary Alice is all-knowing, and throughout the series her voiceover implies heavily that she is, then she already knows Lynette will not kill herself, and neither will Bree. Her appearances derive not from a place of command or control, as male acousmêtres’ interventions often do, but from a place of care. These apparitions are interventions that guide her friends back from despair, embodying empathy, compassion, and non-judgement. In this, Mary Alice emerges as a distinctly feminised acousmêtre. By appearing twice across the series at moments of suicidal despair, her acousmatic powers assume a quasi-divine quality, extending beyond the aural to wield narrative omniscience rooted not in domination but in relationality and emotional solidarity.
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Ben Keightley is a PhD researcher in the Department Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Roehampton. His doctoral project examines representations of women during the Third Golden Age of Television, positioning his work as a critical intervention into the dominant, male-centred narratives that have shaped accounts of this era. His research explores female-centric series, gendered modes of narration, and the shifting dynamics of women’s moral and narrative authority in contemporary television. This blog post derives from a chapter of his ongoing thesis.
References
[i] For the purposes of my thesis, beginning in 1999 with the premiere of The Sopranos, and ending in 2014 with the finale of Breaking Bad.
[ii] Jermyn, D. (2006) Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence. London. I.B. Tauris.
[iii] Gillis S, Waters M. (2006) Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence. London: I.B. Tauris.
[iv] Chion, M. (1999) The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.
