A whole new way of reading Jane Austen?
A fascinating thesis I found in the library.
I was recently stuck in the bureaucratic malaise of the British Library like a fly on a spider’s web, and so I started noodling around in the catalogue looking at theses written about Jane Austen. “Free Indirect Speech in the Work of Jane Austen” by Hatsuyo Shimazaki immediately caught my eye.
What was there to say for three hundred pages about Free Indirect Speech…?
You all know about Free Indirect Discourse or Free Indirect Style. This is when the thoughts of a character are expressed directly in the narrative, no speech marks, no “he thought” or “she thought”. Here’s a classic example from Pride and Prejudice.
On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of receiving her brother and his wife, who came, as usual, to spend the Christmas at Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister, as well by nature as education. The Netherfield ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well-bred and agreeable.
This is a passage of third-person narrative. But the section in bold is clearly the words of Miss Bingley. Austen has slipped Miss Bingley’s thoughts into the main narrative without identifying them with speech marks. She ventriloquises Miss Bingley for ironic effect.
Austen uses this technique all the time. She perfected it. It’s her most important contribution to the development of the novel. She uses it so experimentally in Emma that it is she who deserves all the praise critics usually reserve for Flaubert.
Hatsuyo Shimazaki’s thesis makes a clear distinction between Free Indirect Thought and Free Indirect Speech.1
Usually, we just talk about Free Indirect Discourse, bundling internal thoughts and external speech together. Shimazaki argues that Free Indirect Speech is a distinct and subtle technique.
A passage of FIS [Free Indirect Speech] is a report of someone’s speech perceived objectively by another. By contrast, a passage of FIT [Free Indirect Thought] reveals a character’s subjective view. FIS and FIT arise from different perspectives and work almost in opposite ways. They must therefore be seen as different devices, even though syntactically they share the same stylistic form.
The critic Dorrit Cohn had made this distinction (using different terminology) in her seminal book Transparent Minds but said that Free Indirect Thought (which displays consciousness) was far more interesting. Critics have paid much more attention to Free Indirect Thought than Free Indirect Speech. Shimazaki wants to change that.2 She argues that critics became ideological about the way they examined these issues, and wanted a return to empirical scholarship.3
What follows is a reasonably detailed summary of some of Shimazaki’s main arguments, along with a short example of how the idea applies to Emma (spoilers!).
I found this thesis fascinating and I hope it helps you to read Austen a little differently.
Indirect speech in quotation marks…
Look at this passage from Persuasion.
‘How is Mary looking?’ said Sir Walter, in the height of his good humour. ‘The last time I saw her, she had a red nose, but I hope that may not happen every day.’
‘Oh! no, that must have been quite accidental. In general she has been in very good health, and very good looks since Michaelmas.’
‘If I thought it would not tempt her to go out in sharp winds, and grow coarse, I would send her a new hat and pelisse.’
Anne was considering whether she should venture to suggest that a gown, or a cap, would not be liable to any such misuse, when a knock at the door suspended everything. ‘A knock at the door! and so late! It was ten o’clock. Could it be Mr Elliot? They knew he was to dine in Lansdowne Crescent. It was possible that he might stop in his way home, to ask them how they did. They could think of no one else. Mrs Clay decidedly thought it Mr Elliot’s knock.’ Mrs Clay was right. With all the state which a butler and foot-boy could give, Mr Elliot was ushered into the room.
The bolded section is Free Indirect Speech, but the words are within quotation marks. To begin with we know who is talking, Sir Walter or Anne; but in the bolded section “the characters’ speech is presented as ‘a chorus of voices’”. According to M. B. Parkes, this bolded section “represents both direct and indirect speech as well as statements which could be neither.” Parkes saw this use of quotation marks as experimental, containing as they do an assortment of different sorts of speech and narrative. Most writers don’t put this sort of indirect speech in quotation marks: they only use quotation marks for words characters actually said. By doing this, Shimazaki says, Austen is using a sort of Free Indirect Speech combined with proto-Free Indirect Speech.
And she learned it from the novelists of the eighteenth century, notably Samuel Richardson.
Double-voiced speech
Quotation marks for speech became established in the early- to mid-eighteenth century. This allowed for experiments in the way speech was presented, either within or without such marks. This was also the time when reading silently started to become dominant over reading aloud (though of course there was still a significant reading aloud culture). Punctuation developed to meet the needs of people reading silently.
Speech in Sir Charles Grandison should not be regarded simply as a verbatim record but is presented through typographic experiments, in order for the reader to feel the dialogue more vivid, as if it were spoken out loud.
Clarissa contains many passages where speech is reported in the narrative of a character (i.e. the letters contain other people’s reported speech). As Bakhtin said, as soon as we report other people’s speech ourselves, it takes on another quality. It is not just their speech, but their speech as we report it: it becomes double-voiced allowing for “doubt, indignation, irony, mockery, ridicule, and the like.” See this from one of Clarissa’s letters.
'So handsome a man!—O her beloved Clary!' (for then she was ready to love me dearly, from the overflowings of her good humour on his account!) 'He was but too handsome a man for her!—Were she but as amiable as somebody, there would be a probability of holding his affections!—For he was wild, she heard; very wild, very gay; loved intrigue—but he was young; a man of sense: would see his error, could she but have patience with his faults, if his faults were not cured by marriage!'
What do these italics denote? Clarissa knows that the person whose speech she is reporting is inflected with satire and jealousy. With the speech marks, this effect is enhanced. We get the sense of Clarissa mimicking this person, and making satirical emphasis while doing so. It is not just ventriloquism: it is scornful parody. In Shimazaki’s words: “The heroine reports what another character said about herself and the merged voice sounds satirical, particularly when emphasized with the use of quotation marks.” This is a proto-Free Indirect Speech. (I shan’t recapitulate Shimazaki’s evidence base for the wider claim, but I do recommend the whole chapter of her thesis. It’s compelling. Excitingly, she finds that Rasselas (1759) is the first time modern quotation marks are used, which is when we open and close speech ‘in this manner’ with the ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ left out of the marks.)4