Jane Austen's Narrative Techniques

Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis Massimiliano Morini Jane Austen’s Narrative Tec...

Author: Massimiliano Morini

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Massimiliano Morini

Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques

For Valentina Poggi, who is about to begin her career as a full-time translator

Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Massimiliano Morini University of Udine, Italy

© Massimiliano Morini 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Massimiliano Morini has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Morini, Massimiliano Jane Austen’s narrative techniques: a stylistic and pragmatic analysis 1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817 – Literary style 2. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title 823.7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morini, Massimiliano. Jane Austen’s narrative techniques: a stylistic and pragmatic analysis / by Massimiliano Morini. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6607-3 (alk. paper) 1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817— Technique. 3. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—19th century. 4. Women and literature— England—History—19th century. 5. Fiction—Technique. I. Title. PR4037.M67 2009 823’.7—dc22 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6607-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-7546-9313-0 (ebk.V)

2008042593

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Part 1

vi vii 1

Narrative

1 Jane Austen’s Narrators

15

2 The Development of Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques

37

3 Narrative Opacity in Mansfield Park

61

Part 2

Dialogue

4 Jane Austen’s Dialogue

79

5 Jane Austen’s Novels as Conversational Machines

97

6 Winning the War of Conversation in Emma

129

Conclusion

145

Bibliography Index

149 161

vi

Book Title

Acknowledgements This book owes its existence to Beatrice Battaglia, the leading Austen scholar in Italy, who fifteen years ago set me wandering down the paths of Highbury; and to John Douthwaite, who encouraged me to pursue the study of stylistics. My thanks are also due, as always, to Valentina Poggi and Romana Zacchi, for their longstanding advice and support; to Fabio Cimatti, for agreeing to lend me the talent he keeps hidden from the world; and to Paola Venturi, because I would never dream of publishing anything before submitting it to her quick eye and sound judgement. I would also like to thank Francesco, for being too short as yet to damage my Austen files and typescripts beyond repair; and collectively, Giovanni, Bianca and Francesco, for not caring about Jane Austen or anything I write about. Chapters 1 and 6, in slightly or (respectively) very different guises, have already been published in Style (‘Who Evaluates Whom and What in Jane Austen’s Novels?’; 41:3, 2007) and Language and Literature (‘Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say: A Pragmatic Analysis of the Italian Translations of Emma’; 16:1, 2007); while Chapter 3 (‘Tracking Jane Austen’s Narrator: Sense and Significance of Mansfield Park’) has appeared on Il bianco e il nero. I would like to extend my thanks to the editorial staffs of these journals, which gave me a forum for my ideas and the opportunity to correct or clarify them.

Chapter Title

List of Abbreviations E

Emma

LS

Lady Susan

MP

Mansfield Park

NA

Northanger Abbey

P

Persuasion

P&P

Pride and Prejudice

S

Sanditon

S&S

Sense and Sensibility

TW

The Watsons

vii

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Introduction Another Book on Jane Austen Five years ago, compelled by what I saw as a small critical lacuna, I embarked on a number of linguistic studies of Austen’s novels. When those studies accumulated and started to form an abstract but substantial heap on my computer desktop, the prospect of turning that heap into a consistent whole still seemed daunting, if not ludicrous. An intimidating mass of analytical, biographical, and reference material made any attempt at writing ‘another book on Jane Austen’ appear doomed – David defying Goliath without as much as a sling up his critical sleeve. At that time, my only idea for a title was a self-defeating one: Another Book on Jane Austen – and it is a measure of the difficulty of the enterprise that I did not even know if the idea was mine, or if I had heard of the title somewhere else. However, my embarrassment started to abate as my linguistic studies progressed and defined themselves in the general context of Austen criticism. In this context, it soon became evident that besides bridging a critical gap, the sort of book-length study that I was planning would provide a means to gauge existing critical readings of Austen’s novels against the actual linguistic materials with which those novels are built. On the face of it, a book which combines ‘linguistics’ and ‘Jane Austen’ may appear to create a very strange pair of bedfellows; but if the conceptual anachronism is forgotten (or forgiven, along with other similar anachronisms: Jane Austen and feminism, Jane Austen and postcolonial theory), the basic methodological idea behind Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques acquires the cogency of obviousness. As I hope to demonstrate in what follows, pragmatics, stylistics, and evaluation theory provide an appropriate analytical framework for the writings of a theoretically reticent craftsman of the English language who has been construed to ‘say’ or ‘mean’ radically different, often opposing ‘things’. Through its linguistically-minded analysis, the present study expresses an implicit and explicit dissatisfaction with some historical and contemporary versions of Jane Austen. Admittedly, some of these versions are now outdated, and have been replaced by new ones; but some new critical ideas have become modern Austen commonplaces which will not pass the test of close linguistic scrutiny. Therefore, in order to understand the aims of Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques, a preliminary historical survey is needed. A Brief Summary of Austen Criticism The earliest critical version of Jane Austen saw her as a provincial, harmless, unconscious miniaturist whose works never touched upon the innermost feelings of man or the greater destinies of mankind. This version originated in Austen’s


lifetime, and still has some popular, if not critical, currency. When E was published in 1816, an anonymous reviewer wrote that it would ‘probably become a favourite with all those who seek for harmless amusement, rather than deep pathos or appalling horrors, in works of fiction’ (Southam 1968: 70). The double-edged compliment of ‘harmless amusement’ was replicated in countless critical notices and essays, and the portrait of the artist as an agreeable spinster, harmless herself, was reinforced by the biographical accounts penned by members of Austen’s family circle. When the compliment became an accusation, it was commonly noted that the novels bore no trace of the innumerable social and political upheavals of their age (Walter Scott wrote in 1815 that ‘The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand’; Southam 1968: 67). In this critical tradition, if Jane Austen was allowed to possess great creative arts, these had been acquired unconsciously, and were shown in ‘the extraordinary grace of her facility’ (Southam 1987: 230), to quote Henry James’s faint and damning praise. The legend of Austen as ‘dear aunt Jane’ has been attacked from several quarters, in its thematic and technical implications. In his famous essay on ‘Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’ (1940), D.W. Harding first identified a satirical vein which was ‘obviously a means not of admonition but of self-preservation’ (Harding 1940/1998: 12), the author’s survival strategy in a disagreeable world. Though Harding’s reading was intentionally provocative, ‘lop-sided’ (Harding 1940/1998: 25), it gave birth to a whole ‘subversive school’ of critics who see Austen as deliberately, though covertly, challenging the values of her society. From the technical point of view, it has become increasingly apparent that the narratological complexity of Austen’s works cannot be accounted for in terms of novelistic instinct or artistic unconsciousness. If Q.D. and F.R. Leavis were already persuaded that ‘Jane Austen’s plots, and her novels in general, were put together very “deliberately and calculatedly” (if not “like a building”)’ (Leavis 1948/1964: 7), more recent criticism has found a place for Austen in the greater tradition of European literature (cf. Roger Gard’s comparison of Austen with Flaubert; Gard 1992: 144–54). However, while the recognition of Austen as a major and ‘serious’ author dates at least from the 1910s (Reginald Farrer’s 1917 essay springs to mind), it was in the 1970s that ‘aunt Jane’s’ harmless aura was definitively dispelled. Three critical books of very different descriptions contributed to dismantle the foundations of the legend: Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973), Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), and Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). In Chapter 11 of The Country and the City, ‘Three around Farnham’, Williams refuted the critical commonplace which sees Austen as a gifted but limited novelist of ‘manners’, whose works display no connections with the powerful currents of history. Williams pointed out that ‘history has many currents, and the social history of the landed families, at that time in England, was among the most important. As we sense its real processes, we find that they are quite central and structural in Jane Austen’s novels’ (Williams 1973: 113). While the immortalizing effect of

Introduction

fiction can create the impression that the world depicted in P&P, E, and MP is a relatively stable one, Jane Austen’s characters are portrayed, if only one reads between the lines of their amorous plots, as social beings in an epoch of social upheavals and change (pages 113–15 of Williams’ essay amount to a catalogue of socially mobile characters in Austen’s fiction). Though he also highlighted the social near-sightedness of Austen’s vision (she only wrote about the gentry, and ‘where only one class is seen, no classes are seen’; Williams 1973: 117), Williams was the first serious critic to define the historical relevance of her novels: far from being ‘harmless amusement’, they were seen as representing a transitional period in the life of one of England’s most important social classes. Marylin Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas was a further investigation into the social and philosophical roots of Austen’s writings. Here, Jane Austen was seen not as a precise but neutral beholder of social ties and contracts, but as a politically conscious author whose works faithfully reproduced her ideology. According to Butler, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the intellectual field of England was divided between the opposing camps of the Jacobins and the anti-Jacobins: and Austen’s sympathies, as expressed in her works, were openly conservative. Austen’s novels were conceived as educational projects in which ‘The key virtues are prudence and concern for the evidence; the vices are romanticism, self-indulgence, conceit, and, for Jane Austen, other subtle variations upon the broad anti-jacobin target of individualism’ (Butler 1975: 122). Taking a step forward from Williams’ image of Austen as a ‘social’ author, Butler described her as a political writer whose works straightforwardly conveyed her views on the current state of affairs. Four years later, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar painted a very different picture of Austen’s ideology as reflected in her writings. The two chapters dedicated to Jane Austen, in The Madwoman in the Attic, were a feminist version of Harding’s essay on ‘Regulated Hatred’. The famous image of Austen hiding her manuscript if anyone outside her family circle knocked on the sitting-room door, glad that a hinge creaked to warn her that somebody was about to come in, was used as a metaphor for an undercover style that criticizes the conventions it professes to sanction. According to Gilbert and Gubar, Austen used ‘explicitly decorous’ forms to make her ‘implicitly rebellious vision’ acceptable (Gilbert and Gubar 1979/1984: 153). In particular, her novels explored ‘female confinement’ in all its articulations (physical confinement, the compulsory nature of marriage, the great number of inaccessible roles), and deplored that confinement at the same time that they showed its inevitability, and even its propriety. These three versions of Jane Austen, however distant from one another, constituted as many attempts at liberating the author from the ivory tower of ‘pure’ or ‘ahistorical’ art – and made it virtually impossible to study Austen’s writings without a reference to her social milieu. However, while Williams confined himself Cf. also Tony Tanner, when he groups MP with the ‘great novels [which] concern themselves with characters whose place in society is not fixed or assured’ (Tanner 1968: 136).


to an observation of the social facts which are described or taken for granted in the novels, Butler, Gilbert and Gubar preferred to see the novels themselves as indirect manifestos issued by an ideologically embattled writer. For these critics, Jane Austen was a political writer – whether reactionary or subversive, patriarchal or feminist, it remained to be seen and debated. The indirectness of her methods demonstrated, if anything, the sharpness of her purposes. This position has been immensely influential, and the following decades have seen a flowering of political and ideological versions of Jane Austen. Feminist criticism, in particular, has produced a great quantity of studies of varying quality and inspiration, many of which have been invaluable in detailing Austen’s indebtedness to female predecessors, her adherence to or rejection of contemporary ideas of womanhood, and her awareness of the critical wars of her time. Margaret Kirkham has studied Austen in the context of ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘rational feminism’ – a middle position between Wollstonecraft’s radicalism and evangelical defeatism (Kirkham 1983/1997). Mary Poovey, Claudia L. Johnson and Alison G. Sulloway have studied Austen’s images of femininity in the cultural and polemical contexts of her time (Poovey 1984; Johnson 1988; Sulloway 1989). Deborah Kaplan has convincingly portrayed an author whose divided allegiances to ‘the gentry’s culture’ and ‘the women’s culture’ informed the ‘muted subversiveness’ of the novels (Kaplan 1992: 13). Indeed, ‘feminist Austen’ is such a multifaceted figure that it would be better to speak, as Devoney Looser has done, of various feminist traditions in Austen criticism (Looser 1995: 1–6). While feminist criticism has obviously concentrated on woman’s role in society as depicted in Austen, other scholars have situated her novels in the wider contexts of the British nation, Western civilization, or the world at large. Mary Evans has read Austen’s novels as ‘a radical critique of the morality of bourgeois capitalism’ (Evans 1987: backcover). By contrast, A.M. Duckworth has contended, against the whole ‘subversive tradition’, that though there are occasions ‘where ... individualism is admirable ... this is a long way from saying that individual action of a subversive or antisocial nature is sanctioned, even unconsciously, in Jane Austen’s novels ... Indeed, in one instance, that of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, it is precisely the resistance of the heroine to those forces endangering her world which permits the continuity of an integral society’ (Duckworth 1994: 6). More recently, a ‘postcolonial Jane Austen’ has made its appearance, following a cultural/ ideological proposal formulated by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism: But just because Austen referred to Antigua in Mansfield Park or to realms visited by the British navy in Persuasion without any thought of possible responses by the Caribbean or Indian natives resident there is no reason why we should do the same. We know now that these non-European peoples did not accept with indifference the authority projected over them, or the general silence on which their presence in variously attenuated forms is predicated. We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented ... in such works. (Said 1993: 66)

Introduction

It is interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that all of these warring factions have their favourite novels in the Austen canon. Postcolonial criticism concentrates on MP (the Antigua plantation), P (the navy), and the unfinished S (the ‘west Indian’ schoolgirl; cf. Park and Sunder Rajan 2000). Those who argue for the centrality of the satirical vein focus on the open parody of NA, while the critics who see an educational project as being crucial to Austen’s concerns take S&S as their starting point. Finally, dating at least from Butler’s study, MP has been the main battleground of the war between the subversive and the reactionary schools, with the theatrical episode of Lovers’ Vows eliciting the same contrasting interpretations that the novel and Austen’s whole career have stimulated. Purpose and Scope of the Book Though this study expresses a discomfort with the image of Austen as an ideologically embattled writer, it does not aim at reinstating a de-historicized, socially and intellectually harmless reading. Even in the scarcity of textual evidence for Jane Austen’s artistic awareness (a brief passage in NA, some references in her correspondence, the epistolary advice given to her niece Anna), Henry James’s accusation of ‘unconsciousness’ is implicitly refuted. Part 1 details a process of artistic development (involving a constant increase in narratological complexity) that cannot but be accompanied by a corresponding growth in critical ‘consciousness.’ Feminist criticism has effectively exposed the male-chauvinistic foundations of the aunt Jane legend, and the 1970s have made it impossible to think of Austen’s novels as untouched by the bigger or smaller waves of history. This book accepts the insights of Williams, Butler, and others as given, and aims at linguistically vindicating Gard’s idea that Austen’s methods antedate Flaubert’s. However, while the destructive activity of both the subversive and the reactionary schools is taken as a starting point, their constructive proposals are in part rejected. Butler’s conclusions on the one hand, and Gilbert and Gubar’s In his somewhat ingenuous but occasionally insightful study of Jane Austen, Christopher Brooke formulates a judgment on Butler’s study which can be extended to many other critical works: ‘I believe I have learned more of Jane Austen’s inspiration from Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas than from any other book about her written in the last thirty years. Above all she has shown very clearly how much Miss Austen owed to the highly moral, didactic, conservative, ‘anti-jacobine’ novels. So substantial is the evidence for their influence that Dr Butler becomes convinced that Jane Austen must have had a like didactic programme in her major novels, and she proceeds to discover it. But a difficulty arises: for all the subtlety and power of Jane’s technique as a novelist, she seems to falter in adapting her teaching and her stories. So consistently does Marilyn Butler make her falter that our suspicions are aroused: no small part of Dr Butler’s contribution to our understanding lies in the failure of this part of her scheme’ (Brooke 1999: 19). More generally, Mary Waldron has written that ‘One of the most popular games that people play with Jane Austen’s fiction is to try to determine from it whether she was committed to the mores of the society in which she lived or, on the other hand, deeply critical of them.


on the other – with their three decades of filiations – are based on the common assumption that Austen expresses an opinion on the key issues of her society through her novels. The terminology used by both ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ critics (the novels ‘challenge’, ‘suggest’, ‘subvert’, ‘embody ideals’; they are ‘analyses’, ‘critiques’, ‘examinations’; they ‘serve a purpose’, or ‘reflect an ideology’) makes it clear that many commentators have become used to treating Austen’s works as pamphlets rather than fictional works. This is particularly obvious in certain feminist readings: Three of Jane Austen’s novels end with marriages that have incestuous overtones. In Mansfield Park, Fanny and Edmund are first cousins; moreover, they have been brought up as brother and sister in the same household. In Emma, the heroine marries her brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley, who throughout much of the novel shares a fraternal relationship with her. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, like Emma, marries her brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars. And in the same novel, Colonel Brandon tells Elinor the story of his desire to marry Eliza Williams, a sister-in-law brought up as his sister. Such relationships serve a singular purpose in Austen’s work. With these in-family marriages, she challenges the traditional dynamics of power and system of values in male/female relations. Instead of creating marriages in which power is associated with sex, Austen offers siblinglike unions that highlight moral and spiritual values. These unions profoundly alter the balance of power between men and women in her novels. (Hudson 1995: 101)

The striking fact that Austen’s oeuvre has attracted (and, indeed, stimulated, as pointed out in chapter 1) such a diversity of ideological readings should alert us to the dangers inherent in this kind of interpretation. Perhaps, if opposing analyses can be presented in similarly convincing ways, the novels had better be read as complex acts of ideological balancing rather than as unbalanced, biased manifestos. Both conclusions have been reached; both are unsatisfactory and always open to challenge. This is because fiction – that is, the kind that goes on engaging the interest of readers long after the writers are dead – is always uncommitted; it plays its own games with the norms of behaviour which are current at the time of writing’ (Waldron 2004: 427). However, in recent years a number of studies have appeared which – very much in the manner of Raymond Williams – situate Austen in the philosophical (Knox-Shaw 2004), scientific (Graham 2008) and literary (Mandal 2007) climate of her time, without assimilating her fiction to any particular line of thought. John Bayley wrote as early as 1968 that ‘[Austen’s] critics, like those of Shakespeare, find in her what most interests themselves, but having found it they assume in it a hard ‘unplastic’ significance, an intellectual absoluteness which they would also find in George Eliot or Henry James’ (Bayley 1968: 4). Beatrice Battaglia has written that ‘the enormous bulk of critical studies and the vitality of the debate on Jane Austen should make it an objective fact that she is the most ambiguous and controversial author in the whole tradition of English literature [Che Jane Austen sia la scrittrice più ambigua e controversa della letteratura inglese dovrebbe essere un fatto oggettivo confermato dall’enorme produzione critica e dalla persistente attualità del dibattito aperto sulla sua narrativa]’ (Battaglia1983: 7).

Introduction

Such a reading has been provided by a number of post-structuralist critics who have applied themselves to studying Jane Austen. Against the tendency to constrict the author into a fixed ideological frame, these critics have noted that the novels are characterized by a conflict between closure and a ‘narrative dynamic ... which can never be accommodated in a final settlement’ (Miller 1981: xii); that ‘Jane Austen’s use of narrative voice exposes the context of “truth” as a tissue of indeterminacy’ (Patteson 1981: 465); that the order of authoritative narrative is undermined ‘by suggesting that it is an arbitrary system of mere writing’ (Holly 1989: 47). The poststructuralist critical line opposes all ‘subversive’ and ‘reactionary’ interpretations by pointing out that no single authoritative voice is set up in the novels that can subvert an existing system or react against modern values. A pamphlet-like reading of the novels presupposes a ‘Jane Austen’ looming from behind the veil of narration; but as D.A. Miller has recently written, Austen manages to subtract her signature from her creations: she ‘writes like a real god, without anthropomorphism. Nowhere else in nineteenth-century English narration have the claims of the “person,” its ideology, been more completely denied’ (Miller 2003: 32). Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques agrees with the general conclusions of post-structuralist criticism, and tries to extend those conclusions by looking at the technical means by which Austen’s ‘indeterminacy’ is created. Its first discovery is that indeterminacy, in this case, is not a product of the narrator’s invisibility, as our modernist prejudices would have us believe. D.A. Miller (2003) speaks of a narrator paring his/her fingernails far from the events of MP or E – but this impression clashes with the narrator’s authoritative interventions, when the moral has to be pointed or the tale adorned. Richard F. Patteson is perhaps closer to home when he speaks of the ‘multiplicity of narrative voice’ making ‘the reader’s search for determinacy even more difficult than the characters’’ (Patteson 1981: 465). In my account, there is no ‘multiplicity of narrative voice’, but there is – as Patteson notes – a multiplicity of ‘point of view’. The narrator is only one of many sources of authorititativess: he/she is automatically perceived by the reader as being more authoritative than the characters, but he/she relinquishes his/her dominant position by renouncing his/her authoritativeness or conferring it on others. In the present study, Austen’s works are viewed as dialogic machines – in the Bakhtinian sense – not because all novels are dialogic (though that can safely be argued), but because these novels in particular are constructed as dialogues among voices whose struggle for power can never be finally decided (which is why opposing readings are possible and plausible). To analyze the workings of a

Barbara K. Seeber also proposes a dialogic, Bakhtinian interpretation of Jane Austen, but she manages to combine this with the ‘subversive’ reading. The effects are somewhat contradictory: ‘I want to present a reading of Jane Austen that overcomes this theoretical dilemma. Austen is subversive, but this subversion is not just to be situated in a barely audible subtext. Rather, it is in the interplay between main text and subtext that the subversive effect lies. As we shall see, to designate parts of the novels as subtexts is to read Austen’s novels monologically; the texts themselves do not take this authoritarian stance’ (Seeber 2000: 8). But if ‘the texts’ do not distinguish between text and subtext, why should we?


dialogic machine, there are no better tools than the tools of linguistics: evaluation theory is used to understand which voices evaluate which events and characters, and how; stylistics is used to observe the ways in which Austen’s narrators renounce their evaluative power; while pragmatics and conversation analysis provide the terminology and the theoretical framework for a close study of how narrators and characters interact and produce meaning in and through their interaction. That this meaning remains indeterminate, even after close study, does not mean that the study has been in vain, but that Austen has created fictional vehicles for semantic indeterminacy – which, with the inevitable circularity of human sciences, is what Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques sets out to demonstrate. Parts and Chapters Parts 1 and 2 of this study are assigned respectively to Austen’s narrators and characters, or to narrative technique and dialogue. As Graham Hough showed in his famous essay of 1970, the distinction is even more artificial in Austen’s novels than elsewhere: in E, for instance, the ‘division of labour is by no means clear,’ and most of the tale is told in ‘coloured narrative’ or ‘free indirect style’ (Hough 1970/1991: 172, 173). Artificial and a posteriori though it may be, however, a neat division of labour is useful for the analyst who wants to show the mechanics of a single complex action by splitting it into two synchronic events: in Part 1, Austen’s narrators are shown to give up their natural position of authority by conferring it on others and undermining their own credibility; in Part 2, the interpersonal relationships (among characters, and characters and narrators) are shown through which meaning is negotiated in a fictional world divested of a single central authority. In Part 1, evaluation theory and stylistics are used in order to understand ‘who evaluates whom’ in the novels. Evaluation theory provides a general theoretical framework which re-articulates Patteson’s indeterminacy of meaning as evaluative opacity. Strong evaluations are provided, by the narrators and other characters, but the reader’s belief in the existence of one or more authoritative evaluators is consistently dismantled (stylistics provides the tools and the terminology to observe the various ways in which evaluative authority is eroded, or erodes itself). In the absence of a strong evaluative centre, all interpretations end up possessing very similar degrees of authority – an uncertainty which is mirrored in the diversity of critical interpretations. Chapter 1 unfolds this theory in its general lines. Chapter 2 traces the development of ‘evaluative opacity’ in the course of Austen’s career as a novelist (and in so doing, re-interprets the traditional distinction between the Steventon and the Chawton novels as a rise in the level of opacity). Chapter 3 is dedicated to a close reading of the incipit of MP, which demonstrates that evaluative opacity does not coincide with the absence of evaluation. In Part 2, pragmatics and conversation analysis, together with the conversation manuals of Austen’s time, are used to understand the novels as records and

Introduction

products of interpersonal negotiation. Conversation and characterization are closely allied in Austen’s novels, for if readers cannot rely on an authoritative narrator unquestionably identifying the moral and social nature of characters, they must judge everybody on the basis of internal (the narrator’s view, the other characters’ opinions) and external evidence (the readers’ own social-conversational prejudices). Chapter 4 defines a set of social-conversational rules which can be held to be (laxly) valid for Austen’s time and Austen’s fiction, and according to which a number of types or categories can be identified (the boors, the fools, etc.). Chapter 5 diachronically analyzes the changes in characterization from one novel to another, and once again observes a divide between the Steventon and the Chawton periods (the caricatures of NA, S&S and P&P become the mixed psychological types of MP, E and P). Finally, Chapter 6 analyses a single complex social occasion in E (the Box Hill episode) as a ‘conversational tennis match’ which sees the contestants striving for social power and gaining or losing ‘status’ with their every move – though once again, in the mist of evaluative opacity, winners and losers cannot be proclaimed with any final certainty. All the six novels in the main Austen corpus are analyzed in both parts, with some occasional forays into LS, TW and S. These three works/fragments are included for the light they shed on the major works, and no attempt is made at studying them in any detail; other fragments or juvenilia fall outside the scope of this study. Even within the main corpus, however, a preference is silently assigned to MP and E, both of which have a monographic chapter. This favouritism has less to do with aesthetic than with practical considerations: MP and E are Austen’s most complex novels, and as such they yield the greatest number of (contradictory) facts to critical scrutiny. Critical Debts and Predecessors When one is researching a subject with a view to writing a book-length study, one’s worst nightmare is finding out that one’s project has already been realized by someone else. Fortunately, such an exact correspondence is rare if not impossible, at least if the inception of the project is one’s feeling that one’s insight will add a little something to the sum of general knowledge. Short of the discovery of a nightmarish double, however, various degrees of analytical overlap are inevitable and, indeed, desirable. Before detailing one’s vision, therefore, an enumeration is appropriate of all the precedents which made one’s work possible and enabled one to skip peripheral concerns (which others busied themselves with) in order to get to the heart of the matter. As said above, very few linguists have devoted themselves to Jane Austen. The only book-length study so far was J.F. Burrows’ Computation into Criticism, A recent book on Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk (Mandala 2007) has done much to reinforce my conviction that such analyses are justified and productive.

10


which applies computational linguistics to an analysis of the novels. Burrows’ statistics on personal pronouns (Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Fanny Price say ‘we’ very rarely, but for opposing reasons), or on the distribution of a 30-word matrix in the conversational styles of a number of characters, produce interesting, though somewhat predictable, results (one example: ‘Save for the special case of Mrs Gardiner ... Collins is the most isolated of the major characters of Pride and Prejudice with only three correlations higher than 0.770’; Burrows 1987: 6). The main merit of the book is that it demonstrates the trustworthiness of computational methods in the study of Austen, and therefore paves the way for other – and perhaps less mechanical – linguistic applications. Shorter computational studies include Rand Schmidt (1981) and DeForest and Johnson (2001). Rand Schmidt attempts a comparison between male and female language in the novels, and notes that ‘the language of the female characters is subject to norms to a much greater extent than that of the male characters’ (Rand Schmidt 1981: 209). DeForest and Johnson measure the density of latinate words in the speeches of Austen’s characters, and make interesting discoveries along the axes of ‘class, gender, education, mind, and mood’ (DeForest and Johnson 2001: 390): in particular, very similar densities reveal the linguistic alignment between Austen’s narrators and their heroines (‘It is no coincidence that Austen’s four great heroines are all within two percentage points of their narrators. Their voices blend with the narrators’, and we unconsciously give them the authority of the actual storyteller’ [De Forest and Johnson 2001: 398]). These essays aside, Jane Austen’s language has mainly attracted the attention of literary critics rather than linguists. Phillips (1970), Page (1972) and Tave (1973) are impressionistic studies which, after three or four decades, must be read with a degree of critical detachment. The distribution of certain keywords mirrors Austen’s social and ethical vision, and character is revealed by conversational style (much in the manner of Chapters 4 and 5 here): but many a perceptive survey is marred by the conflation of author with narrator, and, more generally, by the unsystematic character of the analytical methods. A more recent monograph on ‘the language of Jane Austen’ is Stokes (1991), which is less impressionistic but more limited in scope: rather than studying Austen’s language as it purports to do, Stokes’s volume provides a social and etymological reading of a number of significant terms (‘understanding’, ‘disposition’, ‘accomplishments’, ‘sense’, ‘sensibility’, ‘prudence’) which are used as keys to unlock the social contexts portrayed in the novels. Part 1 of this study owes its existence to all previous stylistic/narratological analyses of Jane Austen, as well as to the post-structuralist studies quoted above. My debt to Wayne Booth’s 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction is acknowledged in Chapter 1, when I describe the process whereby Austen’s narrators turn themselves A recent addition to the number of studies concentrating on Jane Austen’s words is a short but brilliant essay on ‘Three Words of Jane Austen: Courtesy, Civility and Gallantry’ (Wiesenfarth 2004).

Introduction

11

into characters. Graham Hough’s classic article on ‘Narrative and Dialogue in Jane Austen’, with its definition of ‘coloured narrative’, is a precedent for my own observation of how Austen’s narrators are conflated with one or more (mimetic or non-mimetic) reflectors. Another important narratological study which dedicates a chapter to Jane Austen is Roy Pascal’s The Dual Voice (1977): while Pascal prefers to speak of ‘free indirect speech’ rather than ‘coloured narrative’, his conclusions are of a pair with Hough’s (‘contamination’ is held to be the rule of Austen’s narrative technique). Finally, after completing the article which has now become Chapter 3, I found another essay which comes to the same conclusions by a slightly different linguistic route (Blake 1988). Part 2 counts fewer precedents, though many critics have busied themselves with matters which touch its concerns tangentially. Among the predecessors, Marylea Meyersohn has studied Austen’s ‘garrulous speakers’ (1990), while Juliet McMaster has written a very perceptive essay on Mrs Elton and other ‘verbal aggressors’ (McMaster 2002). Among the ‘tangential’ precedents, classic studies of Austen’s dialogue like Babb (1962) and Kroeber (1971) can be mentioned, alongside the above-quoted critical monographs by Phillips, Page and Tave. Chapter 4, in its outline of the relationships between Austen’s novels and the conversational culture of Austen’s time, treats the latter as a rather unproblematic datum – while as Williams would say, even this small history has many currents. A number of essays and monographs on British conversational culture and on the idea of the gentleman in British society allowed me to treat these currents as a sea, in the knowledge that they had been described separately elsewhere. Fritzer (1997) observes in exhaustive but somewhat superficial fashion the connections between Austen’s fiction and the courtesy books of her time. Robin Gilmour draws a wellrounded historical portrait of ‘the idea of the gentleman’, and describes a secular strife between social and conversational models (aristocratic vs. bourgeois) which is subterranean in Austen and comes to light in the Victorian novel (Gilmour 1981). Berger (1991) and Appleton (1992) see this strife as embodied in Austen’s characters (Frank Churchill vs. Mr Knightley, in particular). Jenny Davidson looks at the same strife in different terms, i.e., as a conflict between ‘sincerity’ and ‘hypocrisy’ (she presents Fanny Price as a case of insincerity caused by extreme dependence; Davidson 2004: 146–69). Finally, a recent work must be mentioned which starts out from much the same assumptions as Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques, though its analytical method is strikingly different from the ones employed here. In the preface to his Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (2003), Bharat Tandon writes that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concern ‘with conversation as a socially cohesive activity, has led [him] to works on rhetoric and polite conduct’, while ‘Austen’s emphasis on conversation as a complex social performance has made her work fertile ground for the application of the language-use philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin and Grice’ (Tandon 2003: xiv). While this preface prefigures a pragmatic/conversational account of Austen’s fiction, that account is never actually given, and the most interesting section of Tandon’s book is the one about the eighteenth-century debate on politeness.

12


Ted Hughes’ famous description of poetic creation has a ‘thought-fox’ entering the ‘dark hole’ of the poet’s head to be formulated and typed (‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head. / The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed’; [Hughes 1957/1986: 26]). The poem is written in loneliness, in timelessness, in the absence of other voices silencing the poet’s. It may be a matter for contention whether that description is universally valid for poetic creation: but critical writing certainly takes different routes. The critic, even if he/she were willing to do so, can never work in silent loneliness: other thought-foxes roam the same meadows as his/her own; the hole of his/her head is well-lighted, and crowded. And even if a wonderful thought-fox enters that hole, the critic must go out of his/her room to chase after all the other foxes, and nothing can be created until the last specimen is put in the same cage as the first.

Part 1 Narrative


Chapter 1

Jane Austen’s Narrators The Point of Fiction Many commentators of Jane Austen’s fiction have commented upon the difficulty of her narrative game. As Virginia Woolf famously had it, ‘of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’ (Southam 1987: 301). Speaking of E, almost universally held to be the most complex and the most elusive of her novels, Reginald Farrer wrote that if you read it twelve times over, ‘at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never understood anything like the widening sum of its delights’ (Southam 1987: 266). Lionel Trilling added that ‘the difficulty of Emma is never overcome. We never know where to have it. If we finish it at night and think we know what it is up to, we wake the next morning to believe it is up to something else; it has become a different book’ (Trilling 1957/1991: 122). More recently and more generally, Irvin Ehrenpreis has expressed the bafflement of all those who try to establish what Austen (or, her narrator) is ‘up to’ in her novels: So the explicitness of the novelist is sometimes only apparent, and at other times is a game played with the audience. By sounding blunt and outspoken in many of her judgments, Austen entices unwary readers into assuming that she is straightforward ... But it remains true that when Austen does plainly set forth her judgment, it is – as I have said – quite reliable. (Ehrenpreis 1991: 118)

However, while certain commentators have put their fingers on Austen’s invisibility (for a recent example, cf. Miller 2003), others have seen her novels as mirroring a definite world view – a world view which has been interpreted in diametrically opposing ways. A traditional reading of Austen as an upholder of the patriarchal values of her society has been challenged by ‘revolutionary’ and/or feminist readings of the novels as subtle critiques of the same values. S&S has been interpreted as a satire on (excessive) sensibility, but some readers have observed that Marianne/sensibility is shown to be much more fascinating than Elinor/sense (Nardin 1973: 10). MP – the litmus test of Austen studies in terms of this argument – has been read as an evangelical plea for old gentrified England and as a covert manifesto against the moral and social strictness of Austen’s time. Lovers’ Vows, the unacted play at the centre of Mansfield Park, has itself elicited similar divided comments as to its ideological function: Penny Gay has recently written that ‘As the critical literature demonstrates, Kotzebue’s play, as adapted by Inchbald, can be used to support both a conservative and a radical reading of the novel’ (Gay 2002: 107).

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How can these positions be reconciled with Farrer’s (1917) image of the author as a joycean divinity, indifferently paring her fingernails elsewhere? ... impersonality comes as the first ingredient in the specific for immortality. The self-revelation of the writer must be as severely implicit as it is universally pervasive; it must never be conscious or obtruded ... She is there all the time, indeed, but never in propria persona, except when she gaily smiles through the opener texture of ‘Northanger Abbey’, or, with her consummate sense of art, mitigates for us the transition out of her paradises back into the grey light of ordinary life, by letting the word ‘I’ demurely peer forth at last, as the fantasmagoria in ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’ or ‘Northanger Abbey’ begins to thin out to its final pages. (Southam 1987: 248)

It comes as no surprise, of course, that Austen’s novels generate opposing interpretations: all great literature is supposed to do so. Conversely, the ability to instigate different readings has long been identified as a stigma of literary greatness. What is at once interesting and baffling is that these opposing readings appear to be equally justified, that there is ample textual material in Austen’s novels to support them both. At the same time, there seems to be uncertainty as to whether Jane Austen watches over her novels as a Victorian commentator or as a modernist detached observer. Is there a ‘point’ to her depiction of English gentry between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, or is there not? And if that ‘point’ is there, what is it exactly? From our postmodern position in history, we might dismiss all the business of finding a ‘point’ in Austen’s fiction – in all fiction – as self-evidently irrelevant. Have we not been taught that novels are not pamphlets? That the point of any narrative is the telling of a story? On the most basic level, these axioms are certainly valid: novels are not pamphlets – and narrators, in written fiction, are not authors. Yet any story, besides telling itself, expresses, is ‘symptomatic of’, a ‘world-view’, in Roger Fowler’s terms. And in Austen’s case, this world-view seems to be, at one and the same time, contradictory and elusive. And while we might, once again, conclude that the ‘point’ of (great) literature always eludes us, there may be a lesson to be learnt about how Austen’s particular Though, as Claudia L. Johnson has noted, Austen remains ‘one of the great anomalies of literary history. If few authors have occupied such an honored position in the ranks of great literature, just as few have inspired such divergent accounts of what exactly they are doing there in the first place’ (Johnson 1988: xiii). Elsewhere, Johnson has added that ‘Jane Austen always seems to inspire radically contradictory appeals to self-evidence’ (Johnson 1996/2001: 119). Indeed, for Fowler it is (fictional) language in general that expresses a world view: modal devices ... make explicit (though sometimes ironic) announcements of beliefs; other parts of language, indirectly but nevertheless convincingly, may be symptomatic of worldview: it has traditionally been assumed in stylistics that the different ways people express their thoughts indicate, consciously or unconsciously, their personalities and attitudes’ (Fowler 1986/1990: 132).

Jane Austen’s Narrators

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elusiveness is constructed – how readers are enticed into looking for a point which consistently evades their grasp. Before embarking on a linguistic investigation of how Austen’s elusiveness is created, it may be useful to remind ourselves of two cultural facts. The first one is contemporary: in our time, we have come to accept that the text does not contain its author – it contains a narrator, and can at most presuppose an ‘implied author’ with whom all readers ideally wish to be acquainted. The second one is contemporary with Austen: in her time, it was customary to think of novels as ethical/ideological mirrors, and she would have expected at least certain categories of readers to deduce the author’s opinions from her writings – to conflate narrator with author, ‘the implied author’ with ‘the real Jane Austen’. Settling the Point: Evaluation In his seminal study of oral narratives told by young black Americans, William Labov wrote that a story, in its minimal form, consists of two temporally ordered clauses (Labov 1972: 360). Besides this basic definition, however, he also provided a more detailed pattern, in order to account for the higher degree of complexity to be found in some of the stories he analyzed. The six parts or stages of this pattern can be and have been used to examine and dissect written as well as oral narratives (cf. Pratt 1977; Fleischman 1997; Black 2006): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Abstract Orientation Complicating action Evaluation Result or resolution Coda (Labov 1972: 363)

Some of these parts or stages may be present or not, in written as well as in oral narratives. In written fiction, the ‘abstract’ is usually provided by the title; the ‘orientation’, if it is to be found at all, is most often found at the start (it is the ‘who, what, where, when’, of the story); the ‘complicating action’ unsettles the initial balance and prepares the ‘resolution’; the ‘coda’, usually placed at the end of the narrative, is where things are rounded off – where the ‘(implied) author’, or the ‘narrator’, parts company with the ‘reader’. ‘Evaluation’ is the most difficult ‘part’ or ‘stage’ to locate, because though it tends to cluster in certain areas of a My ‘reader’, as will become apparent in the course of the chapter, is neither the structural function ‘implied’ by the text (Iser 1978: 20–50), nor the ‘model’ imagined by the author in order to write (Eco 1983: 50–53). It is a more adaptable creature, sometimes coalescing with the critic himself, at other times pointing at various or conflicting interpretive possibilities; perhaps the eclectic figure presupposed by the readings of certain ‘cognitive stylists’ (cf. for instance Stockwell 2002) comes closest to the one delineated here.


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text (traditionally, at the beginning and end; but there is variation along the genre and period axes), it can be found anywhere, and evaluative elements are hard to identify with any certainty. ‘Evaluation’, as Labov himself defined it, is the ‘point’ of a story: it can be a moral, a religious, or a didactic point; more generally, it is what demonstrates that the story is worth telling. In a novel, as well as in any other kind of story, evaluation is endemic, and no two readers will exactly agree as to which stretches of text are evaluative and which are not – though certain passages are quite unequivocally evaluative. Evaluative elements can be found, to begin with, in dialogue as well as in narrative, in the characters’ as well as in the narrator’s discourse. Some of Jane Austen’s novels (P&P, E, the unfinished TW) are mostly made up of dialogue, and when this is the case much of the evaluative work is as it were ‘embedded’ in direct (or indirect) speech. In P&P, we learn something about Mr and Mrs Bennet before the narrator tells us ‘who and what they are’: ‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield is let at last?’ Mr. Bennet replied that he had not. ‘But it is,’ returned she; ‘for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.’ Mr. Bennet made no answer. ‘Do not you want to know who has taken it?’ cried his wife impatiently. ‘You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.’ (P&P 1)

The narrator, however, is always instinctively held to be a more reliable evaluator than any single character. As Michael Toolan puts it, ‘narrators are typically trusted by their addressees ... To narrate is to bid for a kind of power’ (Toolan 1988/2001: 3). Even first-person ‘homodiegetic’ narrators, who take part in the

In the introduction to a recent collection of essays, Marina Dossena and Andreas H. Jucker have written that evaluation ‘is as elusive as pervasive in discourse – pervasive, because no text or utterance is ever absolutely free from it; elusive, because it may be difficult to say exactly what it is that gives the text or utterance that certain quality’ (Dossena and Jucker 2007: 7). ‘That is what we term the evaluation of the narrative: the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d’être: why it was told, and what the narrator is getting at. There are many ways to tell the same story, to make very different points, or to make no point at all. Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, “So What?” Every good narrator is continually warding off this question’ (Labov 1972: 366). Certain systemic linguists working on storytelling (cf. Eggins and Slade 1997) have argued that Labov’s is only one of several narrative genres, not all of them comprehending six parts. An ‘anecdote’, for instance, has no resolution and displays only a minimum of evaluation. This open-endedness may be one of the reasons why Miss Bates’s speeches in E are regarded as boring and inconclusive (while they often hide crucial truths). Labov himself describes a number of ways in which (oral) narrators distance themselves from the stories they tell by variously ‘embedding’ their evaluative comments (Labov 1972: 372–3).


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story and can therefore be suspected of having a personal interest in directing audience reactions, are considered more ‘authoritative’ than any other character, and can be confused with the ‘author’ to a lesser or greater degree. Modernist writers such as Conrad and James, and latter-day followers like Ishiguro, have deliberately played with readers’ expectations by exploiting this ‘authoritativeness’ (cf. Morini 2002). Third-person ‘heterodiegetic’ narrators acquire an extra degree of authoritativeness by being impersonal (if that is the case) and situating themselves out of the action: within the space of their fictional world, they are like gods, and readers will tend to treat them as such – i.e., they will tend to believe all they say. All of Austen’s narrators are third-person heterodiegetic narrators, and as such command the reader’s blind faith (or his/her gullibility, if we believe in the author mocking her audience). These narrators never take part in the action, and only rarely come out of hiding to speak in the first person. Therefore, their evaluative comments tend to have a ponderous weight on our interpretation of the novels – of what is going on, who are the good guys and the villains, what is likely to happen, etc. It is my point, though, that these narratorial figures variously undermine their own authoritativeness and leave readers more or less stranded between the waves of conflicting interpretations. However, before looking at how Austen’s narrators evaluate their fictional worlds (and at how they undermine their own evaluative work), some preliminary definitions of ‘evaluation’ are needed in order to define the range of textual data we are looking for. Evaluation is very difficult to locate, because it is not necessarily linked to any particular linguistic items, and it is not consistently signalled by any linguistic or metalinguistic means (at least in literary texts: other textual types, e.g. manuals or academic articles, can display specifically signalled evaluative techniques). Linguistic studies of evaluation have worked with different definitions of a very elusive quality, and have attributed that quality to words, sentences/utterances, text/discourse, speakers/writers, etc.: some terms of art are ‘connotation’, ‘affective meaning’, ‘attitude’. Scholars belonging to the field of stylistics have preferred to speak of the evaluative, attitudinal force of language as ‘modality’ (cf. Fowler 1986/1990: 131–2; Simpson 1993: 46–55), but they too have had to admit that modal elements are only the tip of the iceberg of attitude (cf. Chapter 3). More recently, a very promising new field of research on ‘evaluation’ as such has opened: the linguists working in this field are trying to unify the terminology and to build a general evaluative theory – and though the concept of ‘evaluation’ still seems ultimately irreducible to any satisfying unity, some interesting results have been obtained in the analysis of literary texts (Cortazzi and Jin 2000), argumentative prose (Hoey 2000), written and oral academic discourse (Anderson and Bamford 2004).

The inevitable (theoretical and terminological) starting point for any description of ‘narrative voice’ is the chapter on ‘Voix’ in Genette (1972: 225–67).

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Textual (or discursive) evaluation is not simply a question of assessing what is good and what is bad, what is important and what is not (though both axes are relevant). Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston, editors of a volume on Evaluation in Text, have identified three main functions of evaluation, which are respectively expressive, interpersonal, and textual. 1. to express the speaker’s or writer’s opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of that person and their community; 2. to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader; 3. to organize the discourse. (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 6) If one thinks of evaluation in a novel, and conveniently substitutes ‘narrator’ for ‘writer’, one immediately sees the cogency of this tripartite definition. The narrator, overtly or covertly, offers his/her point of view on the fictional world he presents, and in so doing reflects (directly or indirectly) the value system of the community which has spawned him/her, or of a part of that community.10 By telling his/her novelistic story, the narrator maintains certain kinds of relations with his/her readers, and/or, within the space of the text, with the shadowy figure of the narratee (if given). Finally, even dispositio is a form of evaluation, and a certain kind of ideological slant (using ‘ideological’ in the widest possible sense) brings about certain forms of textual organization. To give one very straightforward example, the modernists’ sense that the world could no longer be described from an external point of view, within the four walls of unified personality, sequential chronology, narrative reliability and providential finality led to the freer structures employed by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford. Though they insist that evaluation is essentially a unified phenomenon, Thompson and Hunston identify four main parameters: ‘good-bad, certainty, expectedness, and importance’ (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 25). While it is important to insist on the interpenetration of these axes (judging the importance of an event can also imply gauging its expectedness and goodness), and though ‘expectedness’ and ‘certainty’ can certainly be conflated, there is no doubt that the three remaining parameters sum up the evaluative work performed by the authority (or authorities) in charge of a text.11 In a novel, events are arranged, facts and characters are judged along those three axes, as shown in the incipit of Dickens’s These three functions seem closely allied to Halliday’s three grammatical ‘metafunctions’ (Halliday 1985: xiii, passim). 10 This is true even for ‘subversive’ novels, because subversion is a form of reverse reflection. 11 The notion of ‘implied author’ looms behind the idea of ‘responsible authority’, because even if we cannot re-construct an author, we can think of an authorial figure creating a narrator within a fictional world. For the sake of simplicity, however, and because we could by the same token identify countless intermediate stages, we can skip the ‘implied author’ and think of the narrator as the person in charge of a narrative, even when that narrator is also a character. At the same time, we will see how the narrator him/herself


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David Copperfield (expectedness/certainty) and at the start of the second chapter of William McIlvanney’s Docherty (good-bad, importance): Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. (Dickens 1849–1850/1994: 13) High Street was the capital of Conn’s childhood and boyhood. The rest of Graithnock was just the provinces. High Street, both as a terrain and as a population, was special. Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its hundred-and-so yards had failed in the same way. It was a penal colony for those who had committed poverty, a vice which was usually hereditary. (McIlvanney 1975/1996: 24)

As shown by these textual sketches, however, though it is sometimes very evident that one is faced with an evaluative passage, it is by no means easy to determine the linguistic means by which evaluation is effected. In a novel, the most evident cases of evaluation are those in which the narrator commits him/herself to a categorical assertion along the good-bad, important-unimportant axes, or reflects on the probability of an event taking place (all of Austen’s narrators do all of these things). On other, subtler, occasions, an event or a character may be compared to another, a single modal expression used to determine probability or desirability (‘must’, ‘may’, ‘certainly’, ‘luckily’). Even more trickily, evaluation may be hidden in lexical choice, collocation, or contextual elements. The beginning of NA can be used as an illustration; it is only when one identifies the intertextual link with the gothic genre that the evaluative contours of the narrator’s discourse become visible: No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard – and he had never been handsome. ... Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter to the world, as any body might expect, she still lived on – ’ (NA 5)

Attempts at identifying an exhaustive list of linguistic evaluative tools are of course doomed to fail or to produce Lewis Carroll’s 1:1 map of the world.12 It is true, however, that evaluation tends to be effected by certain linguistic means, and that certain linguistic items almost invariably carry evaluative force. Stylisticians have classified narrators and narrative techniques according to the dominating presence of one or more ‘modality’ systems (cf. Simpson 1993: 46–55): ‘deontic’ (‘You may/must/should leave’, ‘it is necessary that you leave’), ‘boulomaic’ (‘I hope that can undermine and disperse his/her authority by conferring it on others, or by showing the uncertain grounds on which that authority is founded. 12 The reference is to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Carroll 1988: 556).

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you will leave’, ‘I wish you’d leave’, ‘hopefully you’ll leave’), ‘epistemic’ (‘You may/must be right’, ‘You’re certainly/possibly right’), and ‘perceptive’ (‘it was evident that he was tired’). Even so, they have freely admitted that there is no fixed connection between modality and language, and that certain forms of evaluation seem to be too pervasive to be identified with any certainty. Evaluation scholars, in this as in other matters, adopt an all-embracing approach. Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston start out from the assumption that evaluation can appear at the level of lexis, grammar, and text; but after trying to isolate specific lexical, grammatical and textual evaluative elements, they have to admit that the task is ultimately impossible or useless. Consequently, they decide to work with more general ‘conceptual’ entities. Evaluation, they say, can be comparative, subjective, value-laden. ‘Of these three groups, the third seems inherently more lexical in nature; but the first and the second are primarily grammatical’ (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 22): (1) Evaluation involves comparison of the object of evaluation against a yardstick of some kind: the comparators. These include: comparative adjectives and adverbs; adverbs of degree; comparator adverbs such as just, only, at least; expressions of negativity (morphological, such as un- and other affixes; grammatical, such as not, never, hardly; and lexical, such as fail, lack). (2) Evaluation is subjective: the markers of subjectivity. This is a very large group including: modals and other markers of (un)certainty; non-identifying adjectives; certain adverbs, nouns, and verbs; sentence adverbs and conjunctions; report and attribution structures; marked clause structures, including patterns beginning with it and there, and ‘Special Operations Clauses’ ... such as pseudoclefts. (3) Evaluation is value-laden: the markers of value. These may be divided into two groups: lexical items whose typical use is in an evaluative environment (the circularity of this definition seems unavoidable); and indications of the existence of goals and their (non-)achievement (‘what is good’ may be glossed as ‘what achieves our goals’ and ‘what is bad’ may be glossed as ‘what impedes the achievement of our goals’). (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 21)

In the end, the catalogue is so vast that the critic is left to his own resources, and must brave the pitfalls of ‘epistemic circularity’ on his own (cf. Chapter 3). However, some of these tools, analyses and definitions may be useful in defining how evaluation works in Austen’s novels. Evaluation and Austen’s Novels We are now in a position to redefine the difficulties many readers have experienced who have tried to put their fingers on ‘what Jane Austen is saying’, or ‘what narrative game Jane Austen is playing’. It is my contention that these difficulties can be summed up in one general problem – the problem of tracing evaluative patterns in


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Austen’s novels. This problem is not merely a consequence of the pervasive and elusive qualities of evaluation in general, or of the fact that novels are not pamphlets and have, therefore, no clear ‘point’ to make: such novels as Dickens’s Hard Times or D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover do display a clear evaluative pattern – whatever different directions their fictional structures may take in spite of it. As seen above, Austen’s novels also seem to invite evaluative scrutiny, while many novels of similar complexity do not – no serious critic would dream of finding the ‘point’ of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, for instance, unless the point is a universal one about the nature of mankind.13 But the reader’s search for Austen’s ‘point’ is frustrated as consistently as it is instigated, and a web of ‘evaluative opacity’ is created which does not coincide with evaluative absence. Austen creates this web of opacity less by withdrawing evaluation than by dismantling the authority of the evaluative sources she sets up. In fiction, the evaluative source par excellence is of course the narrator: even when the physically present spinner of yarns becomes a disembodied voice hovering over a neutrally-told story, a narrative function still remains to give substance to facts and words.14 In Austen’s novels, the narrator as an evaluative centre can still be identified, sometimes even personally, but his/her evaluations cannot be relied upon to provide a centripetal interpretation of events. Some literary critics, though stopping short of a linguistic analysis of Jane Austen’s dismantling of authority, have grappled with the problem of narrative unreliability in her fiction. Many of these critics have brought post-structuralist exegetic concepts to bear against some of her novels, particularly E (cf. Holly 1989; Rosmarin 1984/1991). Richard F. Patteson has written about ‘the multiplicity of narrative voice’ which ‘makes the reader’s search for determinacy even more difficult than the characters’’ (Patteson 1981: 465). Tara Goshal Wallace has observed the moves by which Austen’s narrators renounce omniscience, or partially disappear from ‘their’ narratives, from LS to P (Wallace 1995). D.A. Miller has identified a conflict in Austen’s novels between ‘closure’ and ‘the narrative dynamic itself, which can never be accommodated in a final settlement’ (Miller 1981: xii). In a totally different vein, Bernard J. Paris has suggested that while narrative structures may present ‘an abstract moral perspective ... Realistic characterization fights against theme as well as against form’ (Paris 1978/1979: 20); in MP, for instance, Fanny’s ‘real’ character undermines Austen’s project of making her the heroine of a conservative evangelical novel: 13

Toolan interestingly defines narrative ‘point’ in a didactic manner: ‘A narrative is a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events, typically involving, as the experiencing agonist, humans or quasi-humans, or other sentient beings, from whose experience we humans can “learn”’ (Toolan 1988/2001: 8). 14 Cf. Fludernik (1993: 443): ‘I am here modifying and refining Chatman’s views on the narrator ... I reject Chatman’s ‘narrator at all times’ (including a ‘cinematic narrator’), but decisively maintain the existence of narration, and a gradual scale between an overt (personalized) narrator persona and a more covert narrative voice all the way to an objective backgrounded narrative function in reflector mode narrative’.

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques There are a number of brilliant essays which explain “what Jane Austen meant by the creation of such a heroine” as Fanny Price ... The fact remains, however, that many readers cannot identify with Fanny’s hopes and fears or admire her character and values in the ways that they must if the novel’s comic pattern and rhetoric are to have their desired effects. Some critics complain that Fanny is insipid, others that she is a prig. The major source of difficulty, I believe, is that Fanny is a highly realized mimetic character whose human qualities are not compatible with her aesthetic and thematic roles. (Paris 1978/1979: 22)

Post-structuralist and psycho-analytic views highlight two different but related sources of evaluative unreliability in Austen’s fiction: on the one hand, the narrator tends to undermine his/her own authority by contradicting him/herself, claiming or showing ignorance of facts or thoughts, etc.; on the other hand, the novel is an inherently ‘heteroglossal’ genre (Bakhtin 1963/1984), where the narrator’s is only one of the voices at play, if a highly privileged one. In this heteroglossal context, ‘evaluation’ becomes ‘engagement’ with what other voices say (Martin and White 2005: 92–3). Austen’s narrators tend to undermine their own authority and/or leave evaluative room to other characters – whose views, in their turn, are often refuted by the unfolding of events. In these conditions, it becomes hard, and ultimately impossible, to establish ‘who evaluates what, in and through narrative, and why’ (Cortazzi and Jin 2000: 104). The problem with Austen’s narrators is that they seem to change during the course of each novel, or, to look at it from another angle, that they react differently to the various characters and events it falls to their lot to introduce and describe. They are, all of them, third-person heterodiegetic narrators, yet their level of detachment varies greatly, and their vision disturbingly hovers between omniscience and ignorance. Furthermore, they sometimes employ (and mingle with) one or more reflectors through which the action is shown. In the terms of Paul Simpson’s exhaustive classification, Austen’s novels always display ‘category B’ narrators, but these oscillate between ‘narratorial’ and ‘reflector’ modes. These narrators employ both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ strategies: at times they speak from outside the consciousness of their characters, whereas on other occasions they claim knowledge of thoughts, feelings, and past actions (Simpson 1993: 55–75). Given these premises, it is not surprising that many Austen readers feel the interpretive ground slipping from beneath their feet: they look to the evaluative centre of the novel to know where they stand, but that centre is continually shifting or disappearing from view. Sometimes the centre does hold. There are moments in which Austen’s ‘category B’ narrators work in the ‘narratorial positive’ mode (i.e., they profess omniscience, or rather, they move freely between past and future events, characters’ thoughts and feelings): these moments are usually situated at crucial stages of the narrative, so that readers are encouraged to think that they will set the norm for the rest. When working in the ‘narratorial positive’ mode, Austen’s narrators offer ‘strong evaluations’ of people and actions, mostly on the ‘good-bad’ and ‘importance’ axis. To fall back on Labov’s 1972 pattern, these ‘strong evaluations’ mostly occur during the initial ‘Orientation’ and the final ‘Result’ and ‘Coda’, as well as when


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new characters have to be introduced. In the ‘Orientation’, Austen’s narrators usually provide social and financial information on the main dramatis personae and judge their moral and social character. The first Chapter of S&S provides most of the practical and psychological information we need on the Dashwood family: The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property ... The late owner of this estate was a single man ... he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it ... By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son; by his present lady, three daughters. The son, a steady respectable young man, was amply provided for by the fortune of his mother ... To him therefore the succession to the Norland estate was not so really important as to his sisters; for their fortune ... could be but small ... The old gentleman died ... to [Henry Dashwood’s] son, and his son’s son, [Norland Park] was secured, in such a way, as to leave him no power of providing for those who were most dear to him ... He [Henry Dashwood’s uncle] meant not to be unkind, however, and, as a mark of his affection for the three girls, he left them a thousand pounds a-piece ... [Mr John Dashwood, Henry Dashwood’s son] was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed ... But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself; – more narrowminded and selfish ... Elinor ... possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment ... Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in every thing ... she was every thing but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great ... Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humoured well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne’s romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life. (S&S 1–5)

The information Austen’s narrators provide, almost invariably, when a new actor appears on stage, is complementary to this initial orientation. Even in E, where the narrator is mostly noted for his/her absence and reticence, no new character is launched without a few introductory words: Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. (P&P 12) Mr. Perry was an intelligent, gentlemanlike man ... (E 16) Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove were a very good sort of people; friendly and hospitable, not much educated, and not at all elegant. (P 38)

However, this ‘positive’ evaluative handling soon disappears, and readers are left to their own resources. For the main part of each novel, after the initial orientation,

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the narrator employs many strategies of invisibility and reticence: he/she does not vanish completely, or fall into absolute silence, yet the moments when he/she demonstrably evaluates the narrative are few and far between (though of course, even organization, dispositio, is a form of ‘textual’ evaluation). The narrative voice comes back to the surface only at the end, in the ‘result’ and the ‘coda’, when it takes charge to condense certain parts of the story, or, particularly in the coda, to judge past events and anticipate future developments.15 Generally speaking, the ‘result’ of all of Austen’s novels is marriage (between the heroine and the most desirable man, between another woman and the second-best man, etc.). When a marriage proposal takes place, the narrator prefers to make a summary of the facts rather than merely repeat the characters’ words. In Leech and Short’s classification of speech and thought presentation modes, what readers are offered is a prolonged and reticent Narrative Report of Speech Act(s) (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 318–36), sometimes supplemented by half-moral comments, often uttered with half a tongue in the narrator’s cheek:16 How soon he had walked himself into the proper resolution, however, how soon an opportunity of exercising it occurred, in what manner he expressed himself, and how he was received, need not be particularly told. (S&S 317) What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. (E 391)

In the summing-up coda, Austen’s narrators oscillate between the light irony and benevolence of E (where Mrs Elton’s ventriloquized criticism of Emma and Mr Knightley’s wedding is counterbalanced by their friends’ concluding faith in 15 Penny Gay offers a theatrical interpretation of these final interventions. In the late eighteenth century, such famous actresses as Dorothy Jordan and Frances Abington were often assigned the task of reciting the final prologue, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It as well as in more recent productions. ‘For a gleeful extra minute or so of theatre time’, Shakespeare’s Rosalind ‘plays with the audience’s expectations of conventional gender behaviour, and invites applause for her – and her company’s – performance. In doing so she both ironises the apparent closure of the story that the audience has just enjoyed, and leads the audience to appreciation of an even more sophisticated pleasure: recognition of the creative energy of the author and the actors’. Gay suggests that ‘Jane Austen ... takes a similar position on the stage of her own creations, her novels, putting on with a flourish the mask of “author” and speaking with affectionate irony of the story that we have all – author, actors, and audience – been involved in ... Austen, like the principal actress, is both inside and outside the novel as it ends: both authoritatively knowledgeable about her fictional world, and ironically dismissive of its reality’ (Gay 2002: 166–7). 16 James Thompson has noted the conventional character of these summaries, which were also employed, among others, by Scott, Edgeworth, and Inchbald: such strategies represented a reaction against ‘a generation of overblown language of sentimentality ... implying that [previous] novelists had used up the language of emotion. If this most important emotion cannot be expressed well, Austen and contemporary novelists imply, it ought not to be expressed at all’ (Thompson 1988: 72–3).


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‘the perfect happiness of the union’; E 440) and the harsh retributive morality of MP, where villains are both punished and reproached. In this case, the narrator employs a variety of value-laden expressions (‘the indignities of stupidity’, ‘the disappointments of selfish passion’, ‘punishment’, ‘conduct’, ‘guilt’, ‘mortified’, ‘reproach’) which leave the reader in no doubt as to the deontic character of that final ‘must’: Mr. Rushworth had no difficulty in procuring a divorce; and so ended a marriage contracted under such circumstances as to make any better end, the effect of good luck, not to be reckoned on. She had despised him, and loved another – and he had been very much aware that it was so. The indignities of stupidity, and the disappointments of selfish passion, can excite little pity. His punishment followed his conduct, as did a deeper punishment, the deeper guilt of his wife. He was released from the engagement to be mortified and unhappy, till some other pretty girl could attract him into matrimony again, and he might set forward on a second, and it is to be hoped, more prosperous trial of the state – if duped, to be duped at least with good humour and good luck; while she must withdraw with infinitely stronger feelings to a retirement and reproach, which could allow no second spring of hope or character. (MP 364–5)

These narrative apparitions can have a twofold effect on readers: on the one hand, they create in their minds a conflation of the narrator with the ‘author’ (because if an opinion is forcibly expressed by a third-person heterodiegetic narrator, it must be the author’s); on the other, they convince them that the author or the narrator will be or has been in charge throughout – which is very far from being the case. Firstly, the greater part of Austen’s novels is made up of dialogue (free and bound direct and indirect speech, narrative reports of speech acts), often unmediated by the narrator (above all, but by no means only, in P&P and E). Secondly, even when the narrator is present, his/her opinions cannot be readily identified – because they are not expressed explicitly enough, because they are contradictory, or because it is not clear who is speaking/thinking. Let us first examine the narrator’s evaluative reticence, which is apparently at odds with his/her openness in the openings and closings. Sometimes, this reticence is a function of mystery, or of what Leech calls the ‘interest principle’:17 the narrator does not want to uncover his/her plans, as he/she would if he/she offered explicit evaluation of a character or an event. When Willoughby first appears in S&S, for instance, the narrator does not judge him on the ethical plane (on the ‘good-bad’ axis), nor does he/she pry into his real feelings; so, even when readers start to suspect him of double dealing, they can still hope he will act honourably by Marianne. In the Chawton novels, narrative reticence becomes 17

Leech formulates this principle to account for certain ‘uncommunicative’ features of conversation, but the definition can be easily adapted to the written word: ‘I shall tentatively propose ... an Interest Principle, by which conversation which is interesting, in the sense of having unpredictability or news value, is preferred to conversation which is boring and predictable’ (Leech 1983: 146).

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the rule – if orientations, results and codas be excepted; in E, it takes the peculiar form of listing both good and bad qualities of (almost) all characters, from the eponymous heroine downwards: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence ... The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself ... (E 3–4)

This quotation also illustrates the second source of narrative unreliability, or of evaluative confusion in the narrator’s discourse. In the space of a few paragraphs, the narrator shifts from a ‘negative’ to a ‘positive’ mode: in the first sentence, he/she adopts an external point of view which forces him/her to make conjectures about the real state of affairs (Emma ‘seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence’); whereas in the second, he/she falls back on a positive perspective which allows him/her to establish the ‘real evils indeed of Emma’s situation.’ This kind of oscillation produces epistemological uncertainty, because readers cannot be sure whether the narrator knows or does not know about people’s morals and feelings, about past and future events. Owing to narratorial ignorance or reticence, Jane Austen’s novels are permeated with evaluative opacity, on the good-bad, certainty, and importance axes. We have already seen how on certain occasions, her narrators refuse to provide open evaluations of certain characters (Willoughby, but also, initially, the Crawfords in MP). The same is true of events: sometimes an omniscient narrator informs his/her readers about facts which have taken place on a different temporal plane (cf. for instance Mr Weston’s story, told in Chapter 2 of E); on other occasions, though, an ignorant or reticent narrator omits crucial information – or does not signal the importance of certain details.18 In E, we learn that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are engaged only towards the end of the novel, even though various hints are dropped before that stage. In P&P, we are never told who betrays Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy’s secret to Lady Catherine (cf. Sutherland 1999: 17–22). Not infrequently, the narrator openly pleads his/her ignorance, from the early LS to the mature P:

18 John Douthwaite defines these ‘information gaps’ in pragmatic terms, as breaches of Grice’s maxim of quantity: ‘To illustrate both how radical and how arresting the pragmatic manipulation of language can be, let us examine one type of infraction that is crucial in creating implicature. I am referring to the extreme application of the infraction of the submaxim of quantity, where sufficient information referring to a key event would be expected in normal circumstances in order to clarify the action, but none is provided. This is a standard pragmatic canon employed in all genres to keep the reader out of the know in order to bend the sjuzhet to the narrator’s ends, including maintaining the tension high and keeping readers glued to the page. Its use is particularly prevalent and transparent in one genre which relies on this device as its mainstay: detective stories’ (Douthwaite 2000: 236).


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Whether Lady Susan was, or was not happy in her second Choice – I do not see how it can ever be ascertained – for who would take her assurance of it, on either side of the question? The World must judge from probability. (LS 249) Mrs. Clay’s affections had overpowered her interest, and she had sacrificed, for the young man’s sake, the possibility of scheming longer for Sir Walter. She has abilities, however, as well as affections; and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning, or hers, may finally carry the day. (P 201)

In the first case, the narrator/editor (Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel with a very short narrative coda) professes him/herself unable to guess a character’s thoughts and feelings; in the second, he/she pleads ignorance of the future. In both instances, the narrator’s powers are limited much as a character’s would, by being situated in time and in an individual psyche. The very individual quality of Austen’s narrators clashes with the omniscience they also claim at certain stages: if sometimes they seem to be looking at the action from above, on other occasions they descend upon the earth and betray their position – they say ‘I’, they become characters. In Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, D.A. Miller rightly observes that Austen’s novels lack a strong evaluative centre (‘Austen’s divinity is free of all accents that might identify it with a socially accredited broker of power/knowledge in the world under narration’; Miller 2003: 32), but simplistically attributes this centrifugal quality to the absence of a perceptible narrator (‘Austen’s work most fundamentally consists in dematerializing the voice that speaks it’; Miller 2003: 6–7). While Miller’s identification of a void, a ‘cut’ (Miller 2003: 34) at the heart of the novels is instructive, his conflation of this ‘cut’ with the narrator’s disappearance clashes with all those instances in which the narrator makes a nameless, but not impersonal, appearance.19 If, on the other hand, the narrator is seen as a character among many (though one with a special functional status), his/her personal interventions need no longer be seen as intrusions, and his/her evaluative and epistemological uncertainties become a sign of human, no longer godlike, authority. In his seminal study of E in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth identified the narrator with “Jane Austen”, in inverted commas – both a character and a dramatized projection of the ‘implied author’.20 Booth observed that this dramatized “Jane Austen” is sometimes unreliable (‘Is the mystery purchased at the price of shaking the 19

Predictably, Miller confines the novels which most evidently disprove his theory of impersonality to the periphery of the Austen canon: NA is ‘The least revised of Austen’s early novels’, while P is ‘the great false step of Austen Style’ (Miller 2003: 33, 68). 20 In her analysis of MP, Beatrice Battaglia distinguishes between ‘the Author as a director [l’Autrice nei panni di regista]’ and ‘the narrative voice [which] belongs to a character who has the function of narrator – a character who has the historical attributes of the omniscient, didactic she-Narrator of anti-jacobin and evangelical literature [la voce narrante [di] un personaggio, che ha appunto la funzione di narratrice, ben caratterizzato storicamente come il personaggio della Narratrice omnisciente e didattica della letteratura moralistica antigiacobina ed evangelica]’ (Battaglia 1983: 128).


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reader’s faith in Jane Austen’s integrity?’ Booth 1961: 254), and that her presence is a key structural element of the novel (‘The dramatic illusion of her presence as a character is as important as any other element in the story’; Booth 1961: 266); but he failed to link unreliability and presence, personification and fallibility. Whereas it is probably excessive to say that ‘an omniscient narrator destroys his authority the moment he says I’ (Black 2006: 14), it is true that absence and omniscience often go together (a prejudice having to do with our received ideas on God) – and a humorous narrator speaking in the first person, as well as alternatively knowing and guessing, certainly does lose a great part of his/her reliability.21 I come now to the relation of a misfortune, which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood. (S&S 216) I wish I could say, for the sake of [Mrs Bennet’s] family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; (P&P 295) ... although there doubtless are such unconquerable young ladies of eighteen (or one should not read about them) as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment by all that talent, manner, attention, and flattery can do, I have no inclination to think Fanny one of them ... (MP 181) Mrs Goddard was the mistress of a school – not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems – and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity – but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school ... (E 18)

In all these cases, the narrator-as-a-character (a figure conflated by many with Austen herself) comes out of impersonal hiding, though in different ways and with different degrees of omniscience (or, renunciation of omniscience). In the quotations from S&S and P&P, the narrator, though speaking in the first person, is in full charge of the narrative: he/she knows what has happened and will happen, and is free to move in the consciousness of his/her characters. In MP, the narrator is guessing at possibilities and measuring a (limited) knowledge of Fanny’s inclinations against her background and situation (though one implicature of the text between parentheses is that the narrator does know what would happen if Henry Crawford persisted, because Fanny is not one of those romantic characters peopling the novels the narrator is taking a swipe at). Finally, in E, the narrator comes out not by saying ‘I’, but by expressing in a very direct manner his/her personal opinions on contemporary affairs (in this case, the confusion with the historical Jane Austen is almost inevitable). 21

The ‘author’ also addresses his/her ‘audience’, i.e., the ‘narrator’ addresses his/her ‘narratees’, thus foregrounding him/herself as a character. When the narrator of P says that Lady Russel’s aversion to the idea of a second marriage ‘needs no apology to the public’ (P 11), we are encouraged to think of him/her as a person, or at least a persona.


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Another fluctuating movement exhibited by Jane Austen’s narrators – one that further complicates the network of evaluation – is the continual shift of perspective from the narrator to one or more characters – with the heroine usually taking up the role of reflector. From the mock-gothic part of NA onwards, all of Austen’s novels pivot on one central character whose consciousness the narrator can penetrate, but who also mixes with the narrator him/herself, at times in an inextricable manner. The mixture is stylistic as well as narratological: as literary critics have noted and computational linguists have statistically demonstrated, there is greater linguistic similarity between heroines and narrators than between any two characters in each novel – what Bakhtin called ‘stylisation’ (Bakhtin 1934–41/1981: 301–66).22 A distinction is needed, however, between the cases in which a central character functions as a reflector, and the many instances in which Austen’s narrators and reflectors become virtually indistinguishable. When the narrator consistently places the narrative focus within a character’s consciousness (it happens throughout Emma), readers may tend to see things from that character’s visual, psychological, and ideological perspective. But when this central consciousness and the narrator are blended, and readers no longer know who is speaking, evaluative confusion reaches a peak. In order to discriminate between these two techniques (both of them alternately used in all novels, though with different proportions), I propose a distinction between ‘mimetic’ and ‘non-mimetic reflector.’ In all of Austen’s novels, a central reflecting consciousness is employed. After the initial orientation conducted by the narrator, when all characters have been introduced and events set in motion, readers are plunged into the consciousness of the heroine. This plunge takes place later in the early works, while in the Chawton novels the reflector is employed more consistently, and in E we are allowed to abandon Emma’s gaze and feelings only once or twice. The narrator penetrates the reflector’s consciousness by the use of ‘mental process clauses’ (Halliday 1985: 107).23 Readers are told what the reflector is feeling, thinking, or perceiving:24 22

Cf. De Forest and Johnson, who also comment on how the conflation of narrator and heroine/reflector tricks the reader into giving the latter more credibility than she deserves: ‘It is no coincidence that Austen’s four great heroines are all within two percentage points of their narrators. Their voices blend with the narrators’, and we unconsciously give them the authority of the actual storyteller ... One of the great pleasures in reading Austen is being tricked by the heroine’s mistake’ (De Forest and Johnson 2001: 398). 23 For a definition and a four-way taxonomy of mental process clauses applicable to Jane Austen’s novels, cf. Halliday (1976: 165): ‘Mental process clauses are of four main types: perception (e.g. verbs see, look), reaction (e.g. please, like, smile), cognition (e.g. convince, believe, wonder), and verbalization (e.g. say, speak). The last is in fact rather different from the other three’. 24 Peter W. Graham, however, notes that in Austen’s fiction, all forms of perception pivot on the sense of sight: ‘The primacy of the eye is important here. John Locke considered thought itself a visual process; and as Ira Konigsberg points out the novel as practiced by Austen and her eighteenth-century predecessors responded to this new understanding,

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques Every object in the next day’s journey was new and interesting to Elizabeth; and her spirits were in a state of enjoyment; (P&P 119) Fanny could not wonder that Edmund was at the parsonage every morning ... (MP 52) On the morning appointed for Admiral and Mrs. Croft’s seeing Kellynch-hall, Anne found it most natural to take her almost daily walk to Lady Russel’s, and keep out of the way till all was over ... (P 31)25

From this first plunge onwards, and with the exception of all those cases in which the narrator comes into the open, the heroine becomes the temporal, spatial, and psychological pivot of the narrative. When a scene is described, this pivot functions as a deictic centre; and throughout the reflector narrative, occasional ‘sensing’ reminders are inserted to signal that the angle of vision has not been shifted: Fanny supposed she must have been mistaken, and meant to think differently in future; but with all that submission to Edmund could do, and all the help of the coinciding looks and hints which she occasionally noticed in some of the others, and which seemed to say that Julia was Mr. Crawford’s choice, she knew not always what to think. She was privy, one evening, to the hopes of her aunt Norris on this subject, as well as to her feelings, and the feelings of Mrs. Rushworth, on a point of some similarity, and could not help wondering as she listened; and glad would she have been not to be obliged to listen ... ‘I think, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Norris – her eyes directed towards Mr. Rushworth and Maria, who were partners for the second time – ‘we shall see some happy faces again now.’... Miss Bertram did indeed look happy, her eyes were sparkling with pleasure, and she was speaking with great animation, for Julia and her partner, Mr. Crawford, were close to her; they were all in a cluster together. How she had looked before, Fanny could not recollect, for she had been dancing with Edmund herself, and had not thought about her. (MP 92–3; italics mine)

The narrator first selects Fanny as ‘senser’, then describes a scene and reports a conversation as seen through her eyes and heard by her ears. At the end of the passage, readers are used to Fanny functioning as a deictic/psychological centre, and will tend to interpret that ‘indeed’ as belonging to her (as if she had turned her gaze towards Julia Bertram and Henry Crawford to verify the probability of her

and thereby became the dominant literary genre of the period, as it “directly confronted the problem of perception in both its narrative technique and its subject matter”. This is not to say that novels confine themselves to what the eye can see. Rather, thought itself is visual in novels’ (Graham 2008: 9–10). 25 The process here is one of doing rather than sensing, yet we are also allowed an insight into Anne’s feelings, for example her unwillingness to be in the way when the Crofts visit her family house as prospective tenants.


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aunt’s suppositions).26 If any doubts should arise, however, Fanny is again selected as senser before the end of the paragraph (‘How she had looked before, Fanny could not recollect’): readers are reminded that they are looking at the fictional world through her eyes, and that they are not allowed to see what she does not.27 In an article comparing modernist narrative techniques with Austen’s, I have already observed how narrators employ the reflector technique in order to sift knowledge before presenting it to their readers (Morini 2002: 77, 83–93). In E, many mysteries are unveiled for the reader when they are unveiled for Emma. In the excerpt from MP quoted above, we may suspect the reflecting narrator of a (psychological) omission: we are told that Fanny had not thought about Julia before because she was dancing with Edmund – but the reason is given in passing, and it is left to the reader to guess (or learn later) that since she is in love with Edmund, very little else is likely to engage her attention when she is with him. Things become even more complicated, and evaluation becomes even more elusive, when a mimetic reflector is substituted for its non-mimetic counterpart. When the narrator and the reflector are completely conflated, it becomes impossible to attribute evaluative comments with any certainty to one or the other. Even in the above passage from MP, which is clearly non-mimetic, certain words and clauses (‘indeed’, ‘she was speaking with great animation’) could be grammatically assigned to the narrator as well as the reflector (though logic leads to the latter). In other instances, neither grammar nor logic offer any guidance. The following passage from P&P describes a social occasion which the narrator shows through Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes (The chapter begins: ‘Convinced as Elizabeth now was ... she could not help feeling ...’): 26

In Thompson and Hunston’s three-way definition, this would count as ‘comparative evaluation’ (the narrator’s, or Fanny’s, vision – physical and moral – is compared with Mrs Norris’s). 27 This technical account is very close to Hough’s idea of ‘coloured narrative’ (Hough 1970/1991: 173). Other narratologists prefer to see this blending of voices in terms of ‘free indirect speech’ (Pascal 1977: 45–60) or ‘free indirect discourse’ (Fludernik 1993) – the narrator moving towards the character, imitating his/her voice. Michael Toolan identifies ‘free indirect discourse’ as a privileged means to ‘align’ the narrator with a character: ‘I favour the word “alignment” because it doesn’t prescribe whether that closeness of narrator to character is going to be used for purposes of irony, empathy, as a vehicle for stream-ofconsciousness or the clashing of two voices, or whatever: the alignment is perceived, then the function (or “naturalization”) is worked out by the reader. The term “alignment” also helps us keep in mind that, in terms of lexicogrammatical markers and aesthetic or narrative effect, there is a continuum from pure narrative words to pure character words, with any number of points on that continuum’ (Toolan 1988/2001: 135). Violeta Sotirova envisages ‘a conversational model for free indirect style’ in which free indirect discourse can be seen as representing a dialogue between different or contrasting points of view (Sotirova 2004: 225–6).The notion of free indirect discourse as a hold-all term, however, is misleading (at least for Austen), in that it suggests that an imitation of speech or thought is always present – while my description of blending includes all those cases in which it is point of view alone that sustains the conflation between character and narrator.

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques By Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, they were noticed only by a curtsey; and on their being seated, a pause, awkward as such pauses must always be, succeeded for a few moments. It was first broken by Mrs. Annesley, a genteel, agreeablelooking woman, whose endeavour to introduce some kind of discourse, proved her to be more truly well bred than either of the others ...28 In Darcy’s presence [Elizabeth] dared not mention Wickham’s name ... but, exerting herself vigorously to repel the ill-natured attack, she presently answered the question in a tolerably disengaged tone. (P&P 205; italics mine)

As many have noted, Jane Austen is an eclectic master of thought, as well as speech, presentation. She employs direct and indirect thought, free direct and indirect thought, narrative reports of speech acts (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 337–51). However, the nature of speech and thought presentation is such that the boundaries between different techniques are not always clear-cut. Free indirect thought is particularly tricky: in the absence of clear signals (and in a novel whose narrator seems to be omniscient and not omniscient, and appears to be working both in the ‘positive’ and in the ‘negative mode’), how are readers to tell if the thought is attributable to the narrator or the reflector? In the above passages, are the italicized evaluative comments to be allotted to Elizabeth, the narrator, or both? In other words, to come back to Simpson’s taxonomy of narrators, in these cases we no longer know if the narrator is working in the narratorial or in the reflector mode. One could say that it is not so crucial to distinguish between the narrator’s and the reflector’s voices, because each heroine is a spokesman for her narrator (or, for Jane Austen), and therefore heroine and narrator are one from the ideological point of view. Though that may be the case, however, it is as simplistic to equate narrator with character as it is unfeasible to identify narrator with author: it has been often noted that the ‘point’ of E and NA, for instance, is to prove the heroines wrong; in E, MP and P, the narrators occasionally use not only their heroines, but even such unsympathetic characters as Mrs Norris as reflectors (cf. Chapter 2). More generally still, the narrator is apt to ‘ventriloquize’ the speech of all characters, as well as the kind of ‘tittle-tattle’ one could hear in Bath or in the village of Highbury (cf. Finch and Bowen 1990). The famous incipit of P&P is a typical example: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (P&P 1). In this case, the narrator overtly appears to endorse the proposition expressed by the relative clause, but a certain degree of exaggeration suggests that the endorsement may not be totally heart-felt. This kind of ‘stylisation’, or ventriloquizing appropriation, illustrates very well the concept of ‘irony’ in relevance theory: according to Wilson and Sperber, irony is ‘echoic language’: ‘The speaker echoes a thought [he/she] attributes to someone else, while dissociating [him/herself] from it with anything from mild ridicule to savage scorn’ (Wilson and Sperber 1992/1996: 265). While the definition of irony as echoic language does not hold for all ironical statements 28 This passage contains a different example of ‘comparative’ (‘more truly well bred’) mixed with ‘value-laden evaluation’ (‘a genteel, agreeable-looking woman’).


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(unless the definition is circular), it applies very well to the kind of appropriating game Austen’s narrator plays: and since it is often difficult to determine whether the narrator’s voice aligns itself with or detaches itself from (and if so, in what measure) from the other voices it swallows, the reader is left without a firm evaluative ground to stand on.29 In the end, we find that we cannot ‘catch’ Jane Austen in her novels, because she is simply not there to be caught; only Booth’s “Jane Austen” walks through the rooms of Barton Cottage or in the Mansfield Park grounds, silently watching, loudly commenting on, openly or covertly conniving with the (other) characters. The presence of “Jane Austen” awakens the reader’s desire to know Jane Austen’s mind, and at the same time it posits access to ‘the real Jane Austen’ as impossible. With a further complicating move, however, even “Jane Austen” goes into hiding behind her reflectors, or in the meanderings of description. Readers can rely on no stable evaluative centre, and opacity becomes the rule of the most crystal-clear of narrative creations. Traditional ‘ironical’ readings of Jane Austen (cf. Mudrick 1952) set naive ‘first impressions’ against a more sophisticated reading of the novels, promoted by the narrative structure itself. But in Jane Austen’s novels, whenever readers’ expectations are frustrated, one reading is not simply substituted for another: interpretations are heaped upon interpretations, and if certain evaluative comments are presented as more authoritative than others, in other cases readers do not know whether they are allowed an insight into the heart of the matter, or whether they are only following this or that character (or the narrator-as-a-character) in their misreadings. Logic, linguistic knowledge, and literary expectations cannot unravel one discourse from another, one interpretation from another: for on the one hand, Austen tricks us into believing that certain evaluative comments are more reliable than others; while on the other, she allows us no stable source of authoritativeness, by proving that a chance word, or a silence, can contain a bigger grain of truth than a long ‘authorized’ speech. Choice or Chance? One cannot help concluding that Jane Austen is difficult to catch at her narrative game because she does not want to be caught. Without an explicit narratological theory, she perfects a number of narrative strategies that allow her to transform a third-person narrator into a character, to conflate this character with others, and so 29 Drawing on Fowler’s definition of ‘mind style’, Elena Semino distinguishes between ‘ideological point of view’ (a term she uses ‘to capture those aspects of world views that are social, cultural, religious or political in origin, and which an individual is likely to share with others’) and ‘mind style’ (covering ‘those aspects of world views which are primarily personal and cognitive in origin’; Semino 2002: 97): in this theoretical framework, Austen’s irony can be seen as playing with various degrees of confusion/conflation between these two planes.

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to avoid evaluative commitment. Thus constructed, her novels have at the same time invited and baffled evaluative analysis for almost two centuries. If one should ask oneself why such secretiveness was necessary, one could perhaps have a look at Jane Austen’s letters (that portion of her letters we are allowed to read): they are even more reticent than the novels, perhaps because in the novels some opinions can at least be attributed to characters. In the nineteenth century, however, critics tended to identify the author not only with his/her narrators, but also with his/her characters, unless these characters were explicitly condemned by the narrator and by poetic justice. With all this in mind, we might view Austen’s narrative technique as a masterpiece of prudence – a way to elude and delude the moral scrutinizers of literature, those who praised or condemned a novel for its ‘ideas’ or ‘morals’.30 One is reminded of the exhortation, common to all manuals of conversation (and derived from Castiglione’s Cortegiano), to endorse one opinion and its opposite, or at least to see the merits of both and never take sides with excessive vigour. Whether prudence was her motivation or not, however, and whether she was a fully conscious artist or Henry James’s unconscious craftsman, Jane Austen created narrative machines which still produce epistemological uncertainty. Her novels promise complete disclosures which do not disclose everything; and though it would be anachronistic to fashion a ‘postmodern’, ‘poststructuralist’, or ‘decostructionist’ Austen, it is tempting to believe that she did not believe in truth as an external, verifiable entity: Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material. (E 391)

30 Janis P. Stout (1990: 44) explicitly links Austen’s ‘silent’ narrative strategies with the reticent conversational modes exhibited by some of her (female) characters, and with the premium put on (women’s) silence by Austen’s society: ‘Clearly, Austen’s suppressions were, very often at least, chosen strategies, primarily for reader involvement and for conveying a theory of language. That they were at the same time manifestations of culturally imposed notions of appropriateness, or tact, particularly on the part of women, and reactions to those notions, is also clear’. Anthony Mandal (2007: 38–9), however, describes the novelistic tendencies of Austen’s time in such a manner as to give an alternative, or supplementary, explanation for these silent strategies: ‘The close of the eighteenth century saw the convergence of two conservative reactions which, allied together, curtailed the expansion of the fiction market. There was the general political backlash led by the AntiJacobins against any voice of protest. There was also a reaction against the novel genre itself, which aligned itself against salacious and morally disturbing titles. As a consequence of both impulses, the 1800s saw the depolemicization (if not the depoliticization) of fiction, leading to its reconstruction as a ‘proper’ vehicle for middle-class expression.’

Chapter 2

The Development of Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques A general description of Austen’s narrative technique may give rise to the impression that besides describing the same social set, the author also employed the same techniques in all her novels. This impression is both grounded and false. It is grounded, because NA already contains the narratological germs of MP and E; false, because the same tricks are mastered more and more fully, and MP and E are more complex narratologically, and bear little or no resemblance to the simple mechanisms of NA. Unlike the modernists, Austen left us very little in the way of explicit theory, either in her letters or elsewhere. Therefore, if we want to study the development of her narrative technique, the only documents we can access are the novels themselves: and based on the evidence of the novels, Austen progressively extends that web of ‘evaluative opacity’ which, as has been seen (cf. Chapter 1), both invites and frustrates interpretation. In the interests of evaluative opacity, the narrators learn to shift from a ‘positive’ to a ‘negative’ mode, to undermine their own authoritativeness by being reticent and unreliable, and to transfer some of their prerogatives to a variety of reflectors. In MP and E, the reflectors’ voices become virtually indistinguishable from the narrators’. It is interesting to note, however, that Austen’s use of narrative devices is not unfailingly progressive. In certain cases, she reverts to the narrative habits displayed two or three novels before: in P, for instance (and to a certain extent in the unfinished S), the effect of evaluative opacity is mostly abandoned in favour of open, explicit narratorial control, as if after the complexities of MP and E the author needed a breath of fresh air, a plunge into the clearer waters of the Steventon novels. Northanger Abbey In NA, many of the narrative techniques which will be adopted in later novels are already in use, though they are employed in a light, playful context, and with a As Park Honan writes: ‘The English novel with few exceptions was degenerate in the 1790s, because there was no coherent and deeply based theory of fiction to inspire new artistic developments of the genre or to defend it against its moralistic attackers. Jane Austen joined the debate over the moral value of novels not by theorizing, but by showing that what a novel imitates is far less important than its technical “forms of expression”’ (Honan 1987: 144).

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certain degree of youthful inconsistency. From the evaluative point of view, NA displays a very simple structure: the narrator, who is in charge through most of the novel, uses the pseudo-gothic story of Catherine Morland as a parodic foil for the absurdities of gothic fiction (as seen in Chapter 1, this evaluative net can only be identified on the intertextual plane). The parodic inception of the novel is declared at the beginning and resumed in the ‘result’ and ‘coda’ (having a man falling in love with her out of gratitude ‘is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity’; NA 240). Characters and actions are unambiguously identified as good or bad, intelligent or stupid; feelings and motives are usually explained; and while Catherine may be left to her own devices (she has to make evaluative mistakes, and will learn to discriminate before the end), the reader certainly is not: It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen ... Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner. (NA 10) [Catherine’s brother], being of a very amiable disposition, and sincerely attached to her ... (NA 29) Thorpe never finished the simile, for it could hardly have been a proper one. (NA 73)

On the good-bad axis, and on the moral plane, two sets of characters are identified at a very early stage: the Morlands, Henry and Miss Tilney are good and respectable, while General Tilney is bad and the Thorpes are bad and disreputable. The narrator does not immediately identify Isabella Thorpe as the scheming, insidious figure she is, because the reader is to follow Catherine in her misreadings; but Miss Thorpe’s real motives are transparent, not least because her protestations are ironically set against her actions. In this form of ‘factual irony’, the evaluative force always conveyed by irony springs from ‘a marked disparity between what is said and the situation’ (Black 2006: 110). The narrator apparently remains silent, yet the reader’s judgment is implicitly directed: Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning; and therefore, to shew the independence of Miss Thorpe, and her resolution of humbling the sex, they set off immediately as fast as they could walk, in pursuit of the two young men. (NA 28)

In NA, Austen’s celebrated ‘irony’ is mostly present in its traditional rhetorical meaning of ‘semantic reversal’. Even when the narrator does not speak his/her mind openly, his/her evaluative position remains apparent: when Thorpe clumsily courts Catherine, for instance, the narrator comments that he ‘continued the same kind of delicate flattery, in spite of her entreating him to have done’ (NA 69).

The Development of Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques

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Sometimes this kind of irony is signaled by hyperbole, as when James Morland’s letter arrives containing the news that his engagement with Isabella Thorpe received his father’s stamp of approval: Mrs. Thorpe, with tears of joy, embraced her daughter, her son, her visitor, and could have embraced half the inhabitants of Bath with satisfaction. Her heart was overflowing with tenderness. It was ‘dear John,’ and ‘dear Catherine’ at every word;—‘dear Anne and dear Maria’ must immediately be made sharers in their felicity; and two ‘dears’ at once before the name of Isabella were not more than that beloved child had now well earned. John himself was no skulker in joy. He not only bestowed on Mr. Morland the high commendation of being one of the finest fellows in the world, but swore off many sentences in his praise. (NA 89)

Apart from a few inconsistent remarks in the ‘negative’ mode (‘whether [Catherine] thought of [Henry] so much ... as to dream of him ... cannot be ascertained; but I hope it was no more than in a slight slumber ...’; NA 17–18), the narrator always functions in the ‘positive’ mode: he/she knows everything about the characters’ thoughts and feelings, as well as about past and future events. While Catherine’s gothic and personal evaluations are disproved by facts and corrected by the narrator (‘Catherine listened with astonishment; she knew not how to reconcile two such different accounts of the same thing; for she had not been brought up to understand the propensities of a rattle, nor to know to how many idle assertions and impudent falsehoods the excess of vanity will lead’; NA 46), the narrator’s judgments are never refuted. When the narrator says ‘I’, or evokes ‘my heroine’, and when he/she plays his/her intertextual games with his/her readers, one may well regard him/her as a character, but one cannot help thinking him/her a very assured one. Whether he/she chooses to provide his/her interpretation at any stage of the narrative, or not, that interpretation is never presented as less than authoritative: the narrator, in NA, is the immovable primum mobile of evaluation. The mock-gothic atmosphere of the novel, however, occasions the adoption of a technique which will be put to a different use in S&S. When Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, her literary tastes combine with the atmosphere of the place to inspire her with gothic excitement and fear. Her false ‘romantic’ interpretations of reality are of course exposed for what they are: but in order to make them at least initially plausible, the narrator has to switch from the ‘narratorial’ to the ‘reflector’ mode. Through Chapters V–IX of Volume II, the story is told with Catherine as a reflector: readers are constantly reminded that they are viewing the action from NA contains one of the two examples of ‘prolepsis’ to be found in Austen’s fiction: ‘From the latter circumstance it may be presumed that, whatever might be our heroine’s opinion of [General Tilney], his admiration of her was not of a very dangerous kind; not likely to produce animosities between the brothers, nor persecutions to the lady. He cannot be the instigator of the three villains in horsemen’s great coats, by whom she will hereafter be forced into a traveling-chaise and four, which will drive off with incredible speed’ (NA 95). The anticipation is given as typical of the gothic genre, though its gothic implications will of course be cancelled or qualified.


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her mental perspective (‘Miss Tilney’s manners and Henry’s smile soon did away some of her unpleasant feelings’, ‘she doubted’, ‘she felt utterly unworthy’, ‘He listened to his father in silence, and attempted not any defence, which confirmed her in feeling’; NA 112–13), while the narrator occasionally peeps out to remind them that he/she has not completely relinquished his/her control over the narrative (‘Thus wisely fortifying her mind’; ‘The General was flattered by her looks of surprize’; NA 122, 130). In order to make the gothic sub-plot convincing, Catherine must function, at least on the grammatical plane, as a mimetic reflector – free indirect thought linking her discourse and point of view with the narrator’s. At the end of these four Chapters in reflector mode, the narrator informs us that ‘The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened’ (NA 146): and with Catherine’s awakening, it is the narrator who regains control over the story. In the case of NA, though, even when narrator and reflector are conflated from the linguistic point of view, a logical interpretation, supported by the narrator’s initial and pervasive ‘strong evaluations’ of the conventions of gothic, is that the narrator never endorses his/her reflector’s suppositions, that he/she is fixing a sardonic gaze on her. It is a kind of ‘irony’ which is used consistently in Austen’s oeuvre, though never as unambiguously as in NA – the irony stemming from a discrepancy between the views of character and narrator (Black 2006: 110): But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent compliment, could win Catherine from thinking, that some very different object must occasion so serious a delay of proper repose. To be kept up for hours, after the family were in bed, by stupid pamphlets, was not very likely. There must be some deeper cause: something was to be done which could be done only while the household slept; and the probability that Mrs. Tilney yet lived, shut up for causes unknown, and receiving from the pitiless hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food, was the conclusion which necessarily followed. Shocking as was the idea, it was at least better than a death unfairly hastened, as, in the natural course of things, she must ere long be released. The suddenness of her reputed illness; the absence of her daughter, and probably of her other children, at the time—all favoured the supposition of her imprisonment.—Its origin—jealousy perhaps, or wanton cruelty—was yet to be unravelled. (NA 138)

The shift from one mode of narration to another is more abruptly and arbitrarily managed here than elsewhere. Nick de Marco has registered dissatisfaction with the capricious mutability of narratorial reticence in NA, which ends up destabilizing the narrator-reader relationship: ‘The reader cannot passively accept everything the narrator says, firstly because the reader shares a different point of view from that of the narrator. Thus, the struggle, or dialectic commences when the narrator tries to convince the reader of the “reality” of a certain situation. But after engaging in this type of struggle, at some other point in the narrative, the narrator negates the very existence of the reader. The plot suddenly turns upon itself and this centripetal thrust excludes the reader from any subsequent involvement. This exclusion may last a few pages or entire chapters only to be reopened again, quite arbitrarily, by a cool, ironic remark to the effect that the narrator hasn’t really forgotten the reader after all’ (de Marco 1994: 75).


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Sense and Sensibility In S&S, the reflector technique is used more consistently and more eclectically. Nevertheless, for vast stretches of the novel the narratorial voice is as ‘positive’, as omniscient, and as strongly evaluative as its counterpart in NA: as seen in Chapter 1, the orientation is conducted by the narrator, who informs us about the moral qualities and financial situation of the two branches of the Dashwood family (S&S 1–5). The opening also introduces the ‘main topic’ of the novel, the theme of ‘sensibility’, and reflects the narrator’s evaluative position on Marianne’s ‘excesses’ (she is ‘sensible and clever; but eager in every thing; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation ... she was everything but prudent’; S&S 4–5). This evaluative net is woven into completion in the ‘coda’, after Marianne’s capitulation to sense, when the narrator points a ‘female Quixotic’ moral that was already implicit in the beginning: Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims. She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another!—and that other, a man who had suffered no less than herself under the event of a former attachment, whom, two years before, she had considered too old to be married,—and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat! (S&S 333)

Sensibility, therefore, is openly condemned or laughed at by the narrator – but the narrator is not the only evaluative source in S&S. Sometimes the narratorial voice disappears behind the brains and voices of the characters, while on other occasions it abstains from giving full information or drawing conclusions. One example of reticence is provided by the introduction of Willoughby into the plot: the halfhearted villain which captivates Marianne’s sensitive heart is not openly evaluated by the narrator, so that there remains an uncertainty as to whether he is the villain or the hero – until his actions prove him bad. When Marianne first meets him in According to Beatrice Battaglia, no accurate reading of S&S is possible which does not discriminate between the narrator and the author (Battaglia 1983: 47–88). On the intertextual plane, Willoughby is initially presented as a hero, because, as Margaret Anne Doody reminds us in her introduction to S&S, his description ‘reflects the first appearance of the hero in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (S&S xxvii). Beatrice Battaglia has recently pointed out that a critical awareness of this intertextual level is perhaps less widespread than could be expected or desirable: ‘Occasionally, one also finds that the most recent editor of Sense and Sensibility, M.A. Doody, is praised for her remarkable insight in observing that the first apparition of Willoughby reflects the scene in which the hero of The Mysteries of Udolpho appears for the first time. This seems to be very naive praise, and its naïveté is all the more significant, for it implies little awareness of the fact that Willoughby is first of all a stereotype in contemporary popular fiction, no less than the two heroines. Without recognizing this fact, we cannot properly measure the extent and quality of Jane Austen’s operation of rewriting’ (Battaglia 2002: 41).

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her distress, he is merely defined as a ‘gentleman’; and when he carries the injured young lady inside the house, he is seen through the reflecting eyes of Elinor and her mother: Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at their entrance, and while the eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration which equally sprung from his appearance, he apologized for his intrusion by relating its cause, in a manner so frank and so graceful, that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression. Had he been even old, ugly, and vulgar, the gratitude and kindness of Mrs. Dashwood would have been secured by any act of attention to her child; but the influence of youth, beauty, and elegance, gave an interest to the action which came home to her feelings. (S&S 36)

In what follows, before Willoughby’s real nature and intentions are disclosed, readers will generally have to rely on Elinor’s impressions to confirm or dispel their own uneasiness at his excessive sensibility, extreme imprudence, and inconstant behaviour. Another form of evaluative reticence is less narratological than pragmatic. In S&S, a strategy is inaugurated which will be perfected in the Chawton novels: the narrator appears to comment on a stretch of dialogue, but he/she does so in a somewhat un-cooperative manner (Grice 1967/1991). The narrator breaches, or exploits, the maxim of relation (‘be relevant’), or one of the twin maxims of quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’ and ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’): readers are thus left to work out the implicatures for themselves. Here [Lucy] took out her handkerchief; but Elinor did not feel very compassionate. (S&S 115) Elinor could only smile. (S&S 197)

In the first passage, the narrator does not explain why Elinor should feel compassionate when Lucy takes out her handkerchief, nor why Elinor does not feel as she perhaps should: the first, obvious, implicature, is that Lucy is crying; while the second logical gap triggers more than just one implicature. This narratorial comment interrupts a conversational battle fought by Lucy and Elinor for Edward Ferrars (Lucy is engaged with him, and knows, but pretends she does not, that there is a strong attachment between her fiancé and Elinor): Elinor cannot feel very compassionate about her rival’s sufferings – but additional implicatures suggest that Lucy may be feigning her sorrow, that Elinor thinks or knows that she is a fake, or that the narrator is telling us that she is a fake. The second excerpt is taken from a conversation between Elinor and his half-brother, John Dashwood: the latter has been speaking at some length of his financial difficulties, and Elinor has been answering him in as condescending a tone as she can muster. Given the financial difficulties she has been plunged into by his lack of generosity, the obvious implicature is that he is being either very disingenuous or very stupid.


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Unlike NA, in which the narrator’s evaluating eye is felt even when it is not overtly presiding over the proceedings, S&S is conducted by a fluctuating narrator who alternates between control and withdrawal – and the main form of narratorial withdrawal is conflation with a character’s voice. Whereas in Austen’s mockgothic experiment the reflector mode had been used for the purposes of a partial and momentary suspension of disbelief, in S&S the technique is more pervasive and organic to the description of a social reality. The main reflector is of course Elinor/sense: from a very early stage, we see things from her point of view (‘Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility’; S&S 5). That point of view remains central throughout, though a deeper plunge into Elinor’s consciousness takes place when serious trouble with Edward Ferrars looms ahead (Volume I, Chapter XIX). Whereas in NA there had been a clear evaluative detachment between Catherine and the narrator, here Elinor’s voice and the narrator’s are sometimes indistinguishable: Edward remained a week at the cottage; he was earnestly pressed by Mrs. Dashwood to stay longer; but as if he were bent only on self-mortification, he seemed resolved to be gone when his enjoyment among his friends was at the height. His spirits, during the last two or three days, were greatly improved—he grew more and more partial to the house and the environs—never spoke of going away without a sigh—declared his time to be wholly disengaged—even doubted to what place he should go when he left them—but still, go he must. Never had any week passed so quickly—he could hardly believe it to be gone. He said so repeatedly; other things he said too, which marked the turn of his feelings and gave the lie to his actions. He had no pleasure at Norland; he detested being in town; but either to Norland or to London, he must go. He valued their kindness beyond any thing, and his greatest happiness was in being with them. Yet he must leave them at the end of the week, in spite of their wishes and his own, and without any restraint on his time. Elinor placed all that was astonishing in this way of acting to his mother’s account; (S&S 86–7)

The narratorial mode is ‘negative’: the narrator remains outside Edward Ferrars, makes conjectures about his motives and real feelings (‘as if he were bent only on self-mortification’; ‘he seemed resolved’); if he/she told us that Edward is engaged with Lucy Steele, our reading would change completely. In the negative mode, there is no telling whether this description is made from a narratorial position or through a reflector: by now, readers are accustomed to Elinor being at least the deictic centre of the action, and it is tempting to transform ‘them’ into ‘us’, and to read all the passage as a long stretch of free indirect thought (containing Edward’s discourse in the form of free indirect speech). It is interesting to note that S&S contains two ‘sub-fictions’, two stories told by Colonel Brandon (178–84) and Willoughby (278–90). In these cases, it is the tellers who are evaluated through their stories (cf. Cortazzi and Jin 2000: 114–16); and it is Elinor who functions as hearer and evaluator.


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In this novel, Jane Austen starts perfecting the reflector technique she had learned to use in NA. Another striking development is that the angle of vision is occasionally shifted from Elinor to other characters, including Marianne, Mrs Dashwood, the Dashwood family at large, and even Willoughby: Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard [Marianne] without being in raptures. He paid her only the compliment of attention; and she felt a respect for him, which the others had reasonably forfeited by their shameless want of taste. His pleasure in music, though it amounted not to that ecstatic delight which alone could sympathize with her own, was estimable when contrasted against the horrible insensibility of the others; (S&S 30) Marianne’s preserver, as Margaret, with more elegance than precision, stiled Willoughby, called at the cottage early the next morning to make his personal inquiries ... every thing that passed during the visit, tended to assure him of the sense, elegance, mutual affection, and domestic comfort of the family to whom accident had now introduced him. Of their personal charms he had not required a second interview to be convinced. Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when in the common cant of praise she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less violently outraged than usually happens. (S&S 39)

It is perhaps also due to these stretches of reflector narrative, as well as to Jane Austen’s powers of characterization, that Marianne/sensibility and the rakish Willoughby are perceived by many readers to be at least as attractive as Elinor or Colonel Brandon. By sharing his/her evaluative privileges with these characters (who is it that thinks that the other listeners have ‘reasonably forfeited’ Marianne’s musical respect ‘by their shameless want of taste’, or that Marianne’s face is ‘so lovely, that when in the common cant of praise she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less violently outraged than usually happens’?), the narrator confers on them some of his/her authoritativeness; and no character can be thoroughly unsympathetic who possesses some of the qualities of a narrator. Pride and Prejudice Though the same set of narrative techniques is used in P&P as in S&S, these techniques are mixed in a different blend to tell the story of how three of the five Bennet sisters came to be married (two of them, though comparatively poor, with comparatively rich husbands). The caesura is evident from the very first chapter. The narrator provides a very brief, humorous introduction in the form of a general statement in the present tense (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’; P&P 1), followed by a dramatic ‘set-piece’ featuring Mr and Mrs Bennet, interrupted only by very brief narratorial ‘stage-directions’ and comments (‘Mr. Bennet made no answer’;


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‘This was invitation enough’; P&P 1). Only at the end of this lively conversational exchange, the narrator introduces their warring personalities (‘Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice ... She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper’; P&P 3): these evaluative comments, however, are offered when readers may already have formed an opinion of the couple through dialogue. Throughout the novel, characters’ discourses are given precedence, at least from the point of view of structural organization, over narratorial comments. The predominance is spatial as well as temporal: dialogue takes up the greatest part of P&P, with a ratio paralleled only in E. In these two novels (and possibly in the unfinished TW), the dramatic quality of Austen’s narrative art becomes transparent. The narrator provides the usual elements of ‘orientation’, but these elements are often prefaced by conversational exchanges which speak for themselves. A typical example is the introduction of Mr Collins, who is perhaps the most complete fool in Austen’s fiction (cf. Chapters 4 and 5). The following narratorial judgments only come after a couple of Chapters in which Collins has been introduced, and evaluated, through a letter of his (P&P 47), in Mr Bennet’s words (P&P 48), and by his own contributions to a conversational exchange (P&P 49–52): Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society; the greatest part of his life having been spent under the guidance of an illiterate and miserly father; and though he belonged to one of the universities, he had merely kept the necessary terms, without forming at it any useful acquaintance . Having now a good house and very sufficient income, he intended to marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had a wife in view, as he meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report. (P&P 52–3)

The fact that dialogue takes precedence over narratorial discourse, however, does not entail that the narrator has no hold over the story and its evaluative net. Firstly, even though ‘presentation’ often prefaces ‘description’, the latter is never absent (the Bingley sisters are ‘proud and conceited’; Lady Lucas is ‘a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet’; P&P 10, 12). And as always happens in Austen’s novels, the ‘result’ and the ‘coda’ are conducted by the narrator in the first person. When the final marriage proposal takes place, narrative reports of speech and thought acts are substituted for dialogue; and when all is said and done, the ‘author’ comes out to bid farewell to characters and readers: Elizabeth feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to Austen’s knowledge of and borrowings from the theatre of her time have only recently been studied in any significant detail (cf. Byrne 2002, Gay 2002).

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. (P&P 280) Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley and talked of Mrs. Darcy may be guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children, produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly. (P&P 295)

Secondly, the narrator reserves the right for him/herself to move at his/her pleasure in and out of his/her characters’ minds and lives, and therefore to inform the reader or keep him/her in the dark: Mr Collins’s motives, as seen above, are soon betrayed; Mr Bennet ‘had rather hoped that all his wife’s views on the stranger would be disappointed’ (P&P 8). As in S&S, crucial information is withheld for the sake of the ‘interest principle’: readers may expect, but are not explicitly prepared for, Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth; they do not know at first that Darcy has a part in marrying Wickham and Lydia; and there remains an unsolved mystery as to how Lady Catherine comes to know that her nephew is in matrimonial danger (Sutherland 1999: 17–22). A great deal of ‘interest’ (or, suspense) is created by using the ‘central intelligence’ (James 1953: 299–300) of Elizabeth as a mimetic reflector at crucial moments, thereby limiting the reader’s perspective to hers. The reader, however, can be better than she is at unravelling the mystery of Darcy’s behaviour (as well as at unravelling narratorial discourse from free indirect thought): More than once did Elizabeth in her ramble within the Park, unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy.—She felt all the perverseness of the mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought; and to prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him at first, that it was a favourite haunt of hers.—How it could occur a second time therefore was very odd!—Yet it did, and even a third. It seemed like wilful ill-nature, or a voluntary penance, for on these occasions it was not merely a few formal enquiries and an awkward pause and then away, but he actually thought it necessary to turn back and walk with her. (P&P 140)

Elizabeth becomes the narrator’s reflector from a very early stage, though sometimes we are reminded that our vision is not invariably confined to hers (when questioned by Lady Catherine, ‘Elizabeth felt all the impertinence of her questions, but answered them very composedly’; P&P 126 – the focus is outside as well as inside Elizabeth). However, the narrator’s mirror is not always pointed towards the heroine. As in S&S, Austen continues to experiment with the reflector technique, widening its application to include other characters; and if in the previous novel


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the Dashwood women, and even Willoughby, had briefly functioned as reflectors, in P&P the technique assumes even more democratic, if ironical, features: Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasing countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend. Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal people in the room; he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance, was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! (P&P 6–7)

Here, the central intelligence is a collective one – the narrator ventriloquizing the words and thoughts of the whole party assembled for the ball. As usual, the ‘negative’ narrative technique – dealing only with appearances and not with essences (‘good looking’, ‘gentlemanlike’, ‘countenance’, ‘manners’, ‘fine women, with an air of decided fashion’) – makes for a conflation of the narrator’s and the characters’ perspectives. After an ambiguous beginning, the point of view is located within this collective intelligence by the insistence on mental processes (‘he was looked at’, ‘till his manners gave a disgust’, ‘he was discovered to be proud’), with the whole party, or sections of it (‘The gentlemen’, ‘the ladies’), functioning as senser. The pattern of transitivity, however, with the collective ‘actor’ usually kept distinct from the grammatical ‘subject’ by passivization, underlines the distance between the narrator’s voice and this particular reflector, as does the emphatic, ‘conversational’ exclamation mark in ‘What a contrast between him and his friend!’. Another marker of detachment is the epistemic ambiguity in the use of the modal verb ‘must’ in ‘Such amiable qualities must speak for themselves’, signalling that there may be a difference between the narrator’s and general opinion – or at least that the general opinion is not simplistically endorsed by the narrator. In the moral framework of such novels as S&S and MP, there is a fundamental ambiguity whose origin is probably aesthetic: the virtuous characters (Elinor, Edward Ferrars, Edmund, Fanny) are less attractive than the less virtuous ones (Marianne, Willoughby, the Crawfords), and the narrator’s wavering non-committal attitude leaves free room for opposing interpretations which uphold or subvert the social order. In P&P, no such aesthetic ambiguities exist: the good are not necessarily boring (Elizabeth certainly is not), the potential villains are discovered


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to be good at heart (Darcy), and even the ominously-named Wickham turns out to be ridiculous rather than truly evil. Readers are in no doubt as to who is good and who is bad, or who is better and who is worse, and can rejoice in the final (mild) distribution of punishments and rewards. Nonetheless, an ineradicable source of evaluative ambiguity remains, rooted as it is in the narrator’s refusal to commit him/herself to a definitive position (or, to one single definitive position) and to endorse the views of a character or a group of characters. ‘Irony’, intended as the distance between character and narrator, fact and fiction, saying and meaning, is the rule even in the light, sparkling, uncomplicated world of Elizabeth Bennet. The Watsons In TW, Jane Austen insists on the same fortunate narrative vein of P&P, though the tone is much more sombre. As in the previous novel, dialogue mostly takes precedence over the narrator’s discourse, though the narrator does not renounce his/her evaluative role. At the start, we are only told by the narrator that ‘The Edward’s were people of fortune who lived in the Town and kept their coach’, while ‘The Watsons inhabited a village about three miles distant, were poor and had no close carriage’ (TW 253) – no moral or psychological description is offered. The ‘inexperienced’ Emma Watson, who becomes the narrator’s reflector from a very early stage, is immediately introduced and presented by means of dialogue rather than narration. And it is in the uncharacteristically frank (and bitter) opening conversation that the situation of the Watson women, and the absolute necessity of marriage as a financial remedy to their poverty, are discussed at some length between Emma and her eldest sister (cf. Chapter 5). Emma has just come back to her family after living for a number of years with a widowed aunt (who has unwisely married again). She is at the same time an integral part of the Watson household and a stranger, and this is why she can function as a reflector from the very beginning (Austen’s narrators employ the reflector mode more thoroughly and consistently when their reflectors are in an ‘estranged’ situation, e.g. in a gothic Abbey or away from home). As in NA, S&S and P&P, the narrator sometimes ‘positively’ peeps from behind or above her heroine to judge her or to reveal what she ‘really’ thinks or feels. However, it is interesting to note that the narrator’s hand is much less firm here than it is in P&P, or even S&S – some uncertainties rather reminding the reader of the ‘experimental’ fluctuations of NA: ‘Your Club would be better fitted for an Invalid,’ said Mrs. E., ‘if you did not keep it up so late’.—This was an old grievance. (TW 261) To say that Emma was not flattered by Lord Osborne’s visit, would be to assert a very unlikely thing, and to describe a very odd young lady; (TW 279) She was now so ‘delighted to see dear, dear Emma’ that she could hardly speak a word in a minute. (TW 280)


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Emma’s curtsey in reply must have struck him as very unlike the encouraging warmth he had been used to receive from her Sisters, and gave him probably the novel sensation of doubting his own influence, and of wishing for more attention than she bestowed. (TW 269) As Tom Musgrave was seen no more, we may suppose his plan to have succeeded. (TW 270) Of the pain of such feelings, Elizabeth knew very little;—her simpler Mind, or juster reason saved her from such mortification— (TW 277)

In the first three quotations, the narrator is functioning in the ‘positive’ mode: he/she knows everything about the past (‘This was an old grievance’) and the characters’ feelings (Emma is flattered, and Margaret is not particularly happy to see Emma). In the other passages, the fact that certain events or feelings are conjectured at rather than exposed alerts us to the presence of a ‘negative’ narrator. Whereas this kind of narratorial inconsistency is a constant in all of Austen’s oeuvre, here it seems less a matter of technique than of confusion. And while it is as likely that Austen would have adjusted her aim as the novel went on, this confusion (together with the bitterness permeating many conversational interactions) might be one of the reasons why TW was never completed. Mansfield Park E is usually held to be the greatest narrative (and evaluative) mystery among Austen’s novels: but MP is, in more than one sense, an even deeper, or at least more complex, mystery. In E, much of the evaluative fuzziness is due to the angle of vision, almost invariably centred on Emma herself: in MP, no such single perspective is provided, and we have to make sense of a multiplicity of perspectives. As readers, we are encouraged to invest certain privileged voices (the narrator’s, the reflector’s) with an extra degree of authoritativeness: but if we read deeper into the novel’s structure, we have to admit that authoritativeness does not always coincide with credibility. Apparently, the narrator assumes a strongly evaluative position, at least at certain strategic stages (‘orientation’, ‘result’, and ‘coda’). At the beginning, he/she assumes him/herself as a ‘deictic centre’ for the action, as he/she informs us that the marriage between Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon and Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park took place ‘About thirty years ago’ (MP 3). Judging from this personal beginning, one could be inclined to guess that the narrator will Mary Lascelles wrote as early as 1937 that ‘In Mansfield Park Jane Austen’s style develops a new faculty, out of one perceptible in all her novels – a faculty I can only describe as chameleon-like ... [The] habits of expression of the characters impress themselves on the narrative style of the episodes in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations’ (Lascelles 1937: 76–7).

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be more present than ever in the story and in its evaluative net. The very first Chapter, however, discounts this possibility by providing an ‘orientation’ which, though very informative on the financial and social planes, is very poor in moral and psychological details (cf. Chapter 3). We have to wait until the coda if we want to hear the narrator’s definitive opinion about the characters and the deeds and misdeeds they have performed: Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, and to have done with all the rest. (MP 362)

Between the initial ‘deictic’ self-betrayal and the coda, the narrator is very aloof and reticent, though here and there his/her voice makes itself heard. In part, the narrator recedes into the background by identifying with a reflector – and one providing a particularly limited angle of vision at that. Poorer than Elinor Dashwood and shyer than Anne Elliot, Fanny Price is the most complete outsider in the whole set of Austen’s heroines: having been intimidated from a very early age by her uncle Bertram’s dignified manners and her aunt Norris’s humiliating demeanour, she scarcely allows herself any comments, even in her thoughts. Readers are therefore presented with a ‘negative’ account of events that they have to interpret for themselves: Fanny could not wonder that Edmund was at the parsonage every morning; she would gladly have been there too, might she have gone in uninvited and unnoticed to hear the harp; neither could she wonder, that when the evening stroll was over, and the two families parted again, he should think it right to attend Mrs. Grant and her sister to come home, while Mr. Crawford was devoted to the ladies of the park; but she thought it a very bad exchange, and if Edmund were not there to mix the wine and water for her, would rather go without it than not. She was a little surprised that he could spend so many hours with Miss Crawford, and not see more of the sort of fault which he had already observed, and of which she was almost always reminded by a something of the same nature whenever she was in her company; but so it was. (MP 52)

This passage marks the beginning of the reflector narrative, and it already contains two unspoken psychological facts which Fanny vaguely grasps but cannot or does not want to make explicit – i.e., that Fanny is in love with Edmund, and that Edmund is in love with Mary Crawford. These two very important facts are not openly commented on until a much later stage, and Fanny never admits that she is in love with Edmund until Mary Crawford is defeated and her cousin’s affection secured. A similar limitation, factual rather than psychological, is imposed upon the reader when the calamitous event takes place which makes Edmund and Mary’s marriage impossible: the reader only learns about Henry Crawford’s elopement with Maria Bertram when Fanny is informed about it. As in the previous novel, the use of a reflector is not the only strategy employed by the narrator to hide him/herself. Even when a narratorial voice is


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clearly presiding, the opinions it expresses are generally rather guarded. The only characters who elicit open evaluations are Mrs Norris and the Bertram sisters: Such were the counsels by which Mrs. Norris assisted to form her nieces’ minds; and it is not very wonderful that with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility. In every thing but disposition, they were admirably taught. (MP 16)

Mrs Norris, Julia and Maria are the only characters who never receive a kind word from the narrator. The others are either presented without evaluation or evaluated in mixed tones. Mrs Rushworth is said to be ‘well-meaning, civil, prosing, pompous’ (MP 60) – a mixture of good and bad qualities which gives us an idea of her personality but not of her position on the ethical axis (psychologically ‘mixed’ characters abound in the Chawton novels; cf. Chapters 4 and 5). Even Henry and Mary Crawford, the fascinating outsiders who break into the peaceful but flawed paradise of Mansfield Park, bringing the values of a new fashionable world to bear on the old values of the landed gentry, are initially described as ‘young people of fortune. The son had a good estate in Norfolk, the daughter twenty thousand pounds’ (MP 32). Apart from these financial details, the narrator only tells us that Mary’s object is marriage, ‘provided she could marry well’ (MP 33); and many pages have to be turned before he/she openly comments on Henry’s moral character: ... a fortnight of sufficient leisure in the intervals of shooting and sleeping, [as ought] to have convinced the gentleman that he ought to keep longer away, had he been more in the habit of examining his own motives, and of reflecting to what the indulgence of his idle vanity was tending; but, thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example, he would not look beyond the present moment. (MP 91)

The narrator is similarly reticent when he/she describes events and in the comments he/she intersperses the dialogue with. Readers are usually given all the necessary details for evaluation, but little or no evaluative work is done by the narrator in advance. A very good example is the multiple interaction at the heart of Volume I, Chapter IX, featuring Fanny Price, Edmund, Maria and Julia Bertram, the Crawfords, and Mr Rushworth, and taking place in the Rushworths’ family chapel. We understand, but are not told, that Edmund is in love with Mary Crawford, and that Fanny is secretly jealous; that Julia and Maria Bertram are battling for Henry Crawford’s attention, even if Maria is going to be married to Mr Rushworth. When Mary speaks disrespectfully of the Church of England, the narrator tells us that ‘For a few moments she was unanswered. Fanny coloured and looked at Edmund, but felt too angry for speech; and he needed a little recollection before he could say ...’. Immediately afterwards, Julia directs Henry’s attention towards her sister and Mr Rushworth, who look ‘exactly as if the ceremony were going to be performed’: Henry accepts the invitation to have fun at Maria’s expense, then


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resumes courting her. Julia, however, is not to be defeated, and drops another hint about her sister’s imminent marriage by complaining that Edmund is not yet ordained (‘How unlucky that you are not ordained, Mr. Rushworth and Maria are quite ready’). Miss Bertram looks ‘aghast’ at the news that Edmund is to be a clergyman. When they finally get out of the chapel, there are few happy faces around: The chapel was soon afterwards left to the silence and stillness which reigned in it with few interruptions throughout the year. Miss Bertram, displeased with her sister, led the way, and all seemed to feel that they had been there long enough. (MP 69–70)

In the whole passage, the narrator’s comments can be construed as breaching the maxim of quantity. Though each character’s thoughts, feelings and motives can be guessed at, they are not explicitly stated or explained. Is the pious Fanny merely indignant, or is there a measure of jealousy in her anger? Is Mary Crawford ‘aghast’ at her own gaffe, or at the novel idea of Edmund becoming a clergyman? Why should Julia’s comments so displease Maria? Another factor of evaluative dilution in MP is, as already in S&S and, on a minor scale, in P&P, the multiplication of reflectors, the dissemination of point of view. Here the technique is brought to new heights of complexity and flexibility. The focus is generally on Fanny, but it occasionally shifts on Edmund, Mary Crawford, Sir Thomas, Mrs Norris, the Bertram sisters, and even the very marginal Yates: ... there was a something in Sir Thomas, when they sat round the same table, which made Mr. Yates think it wiser to let him pursue his own way, and feel the folly of it without opposition. He had known many disagreeable fathers before, and often been struck with the inconveniences they occasioned, but never in the whole course of his life, had he seen one of that class, so unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical as Sir Thomas. He was not a man to be endured but for his children’s sake, and he might be thankful to his fair daughter Julia that Mr. Yates did yet mean to stay a few days longer under his roof. (MP 150)

By now, Austen can use the reflector technique with such ease that she can move the mirror at her will from one character to another. Her mastery is at its most evident in the collective scene of Volume II, Chapter VII. A double game of cards is played which involves all the main characters and allows for a number of deft shifts:10

Julia Prewitt Brown has written that ‘Mansfield Park is without a “narrator” as we have understood the term – in the narrator’s place is a collective consciousness, the combination of all the intelligences that collect around an event, an “ethos” that is the effect of the event on the group’ (Brown 1979: 81). 10 A recent development in (cognitive) stylistics, ‘deictic shift theory’ (cf. Stockwell 2002: 78–9), provides very rewarding analytical methods for such eclectic passages.


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Fanny’s eyes were turned on Crawford for a moment with an expression more than grave, even reproachful; ... As yet Sir Thomas had seen nothing to remark in Mr. Crawford’s behaviour. All the agreeable of [Mary’s] speculation was over for that hour. It was time to have done with cards if sermons prevailed, and she was glad to find it necessary to come to a conclusion and to refresh her spirits by a change of place and neighbour. Fanny’s last feeling in the visit was of disappointment. (MP 191–7)

The evaluative pattern of MP is, in a sense, clear and simple enough: the old moral and religious values of the landed gentry are threatened by internal as well as external forces, and these forces are finally defeated by an outsider (Fanny), who becomes the prime upholder of those values. If there is no doubt that the narrator wishes us to see this ‘point’, however, there is also no doubt that this interpretation does not exhaust the novel – other perspectives are given, other ‘points’ are tenable.11 More eclectically than in S&S or P&P, Austen creates a narrator who questions his/her own authority by disseminating it in various ways and among various characters: and in the end, our reading of the novel is not double, but multiple, depending as it does on how much we identify with Fanny, Edmund, Mary, and even with such unattractive characters as the Bertram sisters, Sir Thomas, and Mrs Norris. Emma E has always been considered the most complex of Austen’s novels, the one whose ‘sum of delights’ widens at every reading. It is, in a sense, the most ‘modern’, or ‘modernist’ novel written by Austen, as I have pointed out in a 2002 essay comparing E with Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (Morini 2002). From the narratological/evaluative point of view, however, E is simpler than MP, just as it is surely ‘sunnier’ and ‘more playful’ in tone and setting (Margaret Oliphant wrote in 1870 that ‘in Emma the sun shines, and the playful soft breezes blow, and the heroine herself, with all her talents and quickwittedness ... makes such mistakes as only a clever girl ... could be expected to make’; Southam 1968: 224). In MP, the ‘authoritative’ voice of the narrator speaks (or is silent) in a myriad ways, whereas in E it speaks in Emma’s accents. The ‘point’ of MP is so complicated that there almost seems to be no point to the novel; the ‘point’ of E is only confused by 11 As William H. Galperin has noted, ‘Mansfield Park, more than any other novel of Austen’s, is far from opaque, especially in the Manichaean struggle to which the narrative is continually pegged. The repositories of value in the novel, no matter how odious or inscrutable to modern sensibilities, are just as obvious today as they were to readers such as Walter Scott’. On the other hand, ‘the peculiar difficulty of the novel overall ... continually cries out for some acknowledgment that the author and her narrator are not in fact one and the same’ (Galperin 2003: 171).

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the fact that our perspective is Emma’s, and in the end things are made clearer (but not absolutely clear) when Emma’s psychological mists disperse.12 Much of the evaluative confusion of E is due to Emma’s mistakes, and to the reader’s mistake in following Emma and crediting (to a greater or lesser degree) her interpretations of fictional reality. Emma is identified as the central intelligence of the novel from the very beginning of the action. In the first chapter, Mr Weston is not presented directly, but through the filter of her eyes: The event had every promise of happiness for [Emma’s] friend. Mr. Weston was a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a black morning’s work for her. (E 4)

Emma is almost always present in the rest of the novel – the only substantial exception being Volume I, Chapter V, in which she and her friendship with Harriet Smith are discussed by Mr Knightley and Mrs Weston. The reiteration of mental process clauses constantly reminds the readers that Emma’s eyes, ears, and brains are open (even when duelling with Mr Knightley: ‘Emma knew ... Emma was more than half in hopes ... It was most convenient to Emma ...’; E 52–9). At balls and on all other collective occasions, the camera is always with Emma, and we miss what she is not close enough to see or hear (cf. Volume I, Chapter XV). After a very short while, the narrator’s voice becomes so identified with Emma’s that there is no telling who is saying what. As Wayne Booth pointed out almost half a century ago, Emma is ‘a kind of narrator’ of her own story (Booth 1961: 245); another way of putting it is that she is almost constantly a ‘mimetic’ reflector of the action: The lovers were standing together at one of the windows. It had a most favourable aspect; and, for half a minute, Emma felt the glory of having schemed successfully. But it would not do; he had not come to the point. He had been most agreeable, most delightful; he had told Harriet that he had seen them go by, and had purposely followed them; other little gallantries and allusions had been dropt, but nothing serious. (E 82)

Except when the narrator qualifies Emma’s thoughts as such (‘Emma felt the glory’), these are given in the free indirect form, and are therefore spoken in the narrator’s voice. Grammatically, there is no telling whether Emma or the narrator 12 Recent cognitive accounts of the novels (Butte 2004; Zunshine 2007) have stressed Austen’s complexity of ‘mental embedment’ (Zunshine 2007: 279), the ways in which she describes her characters in the act of interpreting the mental states of others (including others’ responses to their own mental states – the title of Butte’s monograph is I Know That You Know That I Know) in order to shape their own behaviour. In a sense, Emma can be read as a novel about Emma’s ‘Theory of Mind’ (Zunshine 2007: 276–85) – i.e., about the wrongness and eventual correction of her psychological interpretations.


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is telling us that ‘The lovers were standing together at one of the windows’ – apparently a question of minor importance, because the passage seems merely descriptive. There is also, however, a high degree of implicit evaluation in this description, because Mr Elton and Harriet are not officially ‘lovers’, and can be seen as such only by an act of imagination or wishful thinking. It is because Emma and the narrator are so mimetically identified with each other that readers can miss the evaluative content inherent in the use of ‘lovers’: according to the degree of audience perceptiveness, the narrator is having a joke at the reader’s expense, or the narrator and the reader are jointly laughing behind Emma’s back. E is full of these jokes, some of which are rather easy to get (most readers would understand what Mr Elton is about far earlier than Emma does), whereas others are only explained towards the end of the novel, when Emma herself understands them. In a sense, E is structured as a detective novel, with inspector Emma solving all the riddles just before the end: the major mystery of the novel, of course, is Frank Churchill’s engagement with Jane Fairfax; another, less evident but in some ways more elusive, is Mr Knightley’s love for Emma. In both cases, the narrator does not intervene to fill Emma’s interpretive gaps or to correct her mistakes: nevertheless, many hints are dropped throughout the novel that become clear at the end, or at a second reading. In pragmatic terms, we could say that the narrator is so blatantly flouting the maxim of quantity that he/she is almost breaching the maxim of quality: ‘... I do not recommend matrimony at present to Emma, though I mean no slight to the state I assure you.’ Part of [Mrs Weston’s] meaning was to conceal some favourite thoughts of her own and Mr. Weston’s on the subject, as much as possible. There were wishes at Randalls respecting Emma’s destiny, but it was not desirable to have them suspected; (E 36) Certain it was that [Jane Fairfax] was to come; and that Highbury, instead of welcoming that perfect novelty which had been so long promised it—Mr. Frank Churchill—must put up for the present with Jane Fairfax, who could bring only the freshness of a two years absence. (E 148)

In the first example (from Chapter V, the only one outside Emma’s consciousness), the narrator refrains from telling us what Mr and Mrs Weston’s thoughts on Emma’s marriage are; in the second, he/she speaks in Emma’s voice to unite two newly introduced characters for no apparent reason. In both instances, the narrator seems to be having fun at our expense, anticipating events we still know nothing about. That is why it is close to impossible to have a clear understanding of the evaluative pattern of E at a first reading; and why successive readings are so enjoyable to the analytic mind. In passages such as the one quoted above (E 148), we can only identify the narrator’s opinion, or ‘point’, if and when we realize that he/she is playing with information which Emma does not possess: the narrator’s voice, however, is not distinguished from the heroine’s. Throughout E, the narrator rarely peeps out of Emma’s reflecting consciousness, and the cases in which the narrator is above

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Emma, openly judging her, are even more rare. One such case occurs during Mr Elton’s courtship of Emma, when Emma herself thinks that he is courting Harriet Smith: the narrator comments that ‘Emma [is] too eager and busy in her own previous conceptions and views to hear him impartially, or see him with clear vision’ (E 99–100). Generally, however, Emma is not judged or criticized, and her point of view is always presented as authoritative; even when she is forced to acknowledge that Elton has been courting her and not Harriet, she is left to work out the consequences of her realization for herself – the narrator leaving all the evaluative work to the reflector (and there are signs that this evaluative work is not done with the complete ruthlessness a detached narrator would exert): How she could have been so deceived!—He protested that he had never thought seriously of Harriet—never! She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it. His manners, however, must have been unmarked, or she could not have been so misled. (E 121)

Since the narrator’s voice is very rarely heard, Emma’s is for long stretches the only authoritative point of view. The narrator, even when he/she appears to judge and guide the reader’s judgment, does so in a very unobtrusive and cautious way – as already seen in MP. Most characters, when they are not first seen through Emma’s eyes, are presented either neutrally or in a very prudent tone, as mixtures of good and bad qualities (Mr Elton is ‘a young man living alone without liking it’; Mrs Bates ‘enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married’; E 17). In the end, the narrator comes out of hiding only on those very few occasions when he/she speaks sardonically, and in the present tense, of certain parallels between his/her fictional world and Austen’s real one: In this age of literature, such collections [of riddles] on a very grand scale are not uncommon. Miss Nash, head-teacher at Mrs. Goddard’s, had written out at least three hundred; and Harriet, who had taken the first hint of it from her, hoped, with Miss Woodhouse’s help, to get a great many more. (E 63)

Of course, the narrator also comes out at the end of the novel. While he/she is evaluatively reticent in the initial ‘orientation’ and throughout the rest of the action, the ‘result’ and the ‘coda’ find him/her in charge as usual. Emma and Knightley’s amorous exchange is given in summary, and a happy end is offered which is so commonplace as to appear unreal after the narrator’s refutation of ‘complete truth’ as a possibility in life or fiction (E 391): She spoke then, on being so entreated.—What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.—She said enough to show there need not be despair—and to invite him to say more himself. (E 391) But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union. (E 440)


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In E, Penny Gay’s theatrical interpretation of Jane Austen’s endings, and indeed of the whole of Austen’s fiction (Gay 2002: 166–7), becomes even more cogent than elsewhere: for in this novel, Jane Austen has definitively found a way of making the characters act without external interference; and in the epilogue, Austen’s narrator, disguised as ‘Jane Austen’ herself, comes on stage to judge the whole action and celebrate the performance that Jane Austen has so carefully orchestrated. Persuasion P is very distant from E and MP in narratological/evaluative terms. While in MP many authoritative voices are set up beside and against one another, and in E a character’s voice almost completely subsumes the narrator’s, in P the narrator resumes the authority he/she has given up elsewhere and tells his/her own story.13 In this sense, P is closer to S&S and P&P than to the other Chawton novels: but here the tone is cooler and more open, as if the narrator were standing back and enjoying the unfolding of the tale, rather than laughing behind his/her characters’ backs or leaguing with them. The narrator’s dominance is only ‘semantic’ and not ‘quantitative’ (Linell 1990; cf. Chapter 4) – in the sense that though the events are always commented on, and reader response is always guided, most of the novel is occupied by dialogue and reflector narrative. Anne, the heroine-reflector, is very close to the narrator linguistically and ideologically. Sometimes we are deceived with her as to the meaning of a speech or a gesture, as when she does not guess that there are the makings of an engagement in a conversation between Mrs Clay and Anne’s cousin, Mr Elliot: She only roused herself from the broodings of this restless agitation, to let Mrs. Clay know that she had been seen with Mr. Elliot three hours after his being supposed to be out of Bath; for having watched in vain for some intimation of the interview from the lady herself, she determined to mention it; and it seemed to her that there was guilt in Mrs. Clay’s face as she listened. It was transient, cleared away in an instant, but Anne could imagine she read there the consciousness of having, by some complication of mutual trick, or some overbearing authority of his, been obliged to attend (perhaps for half an hour) to his lectures and restrictions on her designs on Sir Walter. (P 183–4) 13 Mirella Billi has written that ‘In Persuasion, more than in other novels by Austen, this narrating personality, which is not dramatized and does not take direct part in the action, controls reader response, by turns identifying itself with the heroine’s subjectivity, or retiring in the objective distance of facts [In Persuasion, più che in altri romanzi della Austen, questa personalità narrante, non drammatizzata, non direttamente partecipe, controlla la risposta del lettore, di volta in volta spingendosi fino a una sorta di identificazione con la soggettività dell’eroina, o ritirandosi nella distanza della oggettività dei fatti]’ (Billi 1994: 115). By virtue of the narrator’s controlling presence, P becomes ‘the great false step of Austen Style’ (Miller 2003: 68) in all those critical accounts which prize impersonality over ideology.

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The narrator, in this case, does not set Anne to rights, and exploits the reflector function to create a small mystery that is soon solved. But Anne’s interpretation of reality is presented as hers and hers alone, and though the style is ‘negative’, there is no grammatical confusion between narrator and reflector (‘and it seemed to her’; ‘Anne could imagine’). No extra authoritativeness is given to Anne’s discourse by turning her into a ‘mimetic’ reflector. The narrator’s control, though often unobtrusive, is exercised throughout the novel. The initial orientation is very clear from the evaluative point of view. All the characters are presented in their moral and psychological traits as well as in their social and financial conditions: ‘Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character’ (P 10); ‘Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable’ (P 10); Mr. Shepherd is ‘a civil, cautious lawyer’ (P 15); Elizabeth is reproved for ‘turning from the society of so deserving a sister [Anne] to bestow her affection on one who ought to have been nothing to her but the object of distant civility [Mrs Clay]’ (P 19). Such is the narrator’s control over the events and the characters that towards the end of Chapter IV, prolepsis is used for the second time in all of Austen’s oeuvre: Anne ‘had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning’ (P 30) – with ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ marking the narrator’s ideological position as regards Anne’s initial refusal of Wentworth and her final recovery and acceptance of his love. In a way, it is as if Austen had realized that the point of her novels is not what happens, but how events are told: if that is true – as six novels all unfolding more or less the same fabula in different ways seem to demonstrate – it is no use trying to postpone the disclosure of the final ‘resolution’. In P, however, narratorial control is by no means confined to the beginning and the end, to the ‘orientation’, the ‘result’ and the ‘coda’. The narrator reserves for him/herself the possibility to move at his/her pleasure among speeches and thoughts, thus correcting characters and readers on more than one occasion. Characters’ thoughts and motives are made explicit and commented on: ‘Sir Walter was not very wise; but still he had experience enough of the world to feel, that a more unobjectionable tenant ... could hardly offer’ (P 26); Captain Wentworth’s purpose is ‘to marry. He was rich, and being turned on shore, fully intended to settle as soon as he could be properly tempted’ (P 54). Even Anne’s feelings are often judged ‘externally’ (‘she truly felt as she said’; P 102, italics mine). When a character’s point of view differs from the narrator’s in a significant manner, the narratorial version is presented as the only true, ‘authorized’ one: The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before. (P 45–6)


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That P is very much the narrator’s story is confirmed by the fact that here as in no other novel, this figure comes out in the open as a character, says ‘we’, if not ‘I’, and often situates the story, spatially, temporally, and psychologically, in connection with him/herself: Captain Wentworth’s first meeting with Anne is dated ‘in the summer of 1806’ (P 26); Anne learns ‘another lesson, in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle’ (P 38–9); the protagonist has a vast knowledge, just as Austen herself, of ‘our best moralists’ (P 85). As the narrator becomes a more recognizable figure, his/her allegiances also become clearer, his/her identity acquires national as well as local and private contours. P is no doubt the one among Austen’s novels which comes closest to providing a historical background, with the Napoleonic wars always looming behind the various references to the navy; and it is significant that this small-scale romantic story should end on a high patriotic note, with the narrator extending his/her evaluative net from text to context: [Anne] gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance. (P 203)

Sanditon S does not appear to be a new beginning in narratological terms, though of course the dimensions of the fragment allow for only a tentative assessment. The beginning resembles P&P or E rather than P, in the sense that the reader’s evaluative work is not openly guided by the narrator. Mr and Mrs Parker are only presented as ‘A Gentleman and Lady’ (S 295), and we have to turn pages upon pages until we know anything more. Soon, however, the main evaluative pattern of the novel – as dictated by the narrator – emerges. The most reprehensible characters in the fragment (Lady Denham, the Parker brothers, Sir Edward) are exposed for what they are (‘The truth was that Sir Edward had read more sentimental novels than agreed with him. Sir Edward’s great object in life was to be seductive’; S 328). The narrator always looms behind and towers above the characters, even in the case of Charlotte Heywood, the heroine/outsider/reflector (‘I make no apologies for my Heroine’s vanity’; S 320). The main topic – the contrast between old and modern times, between the country of the landed gentry and the new promised land of the commercial classes – is mainly presented and evaluated by the narrator, though the reflector obviously shares some of his/her views: ‘And whose very snug-looking Place is this?’—said Charlotte, as in a sheltered Dip within two miles of the Sea, they passed close by a moderate-sized house, well-fenced and planted, and rich in the Garden, Orchard and Meadows which are the best embellishments of such a Dwelling. A branch only, of the Valley, winding more obliquely to the Sea, gave a passage to an inconsiderable Stream, and formed at its mouth, a third Habitable Division, in a small cluster of Fisherman’s Houses.—The village contained little more

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques than Cottages, but the Spirit of the day had been caught, as Mr. P. observed with delight to Charlotte, and two or three of the best of them were smartened up with a white Curtain and ‘Lodgings to let’— (S 309–10)

The narrator’s evaluation is not explicit but easily traceable. All the words connected with the Parkers’ ancestral home have positive connotations (‘sheltered’, ‘moderate’, ‘well-fenced and planted’, ‘rich’, ‘best embellishments’), whereas the new seaside town of Sanditon is presented as a poor, ‘inconsiderable’ thing, containing ‘little more than Cottages’ – the negative construction giving the idea of material paucity. All in all, S seems to mark a return to the narrative technique of NA, with the narrator playing with his/her characters and occasionally having a joke at the heroine’s expense. The usefulness of comparing S with NA – which was not published in Austen’s lifetime – is confirmed by the parallels between the two plots and thematic structures: a very young heroine visits a place where she is a complete outsider, and initially understands but little of what is going on. The presence of Sir Edward points towards the possibility of a sentimental/gothic development in the plot, and certainly allows a quantity of bookish parody on the narrator’s part. Whether she still hoped to be able to publish NA or not, Jane Austen may have seen the possibilities of the old mock-gothic plot in a new context which allowed her to confront a crucial financial and social issue of her day.

Chapter 3

Narrative Opacity in Mansfield Park Evaluation, Style, Choice Evaluation is the ‘slant’ given to a story or a piece of information by the teller or the reporter. It is as pervasive as it is elusive, but when evaluative elements can be isolated, they tell us a lot about the speaker’s, or writer’s, personality and ideology. As Thompson and Hunston write, one of the main uses of evaluation is ‘to express the speaker’s or writer’s opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of that person and their community’ (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 6). In this sense, evaluation can be equated with what stylistics calls ‘(ideological) point of view’, or ‘style’. According to such stylisticians as Leech, Short, and Fowler, analyzing a style means distinguishing between a noumenal ‘world as it is’ and the ‘stylistic slant’ added by the author or narrator – i.e., evaluation. Analyzing Austen’s style, of course – especially in such masterpieces of indirection as MP and E – means engaging with the author in a game of epistemic hide-and-seek in which no stylistic fly can be disentangled with absolute certainty from the web of ‘evaluative opacity’. In their seminal and influential Style in Fiction, first published in 1981, G.N. Leech and M.H. Short drew a distinction between monism and dualism in interpreting style. They were fully conscious of the artificial nature of the distinction, yet they were also convinced it provided critics with two different and useful ways of looking at (different) texts. In a monistic view of style, a literary work is written in the only possible manner in which it could have been written, and if it had been written in a different manner it would be a different text; while in a dualistic view, each work contains a certain matter which could have been set down in another slightly different manner. Artificial as it evidently is, the distinction serves to identify and analyze two different classes of texts. The style of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is sui generis, and can hardly be modified without undergoing a complete alteration, without becoming something else: in this case the full gist of the novel – or whatever Finnegans Wake is – resides in its unique style. The style of Jane Austen’s novels, on the other hand, is characteristic, but can be successfully set against other similar styles, and alternatives may be identified which, if chosen, would not have wholly modified the gist, the content, or the ‘story’ – whatever these are. Prosaically, and approximately, what happens in Finnegans Wake cannot be thought in different words, whereas what happens in E or MP can. Of course, nothing remains exactly the same when an element They also discussed a third, pluralist view of style, but that lies beyond the scope of this chapter.


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is shifted or altered: the ‘fictional element’, as Leech and Short call it, ‘is only invariant in a special sense; the author is free to order his universe as he wants, but for the purposes of stylistic variation we are only interested in those choices of language which do not involve changes in the fictional universe’ (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 37). It is only in a dualistic epistemic system that the notion of style as choice becomes materially evident. For in such a system, ‘what an author has written’ can be set ‘against the background of what he might have written, had he failed to apply certain transformations, or chosen to apply others instead’ (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 22). Style, therefore, can be calculated and isolated, provided that we are able to deduct what might have been written from what has been written. This view, and this analytical method, postulate the existence of two different semantic dimensions, one in which the text is actualized as it is, and another in which it is stripped of something identifiable as the author’s ‘style’. Leech and Short drew a further distinction, as artificial and as useful as the first, between sense and significance, the latter being the sum of the former plus what they called ‘stylistic value’: Let us use sense to refer to the basic logical, conceptual, paraphrasable meaning, and significance to refer to the total of what is communicated to the world by a given sentence or text ... sense + stylistic value = (total) significance. (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 23)

If we take an author’s ‘fictional universe’ (i.e., what is described stripped of the attributes of style) as a fixed, given quantity, we can disentangle the sense from the significance of the author’s words. Sense resides in the fictional universe itself, not as it is evaluated but ‘as it is’; while significance is that world as perceived by all those who participate in it (narrator, characters). Style, or rather ‘stylistic value’, provides a way of looking at a fictional universe, an ‘evaluative’ point of view, and is to be identified with all the colours and impressions which are added and give shape to that universe-in-itself. Of course, the only way of identifying that ‘stylistic value’, and therefore of distinguishing between sense and significance, is accepting that we cannot escape Spitzer’s ‘philological circle’ (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 13): the insights we have are stimulated by (linguistic, stylistic) observation, but observation in turn is guided by our insights as well as by our prejudices. Even though we are trapped in the philological circle, and even though any distinction between sense and significance is bound to be arbitrary (but not random

It is to be noted that the description of this circle as a potential cage is mine alone: Leech and Short are more neutral, and Spitzer writes that the philological circle ‘is not a vicious one; on the contrary, it is the basic operation of the humanities, the Zirkel im Verstehen as Dilthey has termed the discovery, made by the Romantic scholar and theologian Schleiermacher, that cognizance in philosophy is reached not only by the gradual progression from one detail to another detail, but by the anticipation or divination of the whole’ (Spitzer 1948/1962: 19).

Narrative Opacity in Mansfield Park

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or accidental), there is no doubt that in any literary work of art, and in certain works more than in others, a number of linguistic expressions and constructions are identifiable through which a neutral, pre-stylistic ‘fictional universe’ becomes the author’s, or the narrator’s, world. In literary texts such as Jane Austen’s novels, which work by subtle accumulation of details rather than by sweeping the reader along or constantly disappointing his/her expectations, these ‘stylistic markers’ are perhaps more evident than elsewhere. Though ultimately (i.e., in a monistic system) no narrative brick can be shifted from E or MP as well as from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in E or in MP it is easier to isolate the carriers of ‘stylistic value’, to identify ‘consistent structural options [which], agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of world-view, ... a “mind-style”’ (Fowler 1977: 76). Fowler’s concept of ‘mind-style’ can be applied to single characters, to a narrator, or even to an author-figure stretching across a number of literary works originated by the same person. Living authors like James Joyce create different mind-styles (and therefore different fictional authors) for each work they write, while the mind-style created by the likes of Jane Austen only undergoes small modifications from one novel to another. Elsewhere, Roger Fowler drew a tripartite distinction between psychological, spatio-temporal, and ideological point of view, and identified ‘mind-style’ with the latter (Fowler 1986/1990: 127). From this equation, and from Leech and Short’s separation of ‘sense’ from ‘significance’, we derive the idea of style as an ideological, evaluative quantity, the colours and impressions superimposed on the neutral ‘fictional world’ when it is filtered through a character, a narrator, a (fictional, implied) author. In the traditional view of rhetoric, especially after Ramus’s revolution, style is seen as an ornamental layer added to the irreplaceable kernel (and in this traditional view, translation is always possible because only this ornamental layer is replaced). In the (dualistic) view of modern stylistics, style is still an added layer, but one which gives the fictional world a coating of impressions and opinions, i.e., an ideological dimension. Of course, ‘ideology’ is here intended in its broadest possible sense: not as a system of political beliefs, but as the totality of cultural, social, and personal beliefs brought to bear on a fictional universe. In this broad sense, ideology, evaluation, and style are one and the same thing: the angle from which something is seen. Once ideology, evaluation, and style are conflated, however, a fundamental problem remains: how can evaluative, ideological ‘stylistic markers’ be identified with any certainty? In Linguistic Criticism, Fowler identified two ‘fairly distinct ways’ in which ‘point of view on the ideological plane may be manifested’. On the one hand there are modal expressions, which ‘come from a fairly specialized section of the vocabulary, and are easy to spot’. On the other hand there are other parts of language which are harder to locate, and which convey ‘world-view’ more ‘indirectly but nevertheless convincingly’: It is of course ultimately impossible to distinguish point of view from ‘point of view’ (Pugliatti 1985: 1–9); but that is one of the ‘dualistic’ abstractions we must accept in order to be able to isolate ‘stylistic value’.

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques Modality ... is the grammar of explicit comment, the means by which people express their degree of commitment to the truth of the propositions they utter, and their views on the desirability or otherwise of the states of affairs referred to. Respectively, ‘Sir Arthur certainly lost his fortune at the gaming table’ and ‘His gambling was disastrous for the family’ ... The forms of modal expression include: modal auxiliaries ... modal adverbs or sentence adverbs: certainly, probably, surely, perhaps, etc. ... evaluative adjectives and adverbs: lucky, luckily, fortunate, regrettably, and many others. verbs of knowledge, prediction, evaluation: seem, believe, guess, foresee, approve, dislike, etc. generic sentences: these are generalized propositions claiming universal truth and usually cast in a syntax reminiscent of proverbs or scientific laws ... There is a perhaps even more interesting sense in which language indicates ideology, or, in fiction, the world-views of author or characters. The modal devices just discussed make explicit (though sometimes ironic) announcements of beliefs; other parts of language, indirectly but nevertheless convincingly, may be symptomatic of world-view: it has traditionally been assumed in stylistics that the different ways people express their thoughts indicate, consciously or unconsciously, their personalities and attitudes. (Fowler 1986/1990: 131–2)

If modal expressions are more explicit, and therefore easier to spot, isolating other stylistic-evaluative expressions is harder and inevitably more arbitrary (cf. Chapter 1). Here the philological circle becomes a tangible prison, and we run the risk of finding nothing that we did not set out looking for. But our search, however personal, will always be dictated by the text we deal with, which will present us with continuities and discontinuities in order to impress its stylistic fabric on our investigating eye. We will look for significant elisions and repetitions, and we will stop at those points in the narrative when something could have been said in a markedly different manner. In the terms of information theory, we will keep in mind that ‘information-content varies inversely with probability’ (Lyons 1968: 89): whenever we find an unlikely expression, a choice which evokes a more likely, normal alternative, we will suspect that we are in the presence of a relevant stylistic feature. In our analysis of the initial orientation of MP, we will see that Mrs Bertram is pronounced by the narrator to have ‘captivated’ Sir Thomas – where ‘captivated’ is characterized by its improbability in relation with ‘married’, and is therefore informationally marked. It is such linguistic wordings, as well as modal expressions, that we will search thoroughly in our quest for style. Evaluation and Style in the Orientation of Mansfield Park In Jane Austen’s novels, it is not easy to isolate all informationally marked expressions, because they can be figuratively represented as small waves disturbing the surface of a calm, oily sea. The fictional world of Austen’s country


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houses is described by her narrators in a quiet voice and in a predictable manner, except when a single unforeseen epithet, a noun or a verb strangely misplaced, jolt the reader’s senses awake and warn him/her that something is amiss, that he/she might be in the presence of a crucial stylistic feature. Also, compared with the works written by more rootless, cosmopolitan writers, Jane Austen’s novels neatly show the connection between style and ideology, because almost any remarkable stylistic feature in E or MP refers us back in a very straightforward manner to the social and cultural beliefs of early nineteenth-century provincial gentry. When we are told that a woman ‘captivates’ a man, we immediately recognize some of those beliefs, an integral part of that ideology. There is, however, a problem with these stylistic-evaluative markers in Jane Austen’s novels – one which makes them so easy to read on the surface and so difficult to scan in depth: though we can easily recognize many of those markers, it is never clear how much the single characters or, above all, the narrator endorse the beliefs they represent. It is Austen’s celebrated ‘irony’, or what we have termed the ‘evaluative opacity’ of her narrative constructions (cf. Chapters 1, 2). In all of Austen’s novels, and more subtly in E and MP, the narrator by turns endorses, reverses, subverts, ventriloquizes. When the narrator opens P&P by stating, deadpan, that ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’, we may be tempted to take this statement at face value: but the rest of P&P leaves us in doubt as to whether the narrator speaks with, or distances him/herself from, what we will henceforth call the ‘village voice.’ In the incipit of MP, the story of a family (the general ‘orientation’ of the novel) is told in about 800 words which are packed with significant stylistic-evaluative markers. The narrator is apparently telling a very simple story of marriages, family arguments, and reconciliation – three sisters marry: the first marries a rich man, the second marries a man of middling fortunes, the third marries a good-for-nothing Lieutenant of Marines; as a consequence of this disparity of fate and fortune, the three sisters are severed, and then brought together by the practical difficulties of the third – but these markers invest that simple story with a whole consistent world-view. Once this world-view is recognized and made explicit, the problem remains of assessing the evaluative position of the narrator him/herself. And though we can never definitively fix that position, it will add to our understanding of Austen’s style to accept and verify that it cannot be fixed. In order to appreciate Austen’s style, an attempt is made in what follows at producing a ‘de-stylized’ version of the incipit, and therefore at separating sense and significance, a neutral fictional universe from the world as seen and evaluated by the narrator. It is of course impossible to re-create such a world, for the very simple reason that it does not exist. Yet, just as creating an artificial language called ‘Proto-German’ served the purpose of studying the developments of natural languages, creating an artificial fictional universe ‘before’ the addition of Austen’s style can tell us something about that style.

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The re-written text is marked as follows: whenever a ‘de-stylized’ variant is offered, Austen’s original text is given in square brackets (e.g. [only]); if the neutral, de-stylized version requires the substitution of textual material, the substitutional words are in italics (e.g. married replacing [had the good luck to captivate]). Also, Austen’s text is underlined when euphemistic or ironic (e.g. a woman of very tranquil feelings), and written in small capitals when it ventriloquizes the ‘village voice’ (e.g. in the common phrase). The Orientation of Mansfield Park Rewritten About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with [only] seven thousand pounds, [had the good luck to captivate] married Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and [to be thereby raised to] acquired the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon [exclaimed] commented on the [greatness of the] match, and her uncle, the lawyer, [himself], [allowed] declared her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any [equitable] claim to it. She had two sisters [to be benefited] who could profit by her [elevation] marriage; and such of their acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal [advantage] satisfaction. But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to [deserve] marry them. Miss Ward, at the end of half a dozen years, [found herself obliged to be attached to] formed an attachment with the Rev. Mr. Norris, a friend of her brother-inlaw, with scarcely any private fortune, and Miss Frances [fared yet worse] found a husband with no fortune at all. Miss Ward’s match, indeed, [when it came to the point,] was [not contemptible] fairly satisfactory, Sir Thomas being happily able to give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield, and Mr. and Mrs. Norris began their [career of conjugal felicity] marriage with very little less than a thousand a year. But Miss Frances married, in the common phrase, to [disoblige] disappoint her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more [untoward] unhappy choice. Sir Thomas Bertram had interest, which, [from principle as well as pride,] from a general wish of doing right, and a desire of seeing all that were connected with him in [situations of respectability] satisfactory situations, he would have been glad to exert for [the advantage of Lady Bertram’s sister] his sister-in-law; but her husband’s profession was such as no interest could reach; and before he had time to devise any other method of assisting them, an absolute breach between the sisters had taken place. It was the [natural] result of the [conduct] opinions of each party, and such as a very [imprudent] unsatisfactory marriage almost always produces. To save herself from [useless remonstrance] criticism, Mrs. Price never wrote to her family on the subject till actually married. Lady Bertram, who was a woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably easy and indolent, would have [contented herself with merely giving up her sister, and thinking no more of the matter] given up her sister, and thought no more of the matter: but Mrs. Norris had a spirit of activity, which could not be satisfied till she had written a long and angry letter to Fanny, to point out the [folly] wrongness of her conduct,


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and [threaten her with] explain to her all its possible ill consequences. Mrs. Price in her turn was injured and angry; and an answer which comprehended each sister in its bitterness, and bestowed such very disrespectful reflections on the pride of Sir Thomas, as Mrs. Norris could not possibly keep to herself, put an end to all intercourse between them for a considerable period. Their homes were so distant, and the circles in which they moved so distinct, as almost to preclude the means of ever hearing of each other’s existence during the eleven following years, or at least to make it very wonderful to Sir Thomas, that Mrs. Norris should ever have it in her power to tell them, as she now and then did in an angry voice, that Fanny had got another child. By the end of eleven years, however, Mrs. Price could no longer [afford to] cherish pride or resentment, or to lose one [connection] tie which might possibly assist her. A large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor, and a very small income to supply their wants, made her eager to regain the friends she had [so carelessly sacrificed] lost; and she addressed Lady Bertram in a letter which spoke so much contrition and despondence, such a [superfluity] number of children, and such a want of almost every thing else, as could not but dispose them all to a reconciliation. She was preparing for her ninth lying-in, and after [bewailing] complaining of the circumstance, and [imploring] asking for their countenance as sponsors to the expected child, she [could not conceal] wrote how important she felt they might be to the future maintenance of the eight already in being. Her eldest was a boy of ten years old, a fine spirited fellow who longed to be out in the world; [but what could she do?] but how? Was there any chance of his being hereafter useful to Sir Thomas in the concerns of his West Indian property? No situation would be beneath him – or what did Sir Thomas think of Woolwich? or how could a boy be sent out to the East? The letter was not unproductive. It re-established peace and kindness. Sir Thomas sent friendly advice and professions, Lady Bertram dispatched money and baby-linen, and Mrs. Norris wrote the letters. (MP 3–5)

Stylistic-Evaluative Enquiry: Marriage and Economics If Austen’s incipit is compared with its de-stylized version, a thematic question immediately meets the eye (is foregrounded, in stylistic terms). The main topic of these 800 words is marriage, but marriage is not described in all its aspects, or in the aspects we most readily associate with it (i.e., affection/disaffection, attraction/repulsion, love/hate). Its social and financial causes and consequences are openly stated and anatomized, as if MP were an essay in cultural materialism rather than a novel. In order to grasp the exceptionality of such analytic precision, we can compare it with the relative reticence of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791), in a passage which contains in brief a similar story of socially unacceptable marriage: For a detailed description of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century middleclass economy as related to women’s literature, cf. Copeland (1995).

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques The child of a once beloved sister, who married a young officer against her brother’s consent, was at the age of three years left an orphan, destitute of every support but from his uncle’s generosity: but though Dorriforth maintained, he would never see him. Miss Milner, whose heart was a receptacle for the unfortunate, no sooner was told the melancholy history of Mr. and Mrs. Rushbrook, the parents of the child, than she longed to behold the innocent inheritor of her guardian’s resentment, and took Miss Woodley with her to see the boy ... determined to take young Rushbrook to town and present him to his uncle. (Inchbald 1791/1967: 34)

Though in this case confessional differences may also be imputable for the breach (the brother is a Roman Catholic, whereas the husband is probably a Protestant), there is no doubt that Dorriforth’s displeasure mainly arises from social and financial questions (as we understand by the fact that he has to provide for the child whose existence he deplores). But these social and financial questions are covered by a sheen of paternalistic sentimentalism which muddles the matter for all those who are unfamiliar with late eighteenth-century social conventions. In MP the tables are turned: sentiment is momentarily erased in order to introduce the material conditions in which the characters’ thoughts, actions and feelings will unfold. Austen’s speaker, however, is not a sociologist but a narrator: the dissection of marriage is obtained not through direct description and definition, but by the subtle insertion of modal expressions or other stylistic markers. Marriage is described as a hunting campaign, which is conducted by women at the expense of men: the narrator does not simply say, as Inchbald’s narrator does, that Miss Maria Ward ‘married’ Sir Thomas Bertram, but that she ‘had the good luck to captivate’ him. ‘Captivate’ can be set against ‘fascinate’, and other similar verbs (‘charm’, ‘enchant’, ‘bewitch’) which share its main semantic content: it is not chosen by chance, or at any rate the choice is significant in a sentence whose theme and grammatical subject is defined by geographical origin (‘of Huntingdon’) and financial situation (‘with only seven thousand pounds’). The choice is significant because ‘captivate’ makes us think of ‘captive’, and what follows is a comparative description of three sisters’ failures and successes in hunting for a quarry. What women need in order to catch a big quarry is, apart from money, beauty, though elsewhere (in MP and other novels) we are reminded that ‘accomplishments’ may also be of importance. In the same paragraph, Austen’s narrator adds that ‘there certainly are not so many men of fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them’ – where that ‘deserve’, as opposed to ‘marry’ or even ‘catch’, implies that prettiness is a sufficient quality to obtain money in the form of a husband (once again, not love or affection). Living as most of us do in a society which, at least superficially, prizes love over social and financial convenience, we might be tempted to see moral squalor in such a depiction. But these simplistic ethical considerations are outside the interests of Austen’s narrator, who only describes things as they are. Husbandhunting is an absolute necessity for all those women who are not themselves in possession of a big fortune (and since money passed from male hand to male hand,


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such figures were rare): Miss Ward, the second (but eldest) sister, does not merely ‘form an attachment’ with Mr Norris, but finds herself ‘obliged to be attached’ to him. Finding herself in the impossibility of catching a quarry as big as Sir Bertram, she hunts around for the second best, and must, is obliged to, content herself; and the polysemous nature of ‘obliged’ tells us that she must also be thankful, for she might have ‘fared worse’ – she might have incurred the third sister’s fate. Marriage is, as Austen’s narrator tactfully reminds us, a ‘career’ (Mr and Mrs Norris begin their ‘career of conjugal felicity with very little less than a thousand a year’), and there are very few women who can afford not to embark on it. A brilliant career brings social respect and admiration (and envy, of course, behind the curtains), whereas an indifferent career brings a continual struggle against the tide of domestic difficulties, and a bad career record brings financial hardship and social censure. While a good match is looked at as the outcome of ‘luck’ and is ‘exclaimed’ upon by the neighbours, a bad match is looked down on as ‘untoward’ and ‘imprudent’, sheer ‘folly’, an occasion for ‘remonstrance’ and threats (Mrs Norris writes to her sister to ‘threaten her with all its possible ill consequences’). By choosing the wrong husband, a woman positions herself outside the happy circle within which ‘situations of respectability’ are to be found. In MP, the centre of that circle is Sir Bertram, the unmoving primum mobile of this small genteel world: all the other social and financial positions are evaluated by his standards; and it is not by chance that the sentence which contains ‘situations of respectability’ (as opposed to a more neutral ‘satisfactory situations’) has the baronet as its interpersonal and ideational subject. What makes a marriage a good ‘match’ is money, though here as elsewhere, we are reminded in passing that money does not always smell the same, for certain social qualities (epitomized in the term ‘respectability’) tend to give it a somewhat better flavour. The ‘greatness’ of a match is measured by the social and financial disparity between the parties. Maria Ward/Lady Bertram has made a very good match, for she had ‘only seven thousand pounds’ to her name – the modal adverb signalling a disparity between initial and final social position. She has been ‘raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady’ – an ‘elevation’ potentially bringing ‘advantage’ and benefits (‘She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation’) to other members of the family. At the other end of the spectrum, Miss Frances’s choice does not bring any social or financial advantages – the most tangible economic outcome being a ‘superfluity’ of children which does nothing but add to the ‘despondence’ of her situation. What is the narrator’s position in relation to all this? We cannot tell with absolute certainty, and that is what makes Austen’s mature works, in some

Juliet McMaster has written that ‘the gentry and professional classes felt somewhat threatened by the large changes that were coming with the Industrial Revolution, and tended to close ranks against the newly powerful and nouveaux riches. Trade represents new money, and money, like wine, isn’t considered quite respectable until it has aged a little’ (McMaster 1997: 123).

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respects, like so many detective novels. Since the narrator does not give us clear indications as to his/her evaluative position, his/her approval or disapproval of this or that character/behaviour/situation, it is only with the unfolding of the plot that we can infer something about the general ideological (and ethical) framework of the novel. After the first reading, we can go back to the beginning and understand things we had not been told openly in the first place. Though the narrator tends to remain aloof from the facts he/she narrates and the conversational exchanges he/ she reports, those facts and those exchanges cast a revealing light on the narrator’s aloofness. That aloofness, however, can never be complete, and a wry smile – whether of mirth, condescension, or disapproval, it is hard to say – shows through the cracks of impassivity. For one thing, the selection of ‘stylistic markers’ is, of course, far from neutral. By choosing to present marriage as it were on a dissecting table, ready for the reader’s inspection, the narrator breaches a social convention which made it distasteful and tactless to speak openly of financial matters. We should remind ourselves that Austen’s characters never (or almost never, for some of these characters are tactless; cf. Chapter 4) speak as her narrators do: in E, when the eponymous heroine rejects Mr Elton, who in turn rejects Miss Smith, each of the two rejections is based on the assumption that there is a social and economic disparity which is never openly stated (Cf. Chapter 6). Thus, in MP as elsewhere, the narrator is breaching a social norm he/she knows very well, in order to show what lies behind the curtain of ‘social respectability’. Also, in this initial orientation there are a couple of passages in which the narrator seems to distance him/herself from the ideological world he/she is presenting to us. When we read that ‘All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match’, and that ‘Miss Frances married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family’, we hear the village voice, not the narrator’s. At two crucial points in the narrative, where the most advantageous and the most disadvantageous matches are described, the narrator prefers not to speak in his/her own voice – which does not tell us what his/her position is, but leaves us groping in the dark for a clear evaluation of what we are told.

It is interesting to compare the author’s narrative and epistolary styles. Of Austen’s letters, Caroline Austen wrote that ‘They were very well expressed, and they must have been very interesting to those who received them — but they detailed chiefly home and family events: and she seldom committed herself even to an opinion — so that to strangers they could be no transcript of her mind — they would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them’ (La Faye 1989: 249). Though certain contemporary prose writers have managed to make their ‘negative’ narrators as indecipherable as possible. Many of Carver’s short stories can be mentioned as narrative creations whose style seems to reside in the absence of style, and where, as a consequence, all the evaluative colouring appears to be delegated to the selection of facts and speeches.


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Style and Cohesion A comparison between Austen’s incipit and its de-stylized version makes the theme of marriage as a social and economic institution stand out in bold relief: but pointing out what is foregrounded is by no means the only way of discovering what a text or a portion of text is about. The theme can also be identified by tracing the lexical nets innervating the text, as actualized by word repetition, by the use of different forms of the same root, or by the accretion of synonyms, near-synonyms, and lexical items belonging to the same semantic area. All these phenomena belong to the field of ‘lexical cohesion’, as defined by Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English. After noticing how lexical items can function much as grammatical ties in making a text cohesive, Halliday and Hasan grade these cohesive lexical items according to their degree of differentiation from one another, thus creating a scale which displays on one end sheer repetition, and on the other end what the two scholars call ‘collocation’. Collocation, in this case, is defined not so much by the syntagmatic company words keep, but by their paradigmatic relations with other words on the semantic level. Halliday and Hasan shrink from classifying ‘the various meaning relations that are involved’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 287); but that ‘collocation’ here means ‘semantic nearness’ is made evident both by the word-chains used as examples (mountaineering/ Yosemite/summit peaks/climb/ridge) and by the recapitulatory table for lexical cohesion: Type of lexical cohesion: Referential relation: I. Reiteration (a) same word (repetition) (i) same referent (b) synonym (or near-synonym) (ii) inclusive (c) superordinate (iii) exclusive (d) general word (iv) unrelated II. Collocation (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 288)

In the three paragraphs making up the incipit under discussion, the study of lexical cohesion leads us to the same conclusions as the study of ‘foregrounded’ evaluative stylistic markers. While the word ‘marriage’ appears only once (and is arguably substituted, on two more occasions, by ‘elevation’ and above all ‘career of conjugal felicity’), there are words or different forms of the same root that are repeated up to three times, and all these words belong to semantic fields which we could define as ‘financial matters’ and ‘social matters’. As far as money is concerned, while the actual word appears only once, there are three occurrences each for ‘fortune’ and ‘income’, two occurrences for ‘pounds’, and these are supplemented by the occurrence of ‘maintenance’, ‘concerns’, and ‘property’. In the field of ‘social matters’, ‘connections’ features alongside ‘connected’ and ‘connection’, as well as ‘rank’, ‘profession’, ‘career’, ‘respectability’, and ‘interest’ (the personal relationship that one can exploit in order to further one’s or someone else’s career).

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It is to be noted that most of these lexical items are directly connected with the theme of marriage, in the sense that they are used either to denote or to define the pursuit of a husband or the married state. By contrast, in Austen’s quasisociological style, lexical items related to the semantic field of sentiment (‘love’, ‘affection’, ‘attraction’, etc.) are virtually absent. The only reference to sentiments akin to love is to ‘peace and kindness’. It comes at the end of the passage, and is put into perspective by all that has been said so far and by the narrator’s catalogue of how the two more fortunate sisters and Sir Bertram materially express that kindness and celebrate that peace: The letter was not unproductive. It re-established peace and kindness. Sir Thomas sent friendly advice and professions, Lady Bertram dispatched money and baby-linen, and Mrs. Norris wrote the letters.

Stylistic Symmetry: A Tale of Three Sisters MP begins like a fairy-tale or a parable, by telling the story of three sisters who start from roughly the same situation (lower-upper-middle class upbringing – as Orwell would say; Orwell 1937/1997: 113) – some money but not a lot, good looks) but find themselves, at the end of their husband-hunting period, with very different game in their bag. It is a perfect tripartite symmetry, reversed and completed at the end of the novel by the marriage of Fanny and Edmund, i.e., of the unfortunate sister’s daughter and the privileged sister’s son. It is interesting to note how it seems to be this very symmetry – and the different positions held in society by the three sisters – that shapes their individual characters, rather than the reverse. This is the effect of the narrator first giving us a detailed account of material conditions, and then introducing the characters themselves. This tripartite symmetry is realized in the initial orientation by the insertion of stylistic-evaluative markers which immediately sprawl the three sisters on their respective hierarchical social pins. As a result of her ability to ‘captivate’ Sir Thomas, Lady Bertram does not simply acquire a title, but is ‘raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady’. Her ‘good luck’ is underlined by the surprised reactions of her uncle and her community, whose comments show that ‘elevation’ is perceived Peter W. Graham provides an interesting ‘Darwinian’ interpretation of this family history (Graham 2008: 71–6). Fanny works her way into the society of Mansfield Park by endorsing its values: comparing her to the model woman of her day, Mary Poovey finds her ‘outwardly everything a textbook proper lady should be; she is dependent, self-effacing, and apparently free of impermissible desires’ (Poovey 1984: 212; cf. also Chapters 4 and 5). In spite of this textbook perfection, however, Fanny’s climb does not reach the social peak where Lady Bertram roosts, because Edmund is a younger son, and as such will not inherit his father’s estate. As a clergyman’s wife, Fanny will belong to that section of society (termed ‘pseudo-gentry’ by the historian David Spring [Spring 1983]) which is attached to, but not identifiable with, the landed gentry.


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as a small breach in the fabric of society, to be marvelled at but also justified (her uncle allows her ‘to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it’). In Austen’s world, those who seek to better their position, by marriage or other means, are looked down upon as social climbers. On the other hand, when the climb reaches the summit, the breach mends itself by its own consequences – the panacea of ‘rank’ applying the plaster of admiration to the wound of envy. The other two sisters fare worse than Lady Bertram, and differently from one another. The eldest sister finds herself ‘obliged to be attached’ to the Reverend Mr Norris – a fact and an expression which, as we have seen, tell us a lot about the condition of early nineteenth-century women. By fixing on a relatively poor parson, Mrs Norris is enrolled, or remains, in the middle ranks of society, or in the lower ranks of country gentry, only a step higher than Miss Bates in E: her match is described as ‘not contemptible’, a litotes indicating the short distance between her fate and Mrs Price’s. The marriage with the passionless Rev. Norris is described as a ‘career of conjugal felicity’, where ‘career’ suggests hard labour, and ‘felicity’ a more domestic feeling than ‘happiness’ would perhaps entail. Mrs Norris’s mean and self-centred temperament is suited to (or a consequence of) her married and, later, widowed condition: a woman in her position has to struggle if she does not want to be socially relegated, and one needs money and leisure in order to be disinterested and open-minded. Mrs Norris’s liminal social condition is further underlined by a cohesive element of ‘comparative reference’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 39) ‘evaluatively’ linking her plight with Mrs Price’s. The third sister is said to have ‘fared yet worse’ than Mrs Norris, thus implying that if Mrs Price’s marriage is a downfall, Mrs Norris’s is not very far from being contemptible. In Mrs Price we can observe the fate awaiting all (gentle)women who make an ‘imprudent marriage’, an ‘untoward choice’, who marry ‘to disoblige [their] family’. ‘Disoblige’ is once again an element of cohesion with Mrs Norris’s story (Mrs Norris has been ‘obliged’ to marry a man, also in order to ‘oblige’ those social norms which are embodied in the familial institution). The choice is ‘untoward’, i.e., ‘unfortunate’, but also ‘unforeseen’ and ‘unseemly’. It breaches the master law of bourgeois behaviour, i.e., prudence. As a consequence of her imprudence and ‘folly’, Mrs Price is cast out from the family, or is at least forced, by her relatives as well as by the circumstances, to humiliate herself in order to be included again after having preemptively excluded herself. The terms in which the ‘reconciliation’ of the three sisters is described leave us in no doubt that it is only financial factors, and not sororal affection, that lead Mrs Price to make the first move: she can ‘no longer afford to cherish pride or resentment’, because she is saddled with ‘a large and still increasing family’ and ‘an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor’. She needs help, but she is in no position to ask for it, and must beg for it (‘imploring’). With a masterstroke of ventriloquism, the narrator incorporates into his/her discourse a stretch of a letter from Mrs Price, where a modal verb is used for the sake of understatement, but presented to the reader as an indicator of how desperate the sender must be (‘she could not conceal how important she felt they might be’).

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As observed in the previous sections, the narrator’s position is not openly stated, and readers must largely rely, to place their sympathies and antipathies, on the juxtaposition of facts. There are, of course, the stylistic-evaluative markers I have bracketed to show us how the dominant social ideology influences characters’ actions: and there are some euphemistic expressions (which I have underlined) whose surface meaning is disproved or reversed by their co-text, and whose deep, ironical meaning casts the light of opinion on the darkness of events. These expressions are apportioned to all three sisters, reflecting their social positions and their temperaments. Lady Bertram is said to be ‘a woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably easy and indolent’ – where the negative connotations of ‘indolent’ are counterbalanced by the positive aura of ‘tranquil’ and ‘easy’. When we learn, however, that she would have ‘contented herself with merely giving up her sister, and thinking no more of the matter’, we begin to suspect that her tranquillity, easiness and indolence are not as harmless as they might appear. We are faced with something akin to Wordsworth’s ‘savage torpor’ – a passivity which is actively capable of hurting others. As for Mrs Norris, we are told that she has a spirit of ‘activity’ – but in the course of a few lines (she writes ‘a long and angry letter to Fanny, to point out the folly of her conduct, and threaten her with all its possible ill consequences’), we understand that it is an alacrity in hurting others, in putting people in their place and reminding them of their mistakes (she will soon act as self-appointed censor for the young Fanny Price). She receives from her fallen sister a letter containing ‘such very disrespectful reflections on the pride of Sir Thomas, as Mrs Norris could not possibly keep to herself’ – and at this stage, though no open evaluation of her character has been provided by the narrator, we can see her on her way to Mansfield Park, gloating on each passage of a letter she is holding in her hand. As to Mrs Price, we are euphemistically informed by the narrator of how her financial difficulties compel her to humiliate herself in front of the very people she has every reason to hate. After eleven years she can no longer ‘afford to cherish pride or resentment’, and is ‘eager to regain the friends she had so carelessly sacrificed’. The letter she addresses to Lady Bertram is full of ‘contrition and despondence’ – and it is obviously the latter that induces the former, just as it is the fact that she can no longer afford to cherish pride and resentment that makes her eager to regain her ‘friends’. Once all these euphemistic expressions are decoded, very few doubts remain about the motives of the ‘reconciliation’ and the quality of the ‘peace’ of which Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield Park is a sort of tangible symbol. Conclusion: Slovenliness Exploited In a famous essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), George Orwell complains that the English of his time is becoming imprecise and slovenly, its speakers (and above all its writers) mostly unable to express their thoughts clearly through its words. In his opinion, ‘prose consists less and less of words chosen for


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the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house’; locked in this prefabricated building, the user ‘either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not’ (Orwell 1984: 356). This stylistic decline must have external causes in everyday affairs, but the state of everyday affairs in turn is not made a jot better by the decline of language: Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influences of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that to fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. (Orwell 1984: 354–5)

In Orwell’s indignation against sloppy prose we can trace the influence of another commonplace idea: language, for the novelist, is a mirror of thought, and is more or less successful insofar as it expresses thought clearly and distinctly. Though it is of ancient Greek descent, this idea was formulated for English-speaking modernity in the second half of the seventeenth century, by such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, and the Royal Society affiliates. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that ‘The generall use of Speech, is to transferre our Mentall Discourse, into Verbal; or the Trayne of our Thoughts, into a Trayne of Words’ (Hobbes 1651/1997: 20); John Locke spoke (in the Essay concerning Human Understanding) of ‘the use and force of language as subservient to instruction and knowledge’ (Locke 1690/1877: 10); Thomas Sprat, who in 1668 penned a History of the Royal Society, praised its members for their attempt to come back ‘to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in equal number of words’ (Sprat 1668: 113). For the men of the seventeenth-century epistemic revolution, it was of course prose, more than verse, that had to bear the weight of denotative precision; and the prose genre par excellence, the novel, inherited from the beginning an aspiration to describe the world ‘as it is’. Jane Austen and George Orwell both belong to this tradition, and try to describe what they see by means of the language they have at their disposal. Orwell’s remedy against the slovenliness of language is a disposition to think clearly through language, and if necessary against the grain of contemporary English, by avoiding all those expressions that either do not convey any precise

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content or carry the writer astray from what he/she means to write. Austen’s strategy is different: the language she has at her disposal is as imprecise and slovenly, in Orwell’s sense, as that of Orwell’s contemporaries, because it is full of commonplace expressions and of words the meanings of which are not well definable, though their functions can always be inferred on the pragmatic plane. Words like prudence, sense, sensibility, judgment, reason, respectability, are imprecise because they reflect the ideology of a classist male-dominated society that aims at maintaining its privileges while never stating them openly. Instead of refusing to use these words, Austen (or, her narrator) continues to do so, but surrounds them with a co-text in which they are both explained and unmasked. By first detailing the material conditions in which the events take place (and by means of the contrast between words and events), the narrator of MP alerts us to the real significance of such expressions as ‘respectability’, ‘untoward’, ‘imprudent’, ‘career of conjugal felicity’; and by thus exploiting the tesserae his/her social mosaic is made up of, he/she tells us more about the habits and prejudices of early nineteenth-century country gentry than a whole battery of sociological papers ever could. At the same time, by avoiding any kind of open confrontation with the ideology of his/her world (and with the linguistic expressions which convey that ideology), Austen’s narrator maintains a web of ‘evaluative opacity’ which makes it very difficult to identify his/her moral position, and to catch him/her definitely ‘approving’ or ‘disapproving’ the state of affairs he/she is describing. The narrator’s position in his/her ideological and linguistic world is at one and the same time acquiescent and subversive, parasitic and critical. All in all, the initial orientation of MP resembles a report written by a very careful double-dealing spy for his superiors: the text leads its readers to evaluate a situation in a certain manner; yet no single word is traceable that commits the writer to the evaluation which the text unmistakably proposes.

Part 2 Dialogue


Chapter 4

Jane Austen’s Dialogue Reality and Fiction Conversation in Jane Austen’s novels is a complex role-playing game, the rules of which are dictated by general consensus about what can and cannot be said, what can be said openly and what must be hinted at or implied, which moves and acts are allowed and which are not. These rules, if one observes the novels in their varied but consistent whole, form a recognizable set almost universally acknowledged as valid – those who stand outside the rules being labelled by the other characters or by the narrator as arrogant, boorish, or foolish. In order to identify this set of rules and the narrative purposes it serves, an internal perspective can be adopted: observing characters’ behaviour in Austenland can help the critic draw a list of requirements for the perfect speaker, and then the abilities of each individual speaker can be gauged against this yardstick. There is, nonetheless, an evident circularity in such an approach: the novels are judged on the sole authority of the principles they convey, and those principles are inferred from ‘internal’ observation. Though such a procedure can yield results which satisfy the scholar’s as well as the reader’s common sense, an external point of view would be welcome from which those internal observations can be verified. When one studies novels – or any other work of art – this external point of view is guaranteed by the fact that no human product can be created in perfect isolation. Even those works of art which do not offer a direct representation of society have at least an indirect link with the context they spring from – and Jane Austen is a realistic novelist writing about the sector of society it was her portion in life to know. Therefore, in order to study conversation in Austenland we can look at how conversation worked in Austen’s world, just as we can look at the material conditions of life in Austen’s time to understand why, in her novels, (relatively) poor women have to marry well or die socially. Since we have no reliable transcriptions of everyday talk in Austen’s time, we must look at how conversation was supposed to work rather than at how it actually worked. The various manuals devoted to the ‘art of conversation’ which appeared in the eighteenth century and before, in England and abroad (particularly in France), give us a fair idea of how people were expected to behave in polite society, if not of their actual behaviour. The formal quality of these manuals, as opposed to

For the sake of brevity, I distinguish here between Austen’s world (the world in which the authoress lived) and Austenland (the world of her characters). As announced in the Introduction, this chapter does not contain a discussion of the eighteenth-century conflict between different models of conversation. The main quarrel was between an aristocratic model (symbolized by Lord Chesterfield, whose scandalous letters

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the supposedly more informal quality of real conversation, is no insurmountable problem, because it parallels the gap between fictional (i.e., idealized, normalized) and real speech. If one measures these conversational rules against conversational behaviour in Austen’s novels, one sees at one and the same time the predictive power of the rules and the significance of the exceptions. Furthermore, whatever the distance between real and ideal behaviour, conversation in Austen’s time was supposed to be a formal, well-ordered business; in the manuals, we find a constant insistence on conformity between oral and written discourse – as well as on the usefulness of literature as a model for conversation. were posthumously published in 1774, and then ‘digested and methodised’ (and neutralized) again and again by the likes of John Trusler) and a bourgeois model, between ‘honest dissimulation’ and honesty, hypocrisy and sincerity. Exhaustive accounts of the debate can be found in Gilmour (1981) and Davidson (2004). Here, a number of manuals – which aimed to reach as large an audience as possible, and can be expected to mediate between opposing views – are used indifferently to identify a ‘golden mean’ of conversational behaviour. As Norman Page wrote in 1972, ‘Recent investigations into spontaneous speech suggest that it is altogether freer and looser, less patterned and organized and more wasteful and repetitive than has often been assumed; and, even making allowance for the greater formality that obtained in much of the polite speech of the upper levels of early nineteenthcentury society, there seems good reason to doubt whether Jane Austen’s contemporaries really spoke with the sureness and economy of effect which characterize the speech of even her foolish and vulgar figures ... Inevitably, even when it is based on observation rather than literary convention, written dialogue is the result of a controlled and modified selection from the features of living speech: the uncertainties and misdirections of actual “talk” are distilled into a concentration of effects that justifies their appearance in the very different medium of print and their perception through the eye rather than the ear’ (Page 1972: 116–17). Lord Chesterfield urges his son to ‘Be careful then of your style upon all occasions; whether you write or speak, study for the best words and best expressions, even in common conversation or the most familiar letters’; a good way ‘to acquire a graceful utterance, is to read aloud to some friend every day, and beg of him to set you right, in case you read too fast, do not observe the proper stops, lay a wrong emphasis, or utter your words indistinctly. You may even read aloud to yourself, where such a friend is not at hand, and you will find your own ear a good corrector. Take care to open your teeth when you read or speak, and articulate every word distinctly’ (Trusler 1775: 30–32). The author of The Accomplished Youth also stresses the connection between oral and written dialogue: ‘The first thing you should attend to is, to speak whatever language you do speak, in its greatest purity, and according to the rules of Grammar; for we must never offend against grammar, nor make use of words which are not really words. This is not all; for not to speak ill, is not sufficient: we must speak well; and the best method of attaining to that, is, to read the best authors with attention; and to observe how people of fashion speak, and those who express themselves best;’ (Anon. 1811: 196). The author of an 1821 Essay on Conversation observes that ‘what can be said by ... Dr. Blair, concerning written compositions, may be applied with equal propriety to conversation. “Embarrassed, obscure, and feeble sentences, are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure, and feeble thought”’ (Anon. 1821: 23). Cf. also Michaelson (2002: 190, passim) on how novels came to be used as conversation guides, and gradually replaced the manuals themselves.

Jane Austen’s Dialogue

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Those branches of linguistics which study spoken interaction – pragmatics, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology – can also be of use, insofar as they mirror and observe from above (as behavioural norms) the actions that the manuals try to direct from outside (as behavioural rules). In his survey of European writings on the art of conversation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Italy inaugurating the genre in the sixteenth century, France ruling the roost in the seventeenth, and England making its contribution in the eighteenth), Peter Burke has noticed ‘the parallels between the cultural rules which ethnographers and linguists try to discover – who communicates with whom, when, where, about what, in what manner, and so on – and the advice given in treatises written several centuries earlier’ (Burke 1993: 90–91). As Burke suggests, ‘The systematic comparison of the two sets of rules should help to illuminate both’ – and all these rules (or rather, these norms and rules) taken together should help to illuminate the behaviour of fictional characters. Also, modern theories of language provide a relatively stable, relatively consistent set of conceptual terms which can be used to systematize the different insights yielded by novels and manuals. Of course, novelistic characters belong to a fictional tradition at least as much as they belong to the society they are copied from: when one thinks of Austen’s dialogue, one has to remind oneself that it is of literary descent, as well as of realistic origin. The well-read Austen has many novelists in mind – from Richardson and Fielding to Radcliffe, Inchbald, and a host of minor practitioners. In her early works, situations and conversations are often drawn from other novels at least as much as from reality: up to NA, Austen’s art is often imitative, and it is by means of parody – a kind of parody involving setting ‘novelistic’ situations against ‘real life’ – that she acquires her style. It is particularly useful to draw a comparison between Jane Austen and such contemporary colleagues, or close predecessors, as Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Inchbald. If one sets Austen’s dialogue against theirs, one immediately notices that her conversations are both more stylized (more formal and controlled) and more plausible (nobody ever says a thing he/she is not expected to say, and yet there are conversational surprises). On the one hand, this duplicity has to do with the author’s firm grasp of fictional psychology – with the necessary way in which all turns at talk reflect character and situation. On the other hand, the effect is created by Austen’s keen observation, and brilliant exploitation, Gary Kelly turns this critical position on its head: ‘The point about the difference between Austen’s style as a novelist and the enormously diverse styles of her contemporaries is not that Austen is a superior stylist or realist, or artist ... Austen’s political purpose was, through her own stylistic insistence on formal reduction, minimalism and irony, to relativize comprehensively the styles and thereby the politics of her contemporary novelists, and, at the same time, to re-educate the novel reader, stylistically and therefore politically. It is this relativization ... that has produced the famous “realism” effect for Austen’s readers ... the impression that Austen’s, not other fictions, must be “realistic” because, read from her style, theirs seems excessive, extravagant, unreal, untrue, bad, unethical, immoral’ (Kelly 2004: 67–8).

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of the conventions of real speech. Unlike the world of everyday life, Austenland is a country where nothing happens by chance: but its creator manages to give it the appearance of chance and naturalness by holding her mirror up to human nature. In other words, Austen displays a perfect knowledge of the rules of polite conversation and a firm grasp of all the exceptions to those rules, of the (social, psychological) reasons why a certain character in a certain situation can choose to ignore or evade those rules, or can breach them without noticing. As so often with this ineffable creator of literary crystals, the impression is created that nothing is allowed to exist without a reason or a relation to the rest: even the random speck of sand becomes grist to the narrative mill; even chance is enrolled at the service of all-seeing providence. The Art of Conversation Turn-Taking and Conversational Roles The allocation of turns in conversation was, at least in theory, an orderly affair in Austen’s world. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conversation manuals warned their readers against the sins of speaking too much and interrupting other speakers. In his ‘Essay on Conversation’, Fielding wrote that ‘A well-bred man ... will not take more of the discourse than falls to his share’ (Fielding 1743: 150); the anonymous author of The Accomplished Youth exhorted his pupil to ‘Talk often, but never long’ (Anon. 1811: 174); Lord Chesterfield felt it almost unnecessary to point out what ‘every child knows’, that ‘It is a great piece of ill-manners to interrupt any one when speaking, by speaking yourself, or calling off the attention of the company to any foreign matter’ (Trusler 1775: 34). In Austenland, interruptions and overlaps are very rare, and lengthy speeches are uttered only by characters who are perceived by the others as contravening the social pact (Miss Bates in E is forgiven because she is both helpless and harmless, but her infringements are tolerated rather than approved; another garrulous speechmaker is Mr Collins in P&P, who is openly or covertly treated like an idiot by most characters). John A. Dussinger (1990: 13–14) rightly observes that the intertextual (parodic) inception of many characters is not necessarily at odds with their mimetic plausibility: ‘Although previous scholarship has generally assumed a mimetic model to describe Austen’s characterization, this approach has been at odds sometimes with a parodic art that calls attention to literary analogues and deliberately subverts trusting the text. The aesthetic of representation, however, tends to be a contradictory mixture of the natural and the artificial: the Messein porcelain figurine delights not only by its lifelike resemblance but also by its cold, fragile composition – the two opposite qualities being somehow interdependent. Similarly, even fictional characters most patently rooted in motivations of the plot and contrived for thematic purposes can strike us as psychologically reified beings. An assurance of the characters’ artificial origins seems actually to enhance their mimetic value’. Lord Chesterfield notes that ‘Incessant talkers are very disagreeable companions. Nothing can be more rude than to engross the conversation to yourself, or to take the words, as it were, out of another man’s mouth. Every man in company has an equal claim to bear


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Given this orderly procedure, interruptions are seen as serious face-threatening acts (Brown and Levinson 1987), allowable only in particular situations. Austen uses them to underline moments of stress or tension, in ‘intimate’ more often than in ‘socialising’ contexts (McCarthy 1998: 10). In S&S, the close sisterly relationship between Elinor and Marianne makes it possible for each to interrupt the other to scold her or anticipate her words (‘“They will one day be Mr. Willoughby’s, and” ... / “If they were one day to be your own, Marianne, you would not be justified in what you have done”’; 59). In one instance in MP, Mrs Norris dares to interrupt Sir Thomas in her anxiety to avoid personal censure (148). In E, Emma interrupts Mr Elton in her proud, righteous rage (‘“and the encouragement I received” – / “Encouragement! – I give you encouragement!”’; 120). In P&P, Mr Collins is so unbearable that people cut him short when he embarks on his endless speeches (‘“I know little of the game, at present”, said he, “but I shall be glad to improve myself, for in my situation in life –” Mrs. Philips was very thankful for his compliance, but could not wait for his reason’; 58). Altogether, these cases amount to a dozen in the whole corpus, each interruption marking a moment of comic or dramatic crisis. Overlap is even rarer than interruption, represented as it is by a single coreferential instance in NA: ...‘Delightful! Mr. Morland and my brother!’ ‘Good heaven! ‘tis James!’ was uttered at the same moment by Catherine; (NA 29)

In this well-ordered social and conversational world, other-selection is naturally favoured over self-selection in the allocation of turns (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974: 701 ff.). Quite frequently, when there are more than two participants in an interaction, current speaker directly addresses next speaker or drops hints as to who should or can continue: ‘[Frank Churchill speaking] Ladies and gentlemen, I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse (who, wherever she is, presides,) to say, that she desires to know what you are all thinking of.’ Some laughed, and answered good-humouredly. Miss Bates said a great deal; Mrs. Elton swelled at the idea of Miss Woodhouse’s presiding; Mr. Knightley’s answer was the most distinct. ‘Is Miss Woodhouse sure that she would like to hear what we are all thinking of?’ ‘Oh! no, no’ – cried Emma, laughing as carelessly as she could ... (E 334)

his part in the conversation’ (Trusler 1775: 95). In The Literary Economy of Jane Austen and George Crabbe, Colin Winborn writes that ‘Austen prizes the ability to manage one’s words, along with the capacity to know when and how to hold one’s tongue ... Over-speech is associated with vulnerability, with laying oneself open. Those who say too much are liable to be wounded by exposing too much of themselves through their words; or they are liable to wound or expose others’ (Winborn 2004: 79).

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Frank Churchill addresses the whole company, so that everybody feels entitled to speak; while Mr Knightley, though really talking to both Emma and Churchill, addresses himself indirectly to Emma, who obtains a right to take up the floor. A related set of rules establishes who can or should conduct a conversation, and the role each character plays in each exchange. Interaction in Austenland is always ‘asymmetrical’ (Markova and Foppa 1991), in the sense that there are always one or more dominant figures, and each participant has a different contribution to make. Per Linell has defined three different types of ‘interactional dominance’: ‘quantitative’ (determined by the amount of words spoken by each participant), ‘semantic’ (having to do with the power to choose the topic, and to impose one’s interpretation on that topic), and ‘strategic’ (the authority of those who contribute the most important interventions) (Linell 1990). The distinction is relevant to Austen’s novels: while women usually exercise ‘quantitative’ and ‘semantic’ dominance (most men preferring to let them ‘do the talking’), it is usually men who are ‘strategically dominant’ – the opinion of such authoritative characters as Mr Knightley clearly bearing a different weight from all the others. Of course, gender is not the only criterion according to which dominant or subordinate positions are assigned. In many cases, it is simply the most selfassured or the most garrulous that take up the floor or do most of the talking: but there is a marked preference for people of higher rank over people of lower rank, for married over unmarried women, etc. Rank, income, gender and personality combine to assign each character a place in multiple interactions – but this place can change as the situation changes: as will be shown in Chapter 5, MP and P have Cinderella-like plots in which the female protagonists grow from a marginal position to one of relative power, and, consequently, from silence to modestly articulate speech. ‘Dominance’ or ‘subordination’, of course, are not only displayed in each character’s turns at talk. In 1981, Erving Goffman coined the phrase ‘participation framework’ to define the position and status of each interactant: ‘When a word is spoken, all those who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have some sort of participation status relative to it. The codification of these various positions and the normative specification of appropriate conduct within each provide an essential background for interaction analysis’ (Goffman 1981: 3). He observed, amongst other things, that ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’ are not the only available roles: in the complex interactions of numerous groups, there can be ‘overhearers’, ‘ratified participants [who] are not specifically addressed by the speaker’, and ‘ratified participants who are addressed’. Multiple interactions in Austenland (both in ‘socialising’ and ‘intimate’ contexts) often show complex ‘participation frameworks’: when the Dashwood women talk amongst themselves in S&S, Mrs Dashwood is semantically dominant, Elinor is often strategically dominant, while Marianne can be quantitatively dominant, and Margaret is almost invariably a ratified but silent hearer. In the ‘Box Hill’ episode of E, dominance is negotiated and striven for rather than possessed, and different hearers are variously addressed by each speaker (cf. Chapter 6).


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Another general rule for conversation seems to be that each participant has to take up former speaker’s speech and take it as a starting point for his/her contribution, in a cooperative game of tennis where nobody wants the ball to bounce twice in the opponent’s half. As noted by Peter Burke, eighteenth-century English manuals took up the Renaissance idea of the ‘conversazione’ as the sociable event par excellence (one of the most famous Italian courtesy books of the period was Guazzo’s Civil Conversazione, 1574) by insisting that one had to adapt one’s conversation to the people one is conversing with, and we have already seen that interrupting people or calling attention away from what they said was perceived as impolite. In the terms of feminist linguist Jennifer Coates, a ‘female’ kind of conversation structure X1 + X2 + X3 is preferred to a ‘male’ structure X + Y + Z (Coates 1996: 60). In Austenland, there are characters who change or shift the subject at their pleasure (or who drift between loosely related subjects), but they are usually considered foolish or boorish or both, and they may be put up with merely because they are acknowledged to be in the grip of one or more hobby horses (and can afford it, as Sir Walter Elliot in P). Other characters – men, usually – refuse to cooperate in picking up the conversational thread. The price they pay for this behaviour is covert social censure: ‘[Mrs Palmer speaking] How I should like such a house for myself! Should not you, Mr. Palmer?’ Mr. Palmer made her no answer, and did not even raise his eyes from the newspaper. ‘Mr. Palmer does not hear me,’ said she, laughing, ‘he never does sometimes. It is so ridiculous!’ This was quite a new idea to Mrs. Dashwood, she had never been used to find wit in the inattention of any one, and could not help looking with surprise at them both. (S&S 92)

Another kind of impolite behaviour is displayed by Lady Catherine in P&P. The conversation manuals inveighed against the vice of ‘despotism’, i.e., ‘that disposition which some persons possess, of never being at ease except in society where they can take the lead, and assume the style of dictator’ (Anon. 1821: 71). Lord Chesterfield wrote that one need not be ‘ashamed of asking questions, if such questions lead to information’; however, these questions were to be accompanied with ‘some excuse’, so as not to be ‘reckoned impertinent’, while ‘abrupt questions, without some apology’ were to be avoided ‘by all means’ (Trusler 1775: 106). In Lady Catherine’s hands, each conversation turns into an interrogation displaying Lord Chesterfield thinks it almost superfluous to insist on this point: ‘I should suppose it unnecessary to advise you to adapt your conversation to the company you are in’ (Trusler 1775: 98). The author of An Essay on Conversation warned the reader against ‘the habit of forming, in the midst of the same company, several select parties of private conversation, where a general conversation would be more instructive and more universally agreeable’ (Anon. 1821: 87).

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that IRF structure (initiation / response / feedback by first speaker) which has been observed to be typical of classroom interaction (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Hoey 1991): ‘Do you play and sing, Miss Bennet?’ ... ‘... Do your sisters play and sing?’ ... ‘Why did not you all learn?...Do you draw?’... ‘... Pray, what is your age?’ (P&P 126–8)

In conclusion, a sketch can be drawn of an ideal conversation as far as turn-taking, dominance and ‘participation framework’ are concerned: only a few conversations in Austenland will conform to this ideal, but every clear deviation from it will have to be explained as an exception or a breach. Ideally, a conversation will be initiated and conducted by the people of higher rank, and by married rather than unmarried ladies when women are in the lead. Interruptions will be forbidden, and each topic will be handed round from participant to participant (with other-selection preferred over self-selection, but by no means universal) to be serially developed, with no interactant taking up too much space. The following (rather informal and bantering) exchange between Mrs Dashwood, her daughters Elinor and Marianne, and Edward Ferrars in S&S is a perfect illustration. Mrs Dashwood makes all the initiating moves – Edward Ferrars properly submitting to her semantic dominance; Marianne (‘sensibility’: the most spontaneous of the sisters) is the first character to intervene without being other-selected, and Elinor’s interventions carry more authority than her sister’s: ‘What are Mrs. Ferrars’s views for you at present, Edward?’ said she, when dinner was over and they had drawn round the fire; ‘are you still to be a great orator in spite of yourself?’ ‘No. I hope my mother is now convinced that I have no more talents than inclination for a public life!’ ‘But how is your fame to be established? for famous you must be to satisfy all your family; and with no inclination for expense, no affection for strangers, no profession, and no assurance, you may find it a difficult matter.’ ‘I shall not attempt it. I have no wish to be distinguished; and I have every reason to hope I never shall. Thank Heaven! I cannot be forced into genius and eloquence.’ ‘You have no ambition, I well know. Your wishes are all moderate.’ ‘As moderate as those of the rest of the world, I believe. I wish as well as every body else to be perfectly happy; but like every body else it must be in my own way. Greatness will not make me so.’ ‘Strange if it would!’ cried Marianne. ‘What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?’ ‘Grandeur has but little,’ said Elinor, ‘but wealth has much to do with it.’ ‘Elinor, for shame!’ said Marianne; ‘money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned.’ ‘Perhaps,’ said Elinor, smiling, ‘we may come to the same point. Your competence and my wealth are very much alike, I dare say;’ (S&S 77–8)


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Topics, politeness and grammar The injunction to adapt one’s conversation to the people one is conversing with can be applied to choice of topic as well as cooperation. Within a conversational structure of the kind outlined above (X1 + X2 + X3), it is expected of each participant that he/she shall contribute to create a high degree of ‘topical coherence’ (Bublitz 1988). However, this is not always the case: bringing up certain subjects creates embarrassment, and can result into somebody’s attempt to change or shift the topic. Here is Lucy Steele’s response (itself barely acceptable, containing as it does a reference to the Lord) to her sister’s embarrassing remarks on ‘beaux’ in S&S: ‘Oh! dear! one never thinks of married mens’ being beaux – they have something else to do.’ ‘Lord! Anne,’ cried her sister, ‘you can’t talk of nothing but beaux; – you will make Miss Dashwood believe you think of nothing else.’ And then to turn the discourse, she began admiring the house and the furniture. (S&S 107)

In Austenland, there are a number of universally acceptable topics, ranging from the intellectual and social qualities of individuals to such general themes as sense, sensibility, morality, professions, female accomplishments, improvements, poems, and novels. Other topics, notably marriage in its social and financial aspects, can only be dealt with in an indirect manner, involving characters’ knowledge of social conventions and their ability to mean what they are not allowed to say by variously exploiting the cooperative principle (Grice 1967/1991) and the maxims (Leech 1983) or strategies of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). While an intimate context (the one extensively depicted in P&P, for instance) allows for more liberty, it is hardly allowable to speak openly of financial matters in wider socializing gatherings – and unawareness of such invisible boundaries marks out the boors and the socially-conversationally inept. Witness the difference of linguistic behaviour between Mr Elton and Emma Woodhouse when the former proposes to the latter: ‘Never, madam,’ cried he, affronted, in his turn: ‘never, I assure you. I think seriously of Miss Smith! – Miss Smith is a very good sort of girl; and I should be happy to see her respectably settled. I wish her extremely well: and, no doubt, The conversation manuals advised their readers to speak only of general, indifferent matters in any social gatherings larger than their families, so as to avoid stirring up contention and inadvertently causing pain. Lord Chesterfield writes that this kind of ‘chit-chat’ can be learned by observing the way ladies talk: ‘There is a fashionable kind of small-talk, which however trifling it may be thought, has its use in mixed companies: of course you should endeavour to acquire it. By small-talk, I mean a good deal to say of unimportant matters; for example, foods, the flavour and growth of wines, and the chit-chat of the day. Such conversation will serve to keep off serious subjects, that might sometimes create disputes. This chit-chat is chiefly to be learned by frequenting the company of the ladies’ (Trusler 1775: 36).

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques there are men who might not object to – Every body has their level: but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance, as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith! – No, madam, my visits to Hartfield have been for yourself only; and the encouragement I received’ – ‘Encouragement! – I give you encouragement! – sir, you have been entirely mistaken in supposing it. I have seen you only as the admirer of my friend. In no other light could you have been more to me than a common acquaintance. I am exceedingly sorry: but it is well that the mistake ends where it does ... I have no thoughts of matrimony at present.’ (E 119–20)

We can say that Emma and Mr Elton, on this occasion, display different degrees of ability in the wielding of ‘silence’ – if silence be considered, in Adam Jaworski’s words, a ‘metaphor for [lack of] communication’ (Jaworski 1997: 3). Mr Elton almost says what must remain unspoken about the social and financial distance between Harriet Smith and himself (‘there are men who might not object to – Every body has their level…I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance’), while Emma manages to reject him without making any mention of her own social and financial superiority (a superiority she is perfectly aware of, as the mental soliloquies of the following Chapter show) beyond a ‘contrastive’ hint (‘I give you encouragement!’; Brown and Levinson 1987: 217). After being refused by Emma, Mr Elton will marry Augusta Hawkins, the boorish daughter of a Bristol merchant (‘Miss Hawkins was the youngest of the two daughters of a Bristol – merchant, of course, he must be called’; E 164), and the two will show their joint social inability on various communal occasions. Other topics are ‘silenced’ completely – they cannot even be touched upon in passing or alluded to. The male and female bodies, for instance, are never mentioned in conversation beyond the commonplace assertions as to a woman being ‘pretty’, having a ‘good figure’, or a man being ‘handsome’ (though the narrator is occasionally more outspoken than the characters as regards features).10 In MP, it is a measure of Mr Rushworth’s social silliness, as well as of his jealousy, that he keeps mentioning Henry Crawford’s short stature (‘I do not say he is not gentleman-like, considering; but you should tell your father he is not above five feet eight, or he will be expecting a well-looking man’; 145). Another forbidden, ‘silenced’ topic, though here it is quantity, rather than quality, that makes a difference, is oneself. The conversation manuals openly discouraged ‘self-panegyric’ (Burke 1993: 111); while modern pragmatists have observed that ‘modesty’ is a conversational strategy as well as a moral quality (Leech 1983: 131–51). In Austenland, it is only the boorish or stupid characters who speak too much about themselves, and even a boor like Mrs Elton feels she

10 As John Wiltshire points out, the body is also mentioned in conversation as a repository of health (or, more typically, ill-health). Inquiries about health are ‘one way in which a community is constituted’ (Wiltshire 1992: 6).


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has to appear to be talking about indifferent subjects or somebody else even while she is really bragging about her own importance:11 The very first subject after being seated was Maple Grove, ‘My brother Mr. Suckling’s seat’ – a comparison of Hartfield to Maple Grove. The grounds of Hartfield were small, but neat and pretty; and the house was modern and wellbuilt. Mrs. Elton seemed most favourably impressed by the size of the room, the entrance, and all that she could see or imagine. ‘Very like Maple Grove indeed! – She was quite struck by the likeness! – That room was the very shape and size of the morning-room at Maple Grove; her sister’s favourite room.’ (E 244)

A similar kind of topical self-centredness is displayed by those characters who have one or more hobby horses which they use to pester the others and – as seen in the preceding section – to hold the floor for longer intervals than they should. These hobby horses range from rank (Sir Walter in P), health (Mr Woodhouse in E, the Parker brothers in S) and beauty (Sir Walter again) to seaside resorts (Mr Parker in S). Quite often, they are only masks behind which a character hides his/ her own preoccupation with him/herself. Men and women with hobby horses are usually put up with, not least because they can afford them socially and financially (most hobby-horse characters are men of independent means). This preoccupation with topical coherence and the correct choice of topic runs parallel with the importance attributed to correct vocabulary and well-formed grammar. For the writers of conversation manuals, ‘he who mumbles out a set of ill-chosen words, utters them ingrammatically, or with a dull monotony, will tire and disgust’ as much as someone who interrupts other people or comes out with an unwanted subject (Trusler 1775: 30). In Austenland, badly-formed sentences are as rare as undesirable subjects; swearwords and coarse expressions mark out the boor or the fool as does the inability to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable topics. The only all-round boor in Austenland is John Thorpe, who continually takes the Lord’s name in vain, says of an acquaintance that he is ‘as rich as a Jew’ (NA 82), uses the expletive ‘d – ’ (94), and utters ‘frequent exclamations, amounting almost to oaths’ (84).12 Other characters (Mrs Jennings and Miss Steele The author of The Accomplished Youth urges his reader ‘Above all things, and upon all occasions, [to] avoid speaking of yourself, if it be possible.’ He adds that there are devious as well as direct ways of praising oneself: ‘Some, abruptly, speak advantageously of themselves, without either pretence or provocation. They are impudent. Others proceed more artfully, as they imagine, and forge accusations against themselves by exhibiting a catalogue of their many virtues ... Others go more modestly and more slyly still (as they think) to work; but, in my mind, still more ridiculously. They confess themselves (not without some degree of shame and confusion) into all the cardinal virtues; by first degrading them into weaknesses, and then owning their misfortune, in being made up of those weaknesses’ (Anon. 1811: 177–8). 12 ‘One word only, as to swearing. Those who addict themselves to it, and interlard their discourse with oaths, can never be considered as gentlemen; they are generally people of low education, and are unwelcome in what is called good company’ (Trusler 1775: 100). 11


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in S&S, for instance) show their vulgarity by using such intensifiers as ‘monstrous’ or Miss Steele’s exclamation ‘Oh, la’ (S&S 238–40).13 All characters, or at least all but the boors and the socially stupid, are engaged in a conversational tennis game which involves not only sending a manageable ball in the other half, but also hitting the ball in an elegant manner. The great majority of speeches in Austen’s novels are made up of well-formed sentences – so much so that dialogue in Austenland can sound artificial to contemporary ears, and the question is raised of how much fictional conversation reflects real oral interaction – whatever the conversation manuals may say. Austen, however, knows how to exploit the vagaries of natural speech, the laxer grammar of spoken language. Badly-formed and unfinished sentences are exceptionally but knowingly used in her novels to obtain the following effects: 1. conveying feelings of embarrassment (‘“Perhaps,” said Miss Tilney in an embarrassed manner, “you would be so good – it would make me very happy if – ”’; NA 100), surprise (‘“Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte, – impossible!”’; P&P 96), pain and displeasure (‘“Good heavens!” cried Elinor, “what do you mean? Are you acquainted with Mr. Robert Ferrars? Can you be – ?” And she did not feel very delighted with the idea of such a sister-in-law’; S&S 111); 2. conveying characters’ awareness that they are saying what should remain unspoken for reasons of tact or delicacy (Mrs John Dashwood persuading her husband to give as little as possible to his half-sisters: ‘“Oh! beyond anything great! What brother on earth would do half so much for his sisters, even if really his sisters! And as it is – only half blood! – But you have such a generous spirit!”’; S&S 7), or because they are betraying too much of themselves (Colonel Brandon vaguely hinting at unmentionable 13

‘The conversation of a low-bred man, is filled up with proverbs and hackneyed sayings. Instead of observing that tastes are different, and that most men have one peculiar to themselves, he will give you “What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison;” or, “Every one to their liking, as the old woman said, when she kissed her cow.” He has ever some favourite word, which he lugs in up on all occasions, right or wrong; such as vastly angry, vastly kind; devilish ugly, devilish handsome; immensely great, immensely little. Even his pronunciation carries the mark of vulgarity along with it; he calls the earth, yearth; finan’ces, fin’ances; he goes to wards and not towards such a place. He affects to use hard words ... and seldom, if ever, pronounces them properly’ (Trusler 1775: 33–4). Patricia Howell Michaelson discusses an essay on conversation written by Addison at the beginning of the century; she writes that it ‘articulated the stereotype of woman’s language that remained alive through the period: women spoke too much and said too little. The quantity and emptiness of woman’s language were probably its most obvious features. But it is worth sketching out other characteristic deficiencies as well. Particularly useful in literary representations (because so easily imitated) was the specialized vocabulary that marked women’s language, consisting of overused intensifiers like vast and monstrous’ (Michaelson 2002: 37–8).


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mysteries in his past: ‘“This,” said he, “cannot hold; but a change, a total change of sentiments – No, no, do not desire it ... I once knew a lady who in temper and mind greatly resembled your sister, who thought and judged like her, but who from an inforced change – from a series of unfortunate circumstances” – Here he stopt suddenly;’ S&S 48); 3. more generally, displaying a character’s nature, his/her relative weakness or strength of understanding, also in relation with upbringing and social position (Mr Elton and Miss Bates, in E, leave many of their sentences unfinished, the former because he seems to be a man of limited understanding and learning, the latter for the same reasons and because she is in a great hurry to express herself). The last point holds true for all kinds of utterances – whether or not containing unfinished or badly-formed sentences – in the pragmatic sense that every character, when speaking, conveys knowledge about his/her context, other characters, and him/herself. This connection between language and (social) self is never more evident than on those rare occasions on which the lower classes make their appearance to remind us that the country gentlemen and gentlewomen depicted by Austen are not the only inhabitants of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury England. In that case, the connection between rank and (spoken) grammar, social propriety and propriety of speech, becomes as it were materially perceptible in the ‘non-U’ forms (Ross 1954) employed by these waiters and nannies:14 ‘I see Mr. Ferrars myself, ma’am, this morning in Exeter, and his lady too, Miss Steele as was. They was stopping in a chaise at the door of the New London Inn, as I went there with a message from Sally at the Park to her brother, who is one of the post-boys.’ (S&S 310) ‘No, ma’am, – he did not mention no particular family; but he said his master was a very rich gentleman, and would be a baronight some day.’ (P 88–9) ‘Please Ma’am, Master wants to know why he be’nt to have his dinner.’ (TW 278)

Gender, Class and Types Malcolm Coulthard wrote in 1977 that ‘A successful ethnography of speaking will describe the normative structure of all the speech acts and events of a given speech community ... Norms, of course, are not always adhered to, and each community has its own rules for interpreting rule-breaking’ (Coulthard 1977: 47). Characters in a novel, just as people in real life, are judged (in a social, 14

‘All this must be avoided, if you would not be supposed to have kept company with footmen and housemaids. Never have recourse to proverbial or vulgar sayings; use neither favourite nor hard words, but seek for the most elegant; be careful in the management of them, and depend on it your labour will not be lost; for nothing is more engaging than a fashionable and polite address’ (Trusler 1775: 34).


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conversational light) for their adherence to rules, as well as for their ability to infringe rules and get away with it. All of the conversational rules outlined above are universally valid in Austenland – though some characters defy or ignore them, intentionally or otherwise. There is a difference, however, in the degrees of normative power they have for various psychological and social types. Grand ladies and lords, like Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her nephew Darcy, are rather considered ‘proud and disagreeable’ (P&P 7) than boorish if they turn a conversation into an IRF interrogation (as Lady Catherine is apt to do), or deviate from such elementary rules as the ones advising the use of tact in refusing a dancing partner: ‘You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,’ said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet. ‘Oh! she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say, very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.’ ‘Which do you mean?’ and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner, for you are wasting your time with me.’ (P&P 7–8)

Degree of subjection to rules is defined for each character by three social and personal traits: gender, rank/income,15 and psychology. In a general way, however, it can be noted that men are freer than women, high-born and rich people (often, but not always, birth and money coalesce) are freer than poor people and people of no rank, while those characters who are gifted with a simple soul are freer than the socially clever (they gain their freedom by failing to notice most of the chasms yawning in front of them). Of course, different social situations – the setting, participants, topic and purposes of each single interaction (Hymes 1974) – influence these three variables in different and ultimately irreducible ways, so that it is impossible to predict conversational behaviour with any precision. Nonetheless, the variables have a bearing on how characters perceive themselves and are perceived by other characters and the narrator, and can therefore be used to sketch a summary two-way typology. On the one hand, there are all those who (generally) remain within the bounds of good conversational deportment – men and women of all ranks and incomes spanning the restricted domain of Austen’s country gentry. Within this large group, however, the three variables outlined above create different degrees of assurance 15

Lord Chesterfield sums up the connection between rank and conversation in the following subtle manner: ‘Your first address to, and indeed all your conversation with, your superiors, should be open, chearful and respectful; with your equals, warm and animated; with your inferiors, hearty, free and unreserved’ (Trusler 1775: 36).


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and assertiveness. Among themselves, men tend to interact at a level of equality, whatever the social and financial gaps separating them16 – though certain rankconscious gentlemen like Sir Walter Elliot in P insist that their superiority be recognized and bowed to. Here is a brief exchange between Sir Thomas Bertram and his poor nephew William Price, where the only sign of social distance is the title William uses to address his uncle: ‘I should like to go to a ball with you and see you dance. Have you never any balls at Northampton?...’ – And turning to his uncle, who was now close to them – ‘Is not Fanny a very good dancer, sir?’ ...‘I am sorry to say that I am unable to answer your question. I have never seen Fanny dance since she was a little girl; but I trust we shall both think she acquits herself like a gentlewoman when we do see her, which perhaps we may have an opportunity of doing ere long.’ (MP 196)

Rank/income (real or presumptive, as in Mrs Elton’s case) exercises a different, more palpable weight on the conversational behaviour of women. Ladies of rank and wealth, like Emma Woodhouse in E, Mary Crawford and the Bertram sisters in MP, tend to display a more assertive style, even when they do not openly contravene any conversational rules (cf. Chapter 5, the sections on MP and E); while women of lower standing tend to display a more cautious and deferent style, featuring many of the strategies which have been observed by Robin Lakoff in her studies of ‘language and woman’s place’ (here summarized by Susan Speer): • •

Women tend to avoid speaking in a way that conveys strong emotions and generally use ‘weaker’ expletives than men (e.g., ‘Oh dear’ as opposed to ‘shit’). Men and women use a different set of adjectives to convey their opinion on matters. neutral great terrific cool neat

•

women only adorable charming sweet lovely divine

Women tend to use more ‘tag questions’ than men. Tag questions are declarative statements that have been turned into a question with the use of a tag, such as ‘The war in Vietnam is terrible, isn’t it?’ ... Tags and intonations require confirmation from others and act as requests for reassurance or approval.

16 In his survey of eighteenth-century manuals of conversation in Britain, Peter Burke notes that ‘The area in which the English theory of conversation diverged most sharply from its Italian and French counterparts was that of ceremony and compliment ... The balance between equality (among members of the speech community) and hierarchy was shifting in favour of the former, at a time when even kings prided themselves on being the first gentlemen of their respective nations’ (Burke 1993: 111–12).


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• • •

Women use more ‘hedges’ such as well, y’know, kinda than men. In doing so, they avoid making forthright statements. Women’s use of hedging is evidence for hesitancy, making them appear less assertive than men. Women use ‘hypercorrect grammar’ and more ‘superpolite forms’ than men. Finally, women speak in ‘italics’. That is, they give double force to certain words in order to convey the importance of what they are saying. Italics convey doubt about one’s self-expression and one’s fears ‘that their words are apt to have no effect’ ... The speaker who uses tags, intonation, hedging and italics to excess may appear insecure and uncertain about what they are saying and lacking in self-confidence. (Lakoff 1973, 1975; Speer 2005: 33–4)17

Allowing for the linguistic distance between Austen’s society and the Englishspeaking world of the twentieth century (nobody would say ‘shit’, ‘cool’ or ‘kinda’ in Austen, of course), these strategies are employed by female characters as diverse as Mrs Allen in NA, Mrs Palmer in S&S, Fanny Price in MP, Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax and Miss Bates in E, and Anne Elliot in P – thus demonstrating that this kind of ‘female style’ cuts across all layers of the social pyramid, though it is most readily found at low level. One additional ‘female’ rule could be termed ‘the rule of communicative silence’ (for the notion of ‘communicative silence’ vs. mere absence of sound, cf. Sobkowiak 1997): all these women, besides showing caution when they speak, tend to speak less, and less freely, than men or more powerful or self-assured women do. Their ‘silent role’ is a function of their subordinate position in the society they inhabit (cf. Dendrinos and Ribeiro Pedro 1997). On the other hand, there are those who do not entirely submit to the conversational rules dictated by society. These can be further split up into at least three main categories: 1. The boors. There are educated and non-educated boors in Austenland. A non-educated boor, like Thorpe in NA or Mrs Jennings in S&S, is simply not smart or wise enough to recognize all the indirect meanings, and to behave correctly in the allocation of turns or in the use of tact and modesty. An educated boor, like Darcy in P&P, knows what is generally due to society but feels he/she is above such obligations. 2. The fools. The conversational fools, or conversational children (like children in the world of adults, they do not understand what is going on) are usually educated people who nonetheless display an inability to discriminate between allowed and forbidden topics, allowed and forbidden types of conversational behaviour. The prototypes are Mr Dashwood in S&S, Mr Collins in P&P, and Mr Rushworth in MP (Miss Bates, a mixture of various things, bears only a partial resemblance to these characters). They have 17

Lakoff’s conclusions have been challenged from various quarters (cf. for instance O’Barr and Atkins 1980). Whatever the general validity of ‘gender linguistics’, however, linguistic generalizations based on gender have interesting applications in Austenland (cf. also Rand Schmidt 1981).


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learned to master all strategies, but apply them wrongly (typically, they are very polite in indifferent matters and too direct when facing burning issues; or they speak openly of what should remain unspoken). 3. The critics. This is almost a category of one, for the only character to fit it perfectly is Mr Bennet in P&P (another partially eligible candidate being Henry Tilney in NA). Mr Bennet understands the conversational rules of his society perfectly well, yet sometimes he chooses not to abide by them. More than that, he exploits the principles of cooperation and politeness to emphasize the absurdity of people’s behaviour. This kind of behaviour seems to be mainly occasioned by his having to withstand his wife’s querulous insistence, but there is some evidence that Mr Bennet’s fame has reached beyond his domestic walls (in his post-refusal letter to Elizabeth, Darcy writes that ‘The situation of your mother’s family, though objectionable, was nothing in comparison of that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and occasionally even by your father’; P&P 152). Only a few characters fit one category perfectly – and it is mostly in the earlier novels that the mask of type is to be glimpsed beneath the character’s face. After Austen’s early fictional attempts, monolithic characters become rarer, each actor assuming more than one role and each role developing more fully as the plot unfolds (on a scale of complexity increasing novel after novel).18 While NA, from this point of view, displays a relatively stable structure, it can be said that all of Austen’s novels, from S&S onwards, are about the loss or gain of socialconversational power, about how certain characters (Marianne Dashwood, Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, the Bertram sisters, Emma Woodhouse) receive instruction in the ways of humility, while others (Fanny Price, Anne Elliot) acquire greater social ‘consequence’ and/or conversational ‘dominance’. In this sense, all of Austen’s mature novels are about ‘negotiation’, about people engaging one another ‘in a communicative attempt to accommodate potential or real differences in interests in order to make mutually acceptable decisions on substantive matters’ (Firth 1995: 6–7) – these ‘substantive matters’ always having to do with one’s position in the subtly mobile society depicted by Austen. That position in society, with an evident effect of circularity, in turn dictates how each character shall conduct him/herself in each successive negotiation.

18 I implicitly disagree with D.W. Harding, when he speaks of such characters as Mrs Elton, Miss Bates, and Mrs Norris as ‘caricatures’ rather than ‘characters’ (Harding 1968).


Chapter 5

Jane Austen’s Novels as Conversational Machines Introduction All of Austen’s novels concern themselves with the ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ that she advised her niece Anna to concentrate on in her own planned work (Austen 2004: 176). Therefore, Austen’s settings are more or less the same, and her characters correspondingly are taken from the same social set. That does not mean, however, that any single character in a novel is exactly like another – though similarities can be observed and recurrent types recognized. In each successive novel, social-conversational types acquire new contours and interact in slightly different ways with the other inhabitants of each country village. Furthermore, an overall change can be detected from the Steventon to the Chawton novels in the way characters behave and speak: simple, one-sided characters like Thorpe and Mr Collins gradually disappear, and their antics are replaced by the subtler (though equally boorish or foolish) conversational moves of Mrs Elton, Miss Bates, and Sir Walter Elliot. It is also worthwhile to look at the way conversation and the development of conversational techniques interact with the unfolding of plot and character in each novel. There is a long critical tradition of reading Jane Austen’s works (all but MP and P, at least) as educational pieces: the heroines start out in the fictional world with sentimental views or proud misconceptions, and their ideas have to be corrected before they finally marry the ‘right’ man. Some critics, however, have pointed out that education is a linguistic as well as a moral process: Laura G. Mooneyham, for instance, has written that ‘The most productive way to trace the progress of a heroine’s education is to follow her changing habits of speech’ (Mooneyham 1988: x). Looking at dialogue in progress through each single novel, as well as in Austenland at large, means understanding the nature of each educational project, and the extent to which it is actually carried out at the expense of Austen’s protagonists.

‘All Jane Austen’s novels, and many of her minor works, unfinished pieces and juvenilia, are about education. It is the imprudencies and education of her heroines that chiefly interest us; but other people, too, in her stories undergo the discomforts of a true education, or the greater discomforts of a false one, and the novels sometimes move beyond imprudencies to evils’ (Devlin 1975: 1). A study of the possibilities as well as of the limitations (above all for the Chawton novels) of the traditional ‘didactic’ approach is Fergus (1983).


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Finally, even when Austen’s novels cannot be read as educational tales in a straightforward manner, a close reading of (developing) dialogue yields crucial narratological and ideological results: if applied to MP and P, such a reading confirms the impression that these novels are Cinderella-like tales in which (conversational) bashfulness is rewarded and (conversational) forwardness is punished – though the fascination of forwardness is often shown with more vividness than the virtue of bashfulness. Everywhere, conversation analysis provides an insight into the relationships forming and developing within Austen’s ‘select set’. In Austenland, each conversation is a battle for the acquisition of social-conversational ‘status’, and each novel portrays the changing contours of a network of hierarchical links which are continually negotiated in and through conversation. Northanger Abbey The protagonist of NA, Catherine Morland, is a simpleton who, in the course of the few events she witnesses, learns to distinguish not only between gothic fancy and reality, but also between good and bad social behaviour, gentlemen and socialconversational boors. Initially, when exposed to the varied society of Bath, she mixes almost indifferently with the Thorpes and the Tilneys – though she has a feeling that there is something wrong with John Thorpe’s behaviour and language. In the end, though she is still candid, she is no longer so gullible (when Isabella Thorpe, after breaking her engagement with Catherine’s brother, tries to justify her behaviour by letter, the narrator informs us that ‘Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine’; NA 160), and we may expect her to enter her matrimonial life with a fuller awareness of social semiotics. Mrs Allen, her chaperone in Bath, does nothing to help her grasp the complex mechanisms of conversation, because she does not seem to understand them very well herself. Furthermore, she adopts an extreme form of ‘female style’ which does not allow for questioning and instruction (so that Catherine is generally left to fend for herself when she has to decide what is proper or not). The only routine Mrs Allen masters is one in which almost all the space of the utterance is taken up by an emphatic repetition of what her interlocutor says – though she also employs the occasional ‘appealing’ tag question. The information content of her answers is practically nil. She agrees but never expands (Stenström 1994: 39–44): Mrs. Allen congratulated herself ... on having preserved her gown from injury. ‘It would have been very shocking to have it torn,’ said she, ‘would not it? – It is such a delicate muslin ...’.

The reference is to Richard J. Watts’s ‘network/status’ model of verbal interaction. According to Watts, every verbal interaction can be described as a battle for ‘status’ in which contestants try to score points against one another with each conversational move. Each speaker has his/her own position in a social-conversational ‘network’ which influences their choices and is modified with every move (Watts 1997: 88–93).

Jane Austen’s Novels as Conversational Machines

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‘How uncomfortable it is,’ whispered Catherine, ‘not to have a single acquaintance here!’ ‘Yes, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Allen, with perfect serenity, ‘it is very uncomfortable indeed.’ ‘What shall we do? – The gentlemen and ladies at this table look as if they wondered why we came here – we seem forcing ourselves into their party.’ ‘Aye, so we do. – That is very disagreeable. I wish we had a large acquaintance here.’ (NA 12).

Left to her own devices as she is, Catherine is often unable to discriminate between the different degrees of social-conversational impropriety she is exposed to. Gross deviations from the norm (bad language) do not escape her attention, but small transgressions (wrong choice of topic, uncooperative behaviour) usually do – and that is why she cannot see through Isabella Thorpe’s deceptions at first. That is also why she is as much perplexed as she is amused when she first meets Henry Tilney in the Lower Rooms. In introducing himself, he produces a parody of the sort of conversation one is supposed to have in Bath – thus implicitly exposing the absurdity of a conversational rule while demonstrating that he masters all its ramifications: He talked with fluency and spirit – and there was an archness and pleasantry in his manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by her ... ‘I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent – but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.’ ‘You need not give yourself that trouble, sir.’ ‘No trouble I assure you, madam.’ Then forming his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering air, ‘Have you been long in Bath, madam?’ (NA 14)

Henry Tilney is satirizing a propensity to courteous officiousness which was by no means universally censored, and which had been in vogue, in certain sectors of society, for several decades. Lord Chesterfield writes that ‘There is a certain distinguishing diction that marks the man of fashion, a certain language of conversation that every gentleman should be master of. Saying to a man just married, “I wish you joy,” or to one who has lost his wife, “I am sorry for your loss,” and both perhaps with an unmeaning countenance, may be civil, but is nevertheless vulgar. A man of fashion will express the same thing more elegantly and with a look of sincerity, that shall attract the esteem of the person he speaks to. He will advance to the one, with warmth and chearfulness, and perhaps squeezing him by the hand, will say, “Believe me, my dear sir, I have scarce words to express the joy I feel, upon your happy alliance with such or such a family, &c.” to the other in affliction, he will advance slower, and with a peculiar composure of voice and countenance, begin his compliments of condolence with, “I hope, sir, you will do me the justice to be persuaded, that I am not

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Instead of simply abiding by the rules, Henry Tilney meta-communicatively describes the rules he must or should abide by. The conversation between him and Catherine is a perfect illustration of how wooden talk would be if all speakers followed Grice’s cooperative maxims literally (Grice 1967/1991): instead of interpreting Henry’s first question as a direct request for information, Catherine decodes it literally as a request for permission to ask for information; he follows suit by proceeding to ask the first question he had asked permission to ask. Isabella Thorpe is, at least in part, a conversational boor, yet her infringements are not so great as to be evident to Catherine – she never commits on-record facethreatening acts. Miss Thorpe’s main sin is a propensity to exploit others’ talk to further her own conversational aims and personal purposes. Far from taking part in an equal X1 + X2 + X3 tennis match where each opponent hits the other’s ball and sends a comfortable shot in the other half, she exploits the kinetic energy of her opponent’s ball to play her own game. Her parasitic technique is, in a sense, the very reverse of ‘female style’, because where someone adopting the latter would ask for confirmation even when stating the obvious, she twists the obvious into something else while still appearing to defer to her interlocutor’s judgement. In thematic terms, she talks about the same topic but does not ‘talk topically’: ‘[Isabella talking] Do you know I get so immoderately sick of Bath; your brother and I were agreeing this morning that, though it is vastly well to be here for a few weeks, we would not live here for millions. We soon found out that our tastes were exactly alike in preferring the country to every other place; really, our opinions were so exactly the same, it was quite ridiculous! There was not a single point in which we differed; I would not have had you by for the world; you are such a sly thing, I am sure you would have made some droll remark or other about it.’ ‘No, indeed I should not.’ ‘Oh, yes you would indeed; I know you better than you know yourself. You would have told us that we seemed born for each other, or some nonsense of that kind, which would have distressed me beyond conception; my cheeks would have been as red as your roses; I would not have had you by for the world.’ ‘Indeed you do me injustice; I would not have made so improper a remark ...’. Isabella smiled incredulously, and talked the rest of the evening to James.’ (NA 50)

insensible of your unhappiness, that I take part in your distress, and shall ever be affected where you are so”’ (Trusler 1775: 35–6). The reference is to a definition of Sacks’s as quoted by Coulthard: ‘However, as Sacks (1968) argues, talking topically and talking about some topic chosen by another speaker is not the same thing at all. One can perfectly well have a sequence in which successive speakers talk in a way topically coherent with the last utterance, but in which each speaker talks on a different topic’ (Coulthard 1977: 77).


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Miss Thorpe’s vulgarity is also mirrored in her slovenly, ‘vague’, stereotyped use of language: she displays an ample provision of such expressions as ‘vastly’ and ‘for millions’, and misapplies many of the terms she employs (‘ridiculous’ is a case in point here). John Thorpe’s conversational manners are far worse than his sister’s. He is a complete boor, the reverse of a gentleman, by all contemporary standards. As seen in Chapter 4, he is a catalogue of conversational errors. He swears, takes the Lord’s name in vain, uses a great variety of fillers and informal expressions, forms elliptical sentences, and says what must remain unspoken (He tells Catherine: ‘Not expect me! that’s a good one! And what a dust would you have made, if I had not come’; NA 42). Like his sister, he tends to exploit others’ talk in parasitic fashion, as when he covertly proposes marriage to the uncomprehending Catherine: ‘A famous good thing this marrying scheme, upon my soul! A clever fancy of Morland’s and Belle’s. What do you think of it, Miss Morland? I say it is no bad notion.’ ‘I am sure I think it a very good one.’ ‘Do you? – that’s honest, by heavens! I am glad you are no enemy to matrimony however. Did you hear the old song, “Going to one wedding brings on another?” I say, you will come to Belle’s wedding, I hope.’ (NA 90)

His most serious infringement, however, is that he contradicts people openly, on record and without redress (Brown and Levinson 1987: 68–70). In the manuals of conversation, as noted by Peter Burke, ‘Direct contradiction was forbidden, and indirect expressions of dissent recommended’ (Burke 1993: 110). Thorpe shows Vague expressions are universally identified in modern linguistics as characterizing spoken as opposed to written language (Carter and McCarthy 1996: 19). In a sense, the quality of spoken language in Austenland is gauged by its proximity with the more elegant written variety. Cf. Wiesenfarth (1967: 17): ‘Isabella and John have no regard for the meaning of words or for propriety in using them. Isabella is a great offender with adjectives and adverbs and has an affection for superlatives’. ‘In an apparent paraphrase of Cowper, Jane Austen defines John Thorpe’s endless “effusions” as “talk” rather than “conversation”. As Jane Austen makes clear everywhere in Northanger Abbey, “conversation” is much more than a verbal exchange, in the looser twentieth-century sense. Thus she notes that Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Thorpe habitually engage in “what they called conversation, but in which there was scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of subject”’ (Brown 1973: 108). Lord Chesterfield observes that ‘Those who contradict others upon all occasions, and make every assertion a matter of dispute, betray by this behaviour an unacquaintance with good-breeding’. Expressions such as ‘“That can’t be true, Sir”, “The affair is as I say”, “That must be false, Sir”’ have to be substituted with such indirect objections as ‘I may be wrong, but—I won’t be positive but I really think—I should rather suppose—if I may be permitted to say’. More generally, ‘in matters of no great importance’ one should ‘complaisantly ... submit [one’s] opinion to that of others; for a victory of this kind often costs a man the loss of a friend.’ (Trusler 1775: 95–6, 104).

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no concern for his fellow speakers’ ‘face’, just as he demonstrates a complete disregard for the correct distribution of turns at talk. He takes up too much conversational space, fills his speeches with a great amount of information which holds no interest for his hearers, and selects himself as next speaker even when he appears to be yielding the floor: ‘I do not know the distance.’ Her brother told her that it was twenty-three miles. ‘Three-and twenty!’ cried Thorpe; ‘five-and-twenty if it is an inch.’ ... ‘You have lost an hour,’ said Morland; ‘it was only ten o’clock when we came from Tetbury.’ ‘Ten o’clock! it was eleven, upon my soul!...Three hours and a half indeed coming only three-and-twenty miles! look at [my horse], and suppose it possible if you can.’ ‘He does look very hot to be sure.’ ‘Hot! he had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot Church ... What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? a neat one, is not it? Well hung; town built; I have not had it a month. It was built for a Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow; he ran it a few weeks, till, I believe, it was convenient to have done with it. I happened just then to be looking out for some light thing of the kind, though I had pretty well determined on a curricle too; but I chanced to meet him on Magdalen Bridge as he was driving into Oxford, last term: “Ah! Thorpe,” says he, “do you happen to want such a little thing as this? it is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.” “Oh! d – ,” said I, “I am your man; what do you ask?” And how much do you think he did, Miss Morland?’ ‘I am sure I cannot guess at all.’ ‘Curricle-hung you see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board, lamps, silver moulding ... He asked fifty guineas; I closed with him directly, threw down the money, and the carriage was mine.’ (NA 30)

In NA, the main source of conversational interest is the friction between gentlemen, or gentlewomen, and boors – the former acting as a sort of magnifying glass highlighting the conversational errors of the latter. Just as the inception of the plot is parodic (the novel starting out as a humorous rewriting of the Gothic genre), many of the characters are excessive, a caricature of common novelistic types. Catherine Morland, the protagonist, is a perfect simpleton, just as Henry Tilney is the perfect gentleman and John Thorpe is the perfect boor; and with such a set of perfect gentlemen, gentlewomen and fools, dialogue turns out to be either comical or wooden. When a verbal interaction is initiated within a set of polite, well-mannered people, the characters appear to be at a loss what to say, because there can be no friction, no real ‘negotiation’ between perfect social-conversational creatures. So as not to remain silent, the interactants make resort to general topics of high intellectual interest, and some of them employ a pompous essayistic tone perhaps intended for the reader’s as well as for the hearer’s instruction: ‘[Henry Tilney speaking] That little boys and girls should be tormented [with the study of history],’ said Henry, ‘is what no one at all acquainted with human


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nature in a civilized world can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe, that they might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim; and that by their method and style, they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb “to torment”, as I observed to be your own method, instead of “to instruct”, supposing them to be now admitted as synonimous.’ (NA 80)

Sense and Sensibility A bit of didactic woodenness still characterizes some of the conversations in S&S. The exchange between Edward Ferrars, Mrs Dashwood, and her three daughters – quoted in Chapter 4 – is one of the neatest examples in Austenland of a wellordered conversation in which a central topic (Edward’s ambition, and ambition in general) is introduced and developed from beginning to end, all characters making their own contribution. The lack of real interpersonal tension, however, creates a sense of inertia, and it takes the debate between Elinor/Sense and Marianne/ Sensibility, or Margaret’s inexperienced (and sensitive) silliness, to put a spark of life into the exchange: ‘About eighteen hundred or two thousand a-year; not more than that.’ Elinor laughed. ‘Two thousand a year! One is my wealth! I guessed how it would end.’ ‘And yet two thousand a-year is a very moderate income,’ said Marianne. ‘A family cannot well be maintained on a smaller. I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less.’ ... ‘Hunters!’ repeated Edward – ‘But why must you have hunters? Every body does not hunt.’ ... ‘I wish,’ said Margaret, striking out a novel thought, ‘that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece!’ (S&S 78–9)

As in NA, in S&S a contrast between gentlemen and fools is created for the sake of conversational vivacity. In the corpus of Austen’s novels, this is the richest in social boors and conversational fools. Unlike NA, however, S&S displays boorish characters who are not morally corrupt: a case in point is Mrs Jennings, the elderly widow of a London tradesman (S&S 131), who is ‘vulgar’ (S&S 29) and kindhearted at the same time (she tries to comfort Marianne when Willoughby deserts her, and wishes everybody happily married). Like John Thorpe in NA, she takes the Lord’s name in vain, and like many other vulgar characters she uses the intensifier ‘monstrous’ (S&S 224–5). But her main transgressions have less to do with vocabulary than with ‘interactional dominance’ and discretion; in the following exchanges with an embarrassed Colonel Brandon, she shamelessly conducts the conversation and pries into what must remain secret: ‘Cautiously avoid talking of either your own or other people’s domestic affairs. Your’s are nothing to them, but tedious; their’s are nothing to you. The subject is a tender one, and it is odds but you touch some body or others’ sore place?’ (Anon. 1811: 184–5).


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‘No bad news, Colonel, I hope;’ said Mrs. Jennings, as soon as he entered the room. ‘None at all, ma’am, I thank you.’ ‘Was it from Avignon? I hope it is not to say that your sister is worse.’ ‘No, ma’am. It came from town, and is merely a letter of business.’ ‘But how came the hand to discompose you so much, if it was only a letter of business? Come, come, this wo’nt do, Colonel; so let us hear the truth of it.’ ‘My dear Madam,’ said Lady Middleton, ‘recollect what you are saying.’ ‘Perhaps it is to tell you that your cousin Fanny is married?’ said Mrs. Jennings, without attending to her daughter’s reproof. ‘No, indeed, it is not.’ ‘Well, then, I know who it is from, Colonel. And I hope she is well.’ ‘Whom do you mean, ma’am?’ said he, colouring a little. ‘Oh! you know who I mean.’ (S&S 54)

Mr and Mrs Palmer (Mrs Jennings’s younger daughter and her husband) are an interesting couple. She is something of a social fool, in Miss Bates’s garrulous manner (cf. below, the section on E); and like Miss Bates, she is also a perfect illustration of ‘female style’ in conversation (if garrulity be excepted). As witnessed by her use of enthusiastic ‘feminine’ adjectives (‘sweet’, ‘charming’, ‘delightful’), she approves of everything and everybody, including her ill-mannered, badtempered husband; and she is continually consulting someone else’s opinion and asking for someone else’s approbation through a great number of ‘appealing’ tags (Stenström 1994: 79–80):10 ‘Well! what a delightful room this is! I never saw anything so charming! Only think, mama, how it is improved since I was here last! I have always thought it such a sweet place, ma’am! (turning to Mrs Dashwood,) but you have made it so charming! Only look, sister, how delightful every thing is! How I should like such a house for myself! Should not you, Mr Palmer?’ (S&S 92)

Mr Palmer, with a temper perhaps ‘a little soured by finding ... that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman’ (S&S 97), is half a conversational boor, half a social critic. On the one hand, he flatly contradicts people and commits face-threatening acts on record, without redress; on the other, his frequent use of irony comically exposes the hypocrisy of a social system dictating extreme politeness even among hostile or indifferent people: ‘You and I, Sir John,’ said Mrs. Jennings, ‘should not stand upon such ceremony.’ ‘Then you would be very ill-bred,’ cried Mr. Palmer. (S&S 96) 10

Though she also shows some of her mother’s behavioural traits when she teases Marianne about Willoughby: ‘Oh! Don’t be so sly before us,’ said Mrs. Palmer; ‘for we know all about it, I assure you; and I admire your taste very much, for I think he is extremely handsome. We do not live a great way from him in the country, you know. Not above ten miles, I dare say’ (S&S 95).


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‘[Mrs Palmer speaking] My love,’ applying to her husband, ‘don’t you long to have the Miss Dashwoods come to Cleveland?’ ‘Certainly,’ – he replied with a sneer – ‘I came into Devonshire with no other view.’ ‘There now’ – said his lady, ‘you see Mr. Palmer expects you ...’. (S&S 97)

Another involuntary source of comic effects is Mr Dashwood, the first representative of the category of social-conversational fools. Like Mr Palmer, he often steps beyond the barrier separating explicitness and indirection, what can be said openly and what must be ‘silenced’, or implicated. Unlike Mr Palmer, however, he is often totally unaware of the existence of this barrier, or cannot locate it with any precision. He does not know how to pursue his conversational goals without giving offence – though he is so evidently a fool that he is usually exempt from censure. When he persuades himself that his half-sister, Elinor, has a chance to marry Colonel Brandon, he thinks it fit to advise her to encourage the Colonel’s attentions, because if she married him there would be no danger of her marrying his own brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars. In doing so, however, he blunders several times, because he cannot refrain from speaking too explicitly of financial-matrimonial matters, as well as of his wife’s opposition to Edward’s prospective engagement with Elinor. Also, he does not realize that his advice goes against the grain of his warnings:11 ‘You are mistaken, Elinor; you are very much mistaken. A very little trouble on your side secures him. Perhaps just at present he may be undecided; the smallness of your fortune may make him hang back; his friends may all advise him against it. But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself. And there can be no reason why you should not try for him. It is not to be supposed that any prior attachment on your side – in short, you know as to an attachment of that kind, it is quite out of the question, the objections are insurmountable – you have too much sense not to see all that. Colonel Brandon must be the man; and no civility shall be wanting on my part, to make him pleased with you and your family. It is a match that must give universal satisfaction. In short, it is a kind of thing that’ – lowering his voice to an important whisper – ‘will be exceedingly welcome to all parties.’ (S&S 195)

The third fool in S&S is the elder Miss Steele, who is too ingenuous to be considered a boor, though she is certainly vulgar and full of herself. Her vulgarity is expressed, from a ‘stylistic’ point of view, in the fixed expressions she continually punctuates her speeches with (‘vast’, ‘Oh, la’); and, from the point of view of topic, in her having ‘beaux’ as a hobby horse (her lexicon is itself rather vulgar). Her naivety 11

The conversational manuals warned their readers against giving unsolicited advice: ‘Giving advice unasked is another piece of rudeness; it is, in effect, declaring ourselves wiser than those to whom we give it; reproaching them with ignorance and inexperience’ (Trusler 1775: 96).

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appears in the ingenuous, falsely covert way she has of talking about herself as men’s object of desire (‘“There now,” said Miss Steele, affectedly simpering, “everybody laughs at me so about the Doctor, and I cannot think why ...”’; S&S 190). Like Mr Dashwood, she is judged a simple soul as well as a vulgar woman, and that is why, though poor, she is spared the open or covert censure of the other characters. Ironically, it is this simple soul who sets the events in motion which will eventually bring about Elinor’s marriage with Edward Ferrars. S&S is, as announced by the title itself, a novel of contrasts: between the Dashwoods and the John Dashwoods, between Colonel Brandon and Willoughby, Mr and Mrs Palmer, Elinor and Lucy Steele. The quiet, undercover war between Elinor and Lucy is particularly interesting in its conversational results. It begins when Lucy, who is afraid and jealous of Elinor, ‘secretly’ reveals to her that she has been engaged with Edward for years. During one of their several, falsely friendly exchanges, it becomes apparent how vital it is for both of them not to let the other have the upper hand. Whatever the outcome of their personal war, Elinor’s deft use of hedges and indirect statements and Lucy’s cruder behaviour (she interrupts her interlocutor and contradicts her more openly) leave us in no doubt as to who is to win the conversational battle: ‘Undoubtedly, if they had known your engagement,’ said [Elinor], ‘nothing could be more flattering than their treatment of you; – but as that is not the case’ – ‘I guessed you would say so’ – ‘replied Lucy quickly – ‘but there was no reason in the world why Mrs. Ferrars should seem to like me, if she did not, and her liking me is every thing ...’. (S&S 209)

The most interesting contrast, however, from the linguistic as well as from the thematic point of view, is between Elinor and Marianne, i.e., sense and sensibility, rationality and the sublime, social propriety and transcendental individualism. In the terms of Austenland, Elinor is a perfectly proper unmarried lady: she does not put herself forward, she speaks neither too little nor too much, and she displays a linguistic fluency which is the equal of her social dexterity. Marianne, on the contrary, does not behave, or rather does not want to behave, like a proper lady – though she is certainly no boor. The whole ill-fated affair with Willoughby demonstrates that she is apt to forget most social and pre-matrimonial proprieties when swayed by sentiment – just as she is apt to forget classical rhetoric and linguistic elegance. Her conversation is usually ‘emotive’, and often ‘emotional’ – i.e., she usually speaks of emotion, and her emotions often pervade her words.12 12 Horst Arndt and Richard W. Janney distinguish between ‘emotive’ and ‘emotional communication’ – the former being a social, strategic way of conveying one’s feelings, the latter being the result of one’s feelings coming to the surface of language (Arndt and Janney 1991: 531). William Downes writes that ‘emotions’, just like ‘evaluations’ and ‘intuitions’, usually fall outside the scope of linguistics though they can come to the surface of language: ‘Linguistics traditionally does not do justice to “non-thought experiences”, those that are not expressed by propositional form, reasoning or speech acts, but which nevertheless can be manifested in language use’ (Downes 2000: 100).


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When she is in the grip of a sweeping feeling, her sentences often become ill- or half-formed, elliptical, unfinished:13 ‘He has, he has,’ cried Marianne, ‘I am sure he has. His air, his coat, his horse. I knew how soon he would come.’ (S&S 74) ‘... But my mother, my dearest, kindest mother, – I feel the justice of what Elinor has urged, and if she were to be made less happy, less comfortable by our absence – Oh! no, nothing should tempt me to leave her ...’. (S&S 133) ‘Invited!’ cried Marianne. (S&S 148) ‘Go to him, Elinor,’ she cried, as soon as she could speak, ‘and force him to come to me. Tell him I must see him again – must speak to him instantly. – I cannot rest – I shall not have a moment’s peace till this is explained – some dreadful misapprehension or other. – Oh go to him this moment.’ (S&S 153)

In the end, sense triumphs over sensibility. Marianne’s despair is conquered, and she marries the sentimentally unappetizing Colonel Brandon. Even before the event, however, her conversational surrender is signalled by the quiet epistolary eloquence with which she speaks of her physical and moral recovery, and of her repentance for all that her mother and her sister have had to suffer on her account:14 ‘... Do not, my dearest Elinor, let your kindness defend what I know your judgement must censure. My illness has made me think – It has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection. Long before I was enough recovered to talk, I was perfectly able to reflect. I considered the past; I saw in my own behaviour since the beginning of our acquaintance with him last autumn, nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others. I saw that my own feelings had prepared my sufferings, and that my want of fortitude under them had almost led me to the grave ...’. (S&S 303) 13 Interestingly, Francesco Marroni sees Marianne’s treatment of everyday language as an ‘explosion’: ‘Austen delineates an itinerary from the explosion to the re-composition of epistemic reference: thanks to Elinor (who embodies cultural mediation), this itinerary culminates in a reworking-cum-assimilation of Marianne’s unpredictable speech [Quello che viene delineato dalla Austen è un itinerario che va dall’esplosione alla ricomposizione dei riferimenti epistemici: itinerario che culmina, grazie all’opera di Elinor (il personaggio della mediazione culturale), nella rielaborazione e insieme nell’assimilazione della parola dell’imprevedibilità]’ (Marroni 1994: 16). 14 Howard S. Babb, one of the few literary critics who has studied Austen’s dialogue in any detail – if impressionistically – writes: ‘in terms of the novel one thing [Marianne] must learn is a rhetoric that plainly differentiates between sense and feeling, a rhetoric that will prove her fully capable of evaluating personality by demonstrating that she can stand outside herself. Thus in her climactic speeches, when she looks back on her past with Willoughby, Marianne takes over a style like the one that Elinor practices most often’ (Babb 1962: 60).


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The speech goes on for much longer, as fully developed as every single sentence is thought out and neatly finished. As so often in Austen, moral uprightness is reflected in syntactic and conversational order. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen’s second published novel probably owes much of its immediate and long-standing popularity to the liveliness of its dialogue. P&P displays some of the characteristics which make NA and S&S conversationally interesting, without those touches of moral and didactic woodenness which characterize certain exchanges between Catherine Morland and the Tilneys, or Edward Ferrars and the Dashwoods. Like S&S, P&P is rich in social-conversational boors and fools, though here the boors mainly belong to the higher orders of society (and are consequently more dangerous). Among the fools, the purest specimen is Mr Collins, a very near relation to Mr John Dashwood in S&S – only blinder and more pompous, as well as having to suffer the misfortune of being exposed to Mr Bennet as a comic reflector: ‘... I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine, that her charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess, and that the most elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by her. – These are the kind of little things which please her ladyship, and it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to pay.’ ‘You judge very properly,’ said Mr. Bennet, ‘and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?’ ‘They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible.’ (P&P 51)

Since Mr Collins is himself incapable of distinguishing between allowed and forbidden topics, he fails to notice that Mr Bennet is actually being insulting when he compliments him on possessing the talent of ‘flattering with delicacy’. Apart from Mr Collins, who is so ‘absurd’ (P&P 51) that most characters hold him beneath their notice, the other fools in P&P belong to the Bennet family: Mary is a sententious simpleton whose speeches always sound like quotations from a sermon or one of Johnson’s essays (‘Pride ... is a very common failing I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it ...’; P&P 13–14); Lizzy and Kitty are continually speaking about soldiers and committing all sorts of socialconversational blunders; Mrs Bennet herself, though more experienced, is a rather vulgar woman who often talks more and more openly than she should (in Volume I, Chapter IX, she criticizes Mr Darcy to his face, making Elizabeth blush for her; P&P 32). Taken together, the Bennet family is an ensemble of very different


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voices. The vivacity of family conversations is guaranteed – the silliness of Mrs Bennet and three of her daughters interacting as it does with Mr Bennet’s sardonic wit, Jane’s quiet kind-heartedness, and Elizabeth’s quick and solid judgement. Free as it is from many of the accoutrements of politeness, dialogue among the Bennets is as quick as it is explicit: After listening one morning to [Kitty’s and Lizzy’s] effusions on this subject [of soldiers], Mr. Bennet coolly observed, ‘From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced.’ ... ‘I am astonished, my dear,’ said Mrs Bennet, ‘that you should be so ready to think your children silly. If I wished to think slightingly of any body’s children, it should not be of my own however.’ ‘If my children are silly I must hope to be always sensible of it.’ ... [they are interrupted by the entrance of a footman with a note from the Bingleys, containing an invitation for Jane] ‘[Mrs Bennet speaking] Well, Jane, who is it from? what is it about? what does he say? Well, Jane, make haste and tell us; make haste, my love.’ ‘It is from Miss Bingley’, said Jane, and then read it aloud ... ‘With the officers!’ cried Lydia. ‘I wonder my aunt did not tell us of that.’ ‘Dining out,’ said Mrs. Bennet, ‘that is very unlucky.’ ‘Can I have the carriage?’ said Jane. ‘No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night.’ ‘That would be a good scheme,’ said Elizabeth, ‘if you were sure that they would not offer to send her home.’ ... ‘I had much rather go in the coach.’ ‘But, my dear, your father cannot spare the horses, I am sure. They are wanted in the farm, Mr. Bennet, are not they?’ ‘They are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them.’ (P&P 21–2)

In the Bingley/Darcy ménage, by contrast, conversations are characterized by greater subtlety and indirection. The Bingley sisters plan to dissuade their brother from marrying Jane Bennet, but far from admitting the nature of their conversational goal,15 they express their regret that Jane, though she is such ‘a very sweet girl’, has bad connections; and Darcy states it as a general truth that it is very hard for any girl with such connections to marry well. In other words, Darcy and the Bingley sisters use both ‘positive’ and ‘negative politeness’ to soften the facethreatening act they are committing against Jane’s suitor (Brown and Levinson 1987: 69–70): ‘I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet, she is really a very sweet girl, and I wish with all my heart she were well settled. But with such a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is no chance of it.’ 15 An interesting goals-and-plans description of communication is provided by Berger (1995).


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‘I think I have heard you say, that their uncle is an attorney in Meryton.’ ‘Yes; and they have another, who lives somewhere else near Cheapside.’ ‘That is capital,’ added her sister, and they both laughed heartily. ‘If they had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside,’ cried Bingley, ‘it would not make them one jot less agreeable.’ ‘But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world,’ replied Darcy. (P&P 26)

Darcy himself is one of the two ‘educated boors’ of high rank that figure among the characters of the novel. ‘Pride’ (personal pride, class pride) is self-evidently one of the main themes of P&P, and it is pride that leads Darcy to behave impolitely towards the Bennet sisters, just as it is pride that dictates his aunt’s commandeering deportment and IRF questioning. Darcy and Lady Catherine both incur censure, but they do not suffer under it, because they are too rich and powerful for that censure to be open or to influence their actions. As seen in Chapter 4, Lady Catherine’s boorishness is mainly expressed in her tyrannical way of dominating a conversation. The only kind of conversational transaction she understands is one in which she asks the questions and evaluates her interlocutor’s answers: ‘... Do you play and sing, Miss Bennet?’ ‘A little.’ ‘Oh! then – some time or other we shall be happy to hear you. Our instrument is a capital one, probably superior to – you shall try it some day. – Do your sisters play and sing?’ ‘One of them does.’ ‘Why did not you all learn? – You ought all to have learned. The Miss Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income as your’s. – Do you draw?’ ... ‘... Pray, what is your age?’ ‘With three younger sisters grown up,’ replied Elizabeth smiling, ‘your Ladyship can hardly expect me to own it.’ ... ‘You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure, – therefore you need not conceal your age.’ ‘I am not one and twenty.’ (P&P 126–8)

Besides her propensity to conduct conversations imperiously, Lady Catherine shows a marked lack of politeness, or of tact (Leech 1983: 104–30), in the way she has of threatening her hearer’s face on record, without any redressive action (for instance, when she offers advice or opinions in a very decided manner; Brown and Levinson 1987: 65–6). Elizabeth, for her own part, is not as obliging as her interrogator could wish: Lady Catherine is evidently used to complying partners, whereas Miss Bennet often evades her questions, supplies inadequate information, or implies more than she says.16 16

In her survey of conversational acts, Stenström (1994: 114–15) gives a list of answer-types: ‘complying’ (giving adequate information explicitly), ‘implying’ (giving adequate information implicitly), ‘supplying’ (giving inadequate information), ‘evading’ (avoiding answering), ‘disclaiming’ (declaring that the answer is unknown).


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Finally, it could be said that the whole plot of P&P centres on Elizabeth’s taming of the ‘educated boor’ Darcy. At the start of their acquaintance, Darcy is haughty and openly contemptuous: amongst other things, he makes an uncomplimentary remark on Elizabeth when Bingley draws his attention to her. Elizabeth’s pretty figure, and her proud resolve not to be impressed by his self-importance, combine to make him fall in love with her. Yet, when he proposes to her – notwithstanding his social and patrimonial reservations – he does so in his habitual haughty style. Even as he is asking for permission, he is doing so in a commandeering manner, as shown by his choice of modal verbs expressing obligation (‘you must allow me’); and when Elizabeth charges him with Jane’s sentimental disappointment, he proudly asserts the correctness of his behaviour on that occasion, and does not refrain from comparing his kindness towards his friend Bingley to his unkindness towards himself (as open a double face-threatening act as will be found in all Austen’s novels): ‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.’ ... ‘I have no wish of denying that I did every thing in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.’ (P&P 145–7)

Elizabeth’s proud refusal teaches him, in time, to swallow his own pride. When Elizabeth meets him at his ancestral house of Pemberley, he employs a style that is almost ‘female’ in its insistent politeness – thus showing that his taming is already underway, if not completed. His requests for permission now contain no modal verbs of obligation, and are formulated with such tact, with such regard for Elizabeth’s negative and his own positive face, as to make it evident that he is no longer certain of being accepted: ‘There is also one other person in the party,’ he continued after a pause, ‘who more particularly wishes to be known to you, – will you allow me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister to your acquaintance during your stay in London?’ (P&P 194)

The Watsons TW was begun in Bath in 1804, and abandoned early in 1805, after the death of Jane Austen’s father. The protagonist of this fragment is Emma Watson, one of four daughters of a sickly father who has lost his wife and cannot provide for his children. At the beginning of the novel, Emma has just returned to her family from the care of an aunt who has had the imprudence of marrying again after her first husband’s death, thus leaving her niece comparatively destitute. A ball is the first occasion to introduce her to the society her family mixes with in Surrey – a society comprehending such distinguished young members of the country aristocracy as Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave. Nothing much happens in the few chapters

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Austen completed, but it is already apparent that Lord Osborne will fall in love with Emma, and that she herself will fall in love with Mr Howard, a parson she also meets at the ball. From Austen’s plans we know that Mr Watson was to die, Emma was to decline a marriage proposal from Lord Osborne, and Mr Howard and Emma were eventually to marry. The interruption of the plan may have to do with biographical as well as internal reasons. Austen may have been dissatisfied with a novel in which everything was too extreme and too open, from the contrast between the middle-class and the aristocracy to the description of the material conditions of life of impoverished single women. While the middle-class Watsons are depicted as poor but dignified, the people belonging to the higher ranks of society are either foolish or corrupt, or both. Lord Osborne is half a social fool, half a conversational boor. On the one hand, he is too simple-minded to understand that some people do not have the means to afford his own lifestyle; on the other, he is not polite enough to avoid dominating the conversation (with an IRF routine which places him in the same category as Lady Catherine) and giving advice too forcibly: ‘Have you been walking this morning?’‘[Emma speaking] No, my Lord. We thought it too dirty.’ ‘You should wear half-boots ... Do not you like Half-boots?’ ‘Yes – but unless they are so stout as to injure their beauty, they are not fit for Country walking.’ – ‘Ladies should ride in dirty weather. – Do you ride?’ ‘No my Lord.’ ‘I wonder every Lady does not. – A woman never looks better than on horseback. – ’ ‘But every woman may not have the inclination, or the means.’ ‘If they knew how much it became them, they would all have the inclination, and I fancy Miss Watson – when once they had the inclination, the means would soon follow.’ (TW 277–8)

If Lord Osborne is a boor and a fool, Tom Musgrave is a rake and a seducer. His seducing technique, however, is again excessive, a far cry from the refined manners of Henry Crawford in MP. In the following exchange, his courtship of Emma is barely covered by his own cancellation of a conversational implicature (Grice 1967/1991; Levinson 1983: 114) – but it remains so open that the narrator registers it as offensive: ‘I could never dread a meeting with Miss Emma Watson, – or any of her Sisters.’ It was lucky that he added that finish. – ‘Were you speaking to me?’ – said Emma, who had caught her own name. – ‘Not absolutely’ – he answered – ‘but I was thinking of you, – as many at a greater distance are probably doing at this moment. – Fine open weather Miss Emma! – Charming season for Hunting.’ (TW 286)

All the characters, however, speak very openly; in most conversational exchanges, the distance between saying and meaning is very short. If Lord Osborne is outspoken in his disdain for poverty, and Tom Musgrave employs explicit seducing techniques, the Watson sisters use no indirection when they discuss their finances and the importance of marriage in the society in which they live:


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‘I am sorry for her anxieties,’ said Emma, – ‘but I do not like her plans or her opinions ... To be so bent on marriage – to pursue a Man merely for the sake of situation – is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. – I would rather be a Teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a Man I did not like.’ – ‘I would rather do anything than be Teacher at a school’ – said her sister. ‘I have been at school, Emma, and know what a Life they lead; you never have. – I should not like marrying a disagreeable Man any more than yourself, – but I do not think there are very many disagreeable Men; – I think I could like any good humoured Man with a comfortable Income. – I suppose my Aunt brought you up to be rather refined.’ (TW 256)

The Steventon novels never speak so openly of (comparative) poverty, though the Dashwoods in S&S and the Bennets in P&P are certainly in a bad way (but not so bad as the Watsons). In the Chawton novels, much that is on the surface here becomes submerged. In TW, it is as if Austen were trying to watch (female) poverty from a closer angle – and perhaps she finally shrunk from such an explicit description. From MP onwards, she tried to endow her characters (and her narrators) with a talent for indirection. Mansfield Park Everything, including conversation, becomes less extreme and more subdued in the Chawton novels. From MP onwards, characters become more complex, and are less easily classifiable as social-conversational types. Some of them can still be identified as fools or boors, but their infringements are less serious. Conversations, just like characters, are all more or less polite. Even Miss Bates in E, though she is culpable of many infractions, generally knows how to behave, and when attacked by Emma, (cf. Chapter 6) shows a dignity no John Thorpe or Mr Collins would ever be capable of. The nearest thing to a fool in MP is Mr Rushworth, the rich simpleton whose fate it is to be selected for marriage by Maria Bertram, and then discarded in favour of Henry Crawford. Though he occasionally embarrasses his hearers, Rushworth is a fool, not a boor: he is generally well-bred, but does not understand his own limitations (before marrying Maria to him, Sir Thomas perceives that he ‘was an inferior young man, as ignorant in business as in books, with opinions in general unfixed, and without seeming much aware of it himself’; MP 156). However ingenuous he may be, however, he is not a clown like Mr Collins, who is consistently making a fool of himself; he knows, for instance, how to be indirect, and when he expresses his jealousy he does so under the pretence of expressing a dislike of continual rehearsing: ‘If I must say what I think,’ continued Mr. Rushworth, ‘in my opinion it is very disagreeable to be always rehearsing. It is having too much of a good thing. I am not so fond of acting as I was at first. I think we are a great deal better employed, sitting comfortably here among ourselves, and doing nothing.’ (MP 146)

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Just as there is no all-round fool, there are no perfect boors in MP. Nobody contradicts people the way John Thorpe or Mr Palmer do; nobody pries into someone else’s affairs like Mrs Jennings, bosses people around like Lady Catherine, or is openly offensive like the untamed Darcy. Yet many characters have very assertive conversational styles. Excepting Edmund, the Bertram brothers and sisters all speak as if they feared no contradiction and were ready to brook no denial. Tom Bertram, being a male, and the eldest brother at that, is the most imperative, even in grammatical mood (at least when speaking to his younger brother): ‘I know all that,’ said Tom displeased. ‘I know my father as well as you do, and I’ll take care that his daughters do nothing to distress him. Manage your own concerns, Edmund, and I’ll take care of the rest of the family.’ (MP 100)

When grafted onto his sister Julia’s style, Tom’s imperative translates into a modal verb of desirability which is just a little more tactful, and every inch as strong: ‘Those who see quickly, will resolve quickly and act quickly,’ said Julia [to Henry Crawford]. ‘You can never want employment. Instead of envying Mr Rushworth, you should assist him with your opinion.’ (MP 47)

The Bertram sisters form a very tight trio with Mrs Norris, who, though as domineering in spirit as Lady Catherine, is neither rich nor independent, and must therefore veil her will to dominance behind a concern for others’ welfare and for the good management of domestic affairs (she has no real power or authority of her own, so she relies on the authority of those who are more powerful than herself in order to exercise influence)17. The assertiveness of this trio, their ‘semantically dominant’ assurance as to what is right or wrong (‘That will not quite do’, ‘I know’, ‘the truth is’, ‘I will answer for it’, ‘there is no idea’), stands out very neatly in comparison with Edmund’s more prudent, interrogative style (even as he is planning to do something with words, for his goal is to have Fanny participate in the Sotherton excursion):18 ‘But why is it necessary,’ said Edmund, ‘that Crawford’s carriage, or his only should be employed? Why is no use to be made of my mother’s chaise? I could not, when the scheme was first mentioned the other day, understand why a visit from the family were not to be made in the carriage of the family.’

17 According to David Bell’s ‘political linguistics’, ‘Power is the use of sanctions that may be either positive (inducements) or negative (punishments) ... Authority statements typically take the form of orders, instructions, directives, pronouncements, commands’, while ‘the user of influence merely predicts certain contingent outcomes that will follow from certain types of behaviour’ (Bell 1995: 44). 18 Amongst other things, politeness in Austen’s world is signalled by the distance between the locutionary surface and the illocutionary and perlocutionary levels of speech (Austin 1962).


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‘What! cried Julia: ‘go box’d up three in a post-chaise in this weather, when we may have seats in a barouche! No, my dear Edmund, that will not quite do.’ ‘Besides,’ said Maria, ‘I know that Mr. Crawford depends upon taking us. After what passed at first, he would claim it as a promise.’ ‘And my dear Edmund,’ added Mrs. Norris, ‘taking out two carriages when one will do, would be trouble for nothing; and between ourselves, coachman is not very fond of the roads between this and Sotherton; he always complains bitterly of the narrow lanes scratching his carriage, and you know one should not like to have dear Sir Thomas when he comes home find all the varnish scratched off.’ ‘That would not be a very handsome reason for using Mr. Crawford’s,’ said Maria; ‘But the truth is, that Wilcox is a very stupid fellow, and does not know how to drive. I will answer for it that we shall find no inconvenience from narrow roads on Wednesday.’ ‘There is no hardship, I suppose, nothing unpleasant,’ said Edmund, ‘in going in the barouche box.’ ‘Unpleasant!’ cried Maria; ‘Oh! dear, I believe it would be generally thought the favourite seat. There can be no comparison as to one’s view of the country. Probably, Miss Crawford will choose the barouche box herself.’ ‘There can be no objection then to Fanny’s going with you; there can be no doubt of your having room for her.’ ‘Fanny!’ repeated Mrs. Norris; ‘my dear Edmund, there is no idea of her going with us. She stays with her aunt. I told Mrs. Rushworth so. She is not expected.’ (MP 61–2)

In comparison with Tom Bertram and his sisters, the Crawfords are more polite and tactful – but at least as dominant as their neighbours. Henry Crawford is ready to boast that he never asks for information, even when he is looking for directions (‘No, I never inquire. But I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it.’; MP 189). Nevertheless, he does use polite interrogative forms, as well as hedges, when he must defer to someone’s authority (Sir Thomas’s, for instance): ‘I want to be your neighbour, Sir Thomas, as you have perhaps heard me telling Miss Price. May I hope for your acquiescence and for your not influencing your son against such a tenant?’ (MP 193)

The revealing trait in the conversational style of this self-centred character (it is Henry Crawford’s egotism which precipitates the situation, leading him to court Maria Bertram after her marriage with Mr Rushworth) is that even as he is deferring to someone else’s authority, he refers to himself and his own ‘wants.’ When he tells his sister that he is in love with Fanny Price, he never thinks of mentioning her will and her determination (a self-assured man like him would never dream of being refused by someone inferior by birth and fortune): ‘I could not get away sooner – Fanny looked so lovely! – I am quite determined, Mary. My mind is entirely made up. Will it astonish you? No – You must be aware that I am quite determined to marry Fanny Price.’ (MP 228)

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Interestingly, when his ego has to suffer the blow of Fanny’s rejection (but his ego is strong enough to keep the siege going), a ‘taming’ process begins which resembles very closely the one undergone by Darcy in P&P. In his case, the lady is not to be won, and Crawford’s conversational faults had never been as great or evident as Darcy’s – but the change is striking all the same. First-person pronouns almost disappear (in favour of the second person), and when they do appear, they no longer function as subjects for verbs of volition. He asks for permission and advice, and acts on the few answers he can get out of a perplexed Fanny: ‘... Shall I go? Do you advise it?’ ‘I advise! – you know very well what is right.’ ‘Yes. When you give me your opinion, I always know what is right. Your judgment is my rule of right.’ ‘Oh, no! – do not say so. We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. Good bye; I wish you a pleasant journey to-morrow.’ ‘Is there nothing I can do for you in town?’ ‘Nothing, I am much obliged to you.’ ‘Have you any message for anybody?’ ‘My love to your sister, if you please; and when you see my cousin – my cousin Edmund, I wish you would be so good as to say that – I suppose I shall soon hear from him.’ ‘Certainly; and if he is lazy or negligent, I will write his excuses myself – ’ (MP 324)

His sister Mary is a curious mixture of ‘female’ and dominant styles, as shown in the apology she makes to Fanny for riding too long while the latter is waiting. She uses endearing terms (‘My dear Miss Price’), modestly lays all the blame on herself (Leech 1983: 132), yet she also offers no real reason for her actions, and maintains that since her behaviour cannot be justified in any way, then in a sense it must be forgiven. She uses a modal verb expressing strong obligation (‘you must’) even as she is asking for forgiveness (‘forgive me’) and using tactful hedges (‘if you please’): ‘My dear Miss Price ... I am come to make my own apologies for keeping you waiting – but I have nothing in the world to say for myself – I knew it was very late, and that I was behaving extremely ill; and, therefore, if you please, you must forgive me. Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.’ (MP 54)

Edmund wants to marry her, but in order to do so he must struggle with her and win – and it is because he fails to dominate her, because he is not able to overcome her ambition and her pride (she is attracted to him, but does not want to be a clergyman’s wife), that he renounces her and marries his subordinate cousin, Fanny. Mary and Edmund fight several battles over the crucial question of church orders. They are both of them very skilful conversational wrestlers, who know how to argue a very personal point in very general terms (so as to avoid open FTAs):


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‘Oh! no doubt he [an impersonal clergyman] is very sincere in preferring an income ready made, to the trouble of waiting for one; and has the best intentions of doing nothing all the rest of his days but eat, drink, and grow fat. It is indolence Mr. Bertram, indeed. Indolence and love of ease – a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but to be slovenly and selfish – read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine.’ ‘There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character.’ (MP 87)

Ironically, among all these dominant characters (for even Edmund, though very polite, is assertive in his upright and modest way), Fanny, the most perfect example of subordination and ‘female style’ in Austen’s works, is the only one who gets what she wants. Maria and Julia Bertram want Henry Crawford, and have to content themselves with Mr Rushworth and Mr Yates. Edmund Bertram wants Mary Crawford, but in the end he marries Fanny. Mary Crawford sacrifices Edmund to her pride and ambition. Fanny is in love with Edmund, and manages to marry him after Henry’s elopement with Maria, and Mary’s bland condemnation of such an enormous social crime. As soon as the young Fanny comes to Mansfield Park, she is taught in the ways of social-conversational subordination by her aunt Norris and her cousins (Edmund excepted): in order to survive, she has to cancel herself, to deny her own wants and make herself as useful to others as she can. Paradoxically, it is thanks to this self-cancellation that she insinuates herself into other people’s lives and eventually becomes mistress of her own. It is through the ‘rhetoric of silence’ that she captivates males who like being listened and deferred to. Almost four decades before the publication of MP, the evangelical writer Hannah More (Fanny herself is a sort of evangelical model) had extolled the virtue and usefulness of female silence: ‘How easily and effectually may a wellbred woman promote the most useful and elegant conversation, almost without speaking a word! for the modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence ... A woman, in a company where she has the least influence, may promote any subject by a profound and invariable attention, which shews that she is pleased with it, and by an illuminated countenance, which proves she understands it. This obliging attention is the most flattering encouragement in the world to men of sense and letters, to continue any topic of instruction or entertainment they happen to be engaged in’ (More 1777: 40–41). The hero of More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife – a fictional translation of the author’s ideology – finally finds the perfect bride in a young woman who closely resembles Fanny Price, though she is far more perfect and far more wooden as a fictional character. When men are speaking, Lucilla has ‘her attention always riveted on the speaker. If the speaker was Dr. Barlow, or her father, or any one whom she thought entitled to particular


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respect, she gently laid down her work, and as quietly resumed it when they had done speaking’ (More 1808/1995: 105).19 Conversationally, Fanny is a constant but inaudible presence in the novel. When questioned, she speaks briefly, in a low voice, in the interrogative mood (asking for someone else’s approval), by litotes, and her modest interventions (she is always submissive in tone and fact) are often ‘swallowed’ or summed up by the narrator: ‘Certainly,’ said Fanny with gentle earnestness. (MP 74) ‘I am disappointed,’ said she, in a low voice, to Edmund. (MP 68) ‘Do not you think,’ said Fanny, after a little consideration, ‘that this impropriety is a reflection itself upon Mrs. Crawford, as her niece has been entirely brought up by her? She cannot have given her right notions of what was due to the admiral.’ (MP 51) ‘... whatever profession Dr. Grant had chosen, he would have taken a – – not a good temper into it;’ (MP 88) ‘Fanny,’ said Edmund, after looking at her attentively; ‘I am sure you have the headach?’ She could not deny it, but said it was not very bad. (MP 57)

However, it would be wrong to deduce that since Fanny so often disappears vocally from the scene, her silent gaze is absent from it, or that since she never speaks of her wants, she has no ambitions and does nothing to further her purposes. Her self-silencing is a strategy as well as a necessity – and when she finally has the opportunity to pursue her (unconscious?) plans, she does not waste it. When Edmund relates his final, decisive argument with Mary Crawford, Fanny tries to reinforce his own negative impressions (‘Cruel! ... quite cruel! at such a moment to give way to gaiety and to speak with lightness, and to you! Absolute cruelty!’; MP 358); and when after a while he is starting to relent, she adds a detail which casts an evil shadow on Mary’s character (she had heard her say that if Tom Bertram had died, sir Thomas’s inheritance would have fallen in better hands). The fact that her intervention is, once again, summed up by the narrator, should not blind us to its ruthless timing: [Edmund and Fanny] continued to talk of Miss Crawford alone, and how she had attached him, and how delightful nature had made her, and how excellent she would have been, had she fallen into good hands earlier. Fanny, now at liberty to speak openly, felt more than justified in adding to his knowledge of The dependence of MP on the ‘evangelical novels’ written by the likes of More is widely recognized, though there is no universal agreement on the ideological nature of the relationship. A recent account which problematizes this dependence, and situates it in the context of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace, is Mandal (2007: 91–130). 19


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her real character, by some hint of what share his brother’s state of health might be supposed to have in her wish for a complete reconciliation. This was not an agreeable intimation. Nature resisted it for a while. It would have been a vast deal pleasanter to have had her more disinterested in her attachment; but his vanity was not of a strength to fight long against reason. (MP 361)

Emma In E as in MP, there are no perfect social-conversational fools or boors. This might seem a strange contention to make regarding a novel which contains Miss Bates and Mrs Elton – but even Miss Bates and Mrs Elton are characters rather than types, their functions in the Highbury society extending far beyond those of a Mr Collins or of a Lady Catherine. Of course, from the psychological point of view, Miss Bates is a fool, and Mrs Elton is a boor, but readers are never allowed to merely laugh or grow indignant at their behaviour, and quite often, they are forced to acknowledge their social and conversational powers (while Mr Collins is invariably made fun of, and Lady Catherine is never shown as less than a virago). Mrs Elton’s bad manners, we are given to understand, have something to do with her being the daughter of a Bristol tradesman (E 164). In Austenland, those who have connections with trade are sometimes allowed to be good, but never refined. Mrs Elton, unlike Mrs Jennings in S&S, tries to acquire the socialconversational manners of her betters (or, of that country gentry her father has bought and sold his way into), but blunders continually. Sometimes she is openly (though unwittingly) face-threatening, as when she flatly contradicts Emma: ‘Oh! yes, I am quite aware of that. It is the garden of England, you know. Surry is the garden of England.’ ‘Yes; but we must not rest our claims on that distinction. Many counties, I believe, are called the garden of England, as well as Surry.’ ‘No, I fancy not,’ replied Mrs. Elton, with a most satisfied smile. ‘I never heard any county but Surry called so.’ Emma was silenced. (E 245–6)

Usually, though, Mrs Elton is more skilled in the use of indirection. As seen in Chapter 4, she speaks too much in the first person, but she knows how to praise herself while appearing to praise somebody else. Also, one of Mrs Elton’s favourite indirect techniques is ‘contrastive stress’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 217) – a technique she often uses to commit off-record FTAs (cf. Chapter 6): ‘It is a sort of thing,’ cried Mrs. Elton emphatically, ‘which I should not have thought myself privileged to inquire into. Though, perhaps, as the Chaperon of the party – I never was in any circle – exploring parties – young ladies – married women – ’ (E 334)

Even Miss Bates, though she is perhaps the funniest and certainly the most famous fool in Austenland, is not a perfect fool. Her conversational style displays a garrulous

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naivety which is endearing and irritating at the same time – yet one also suspects a degree of craft in this simplicity. Surely, she infringes many of the rules which govern the allocation of turns in conversation (whenever she speaks, she exercises a perceptible ‘quantitative dominance’), as well as the selection of allowable topics. She speaks too much, and relates endless anecdotes20 and conversations of no interest whatsoever for her hearers (though Austen drops many hints about the mysteries of this novel in her long speeches). At the same time, and except for their lengthiness, Miss Bates’s speeches are as perfect an illustration of ‘female style’ as can be found in Austen’s novels (she may be ‘quantitatively dominant’, but she is ‘semantically’ and ‘strategically’ deferent). She is continually dispraising herself, praising and thanking other people (Leech 1983: 132), appealing to their judgement through the use of questions and question tags. She is conscious of her position of total subordination (as a poor widow), and knows that she must bow to everybody else’s power and authority (Bell 1995: 44): ‘Thank you. You are so kind!’ replied the happily deceived aunt, while eagerly hunting for the letter. – ‘Oh! here it is. I was sure it could not be far off; but I had put my huswife upon it, you see, without being aware, and so it was quite hid, but I had it in my hand so very lately that I was almost sure it must be on the table. I was reading it to Mrs. Cole, and since she went away, I was reading it again to my mother, for it is such a pleasure to her – a letter from Jane – that she can never hear it often enough; so I knew it could not be far off, and here it is, only just under my huswife – and since you are so kind as to wish to hear what she says; – but, first of all, I really must, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter – only two pages you see – hardly two – and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half. My mother often wonders that I can make it out so well. She often says, when the letter is first opened, “Well, Hetty, now I think you will be put to it to make out all that chequer-work” – don’t you, ma’am? – And then I tell her, I am sure she would contrive to make it out herself, if she had nobody to do it for her – every word of it – I am sure she would pore over it till she had made out every word. And, indeed, though my mother’s eyes are not so good as they were, she can see amazingly well still, thank God! with the help of spectacles. It is such a blessing! ...’. All this spoken very fast obliged Miss Bates to stop for breath; and Emma said something very civil about the excellence of Miss Fairfax’s handwriting. ‘You are extremely kind,’ replied Miss Bates highly gratified; ‘you who are such a judge, and write so beautifully yourself. I am sure there is nobody’s praise that could give me so much pleasure as Miss Woodhouse’s. My mother does not hear; she is a little deaf you know. Ma’am,’ addressing her, ‘do you hear what Miss Woodhouse is so obliging to say about Jane’s handwriting?’ (E 139–40)

Since Emma is almost always the narrator’s reflector in E, readers see Miss Bates through her patronizing eyes, and are led to think the elderly spinster as simple20 ‘Avoid telling stories in company, unless they are very short indeed, and very applicable to the subject you are upon; in this case relate them in as few words as possible, without the least digression, and with some apology’ (Trusler 1775: 92).


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minded as she appears. So they share Emma’s shock when she realizes that she has just committed an on-record FTA against the harmless lady, and that the latter has perfectly understood her meaning (cf. Chapter 6): ‘Oh! very well,’ exclaimed Miss Bates, ‘then I need not be uneasy. “Three things very dull indeed.” That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as I open my mouth, shan’t I? – (looking round will the most good-humoured dependence on every body’s assent) – Do not you all think I shall?’ Emma could not resist. ‘Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me – but you will be limited as to number – only three at once.’ ... ‘Ah! – well – to be sure. Yes, I see what she means, (turning to Mr. Knightley,) and I will try to hold my tongue. I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend.’ (E 335)

Miss Bates and Mrs Elton are marginal characters, though they both have their conversational and narrative roles to play; while the obvious protagonist of the novel is the eponymous heroine. Emma is also the narrator’s reflector, the (often distorting) mirror through which readers are allowed to watch (cf. Chapter 1). Even more consistently than in Austen’s previous works, we see all events as filtered by Emma’s senses and prejudices. Consequently, most characters display their nature to the reader only in connection with Emma, and this holds true for conversational styles as well as for morals and manners. E can be described as the story of Emma’s taming by Mr Knightley.21 The protagonist starts out as an independent, self-willed young woman who wants to exercise social power and conversational dominance; and ends up as a more subordinate lady who is very glad to admit that her husband had been right in all their transactions, herself almost invariably wrong. At the beginning, she displays her will to power in her successful attempt to marry Miss Taylor to Mr Weston, and in her failed attempts to marry Harriet Smith above her social level. From the conversational point of view, she gets on very well with those who accept her quantitative, semantic and strategic dominance (Miss Taylor and Harriet Smith), while she has difficulties with those who exercise quantitative (Miss Bates), semantic (Mrs Elton), and strategic dominance (Mr Knightley). Harriet Smith, in particular, is yet another illustration of ‘female style’: in her transactions with Emma, she speaks only when questioned, and always in a compliant vein (‘to be sure’, ‘certainly’, ‘indeed’). A selection shows the parasitic nature of her interventions – since they are full of cohesive ties with Emma’s speeches, they rarely make sense on their own: 21

It has been described as the story of Emma’s passing from (female) fancy to (male) judgment (‘The world of Emma’s fancy fades into the clear, cool light of day’; Lascelles 1939: 76); but such a description accepts the male world-view implicitly inspiring Knightley’s ideas.


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‘Oh, yes! – that is, no – I do not know – but I believe he has read a good deal – but not what you would think any thing of ...’. (E 24) ‘Oh! not handsome – not at all handsome ...’. (E 25) ‘To be sure. Oh! yes, it is not likely you should ever have observed him – but he knows you very well indeed – I mean by sight.’ (E 25) ‘To be sure, so it is. But they live very comfortably ...’. (E 26) ‘Certainly, he is not like Mr. Knightley ...’. (E 28) ‘There is no saying, indeed!’ (E 29) ‘Will he, indeed, that will be very bad.’ (E 29)

Another example of ‘female style’ is Jane Fairfax – but with Jane Fairfax, Emma cannot sympathize or commune at all. Partly, Emma is jealous of Jane because unlike Harriet, she is on a par with her as to beauty and accomplishments – but it is also evident that when she first meets the socially unimportant Miss Fairfax, the heiress of Hartfield tries to patronize her in the same way as Miss Smith. Jane Fairfax, however, is far more skilled than Harriet Smith in the ways of indirection, and has her own secrets to hide (the secret engagement with Frank Churchill). Therefore, she uses her ‘female style’ to evade Emma’s grasp: while she defers to everybody else’s judgment, it is evident that she does so in order to avoid awkward topics.22 Emma, as the narrator informs the reader, sees through her artifice and does not forgive her: The like reserve prevailed on other topics. She and Mr. Frank Churchill had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known they were a little acquainted; but not a syllable of real information could Emma procure as to what he truly was. ‘Was he handsome?’ – ‘She believed he was reckoned a very fine young man.’ ‘Was he agreeable?’ – ‘He was generally thought so.’ ‘Did he appear a sensible young man; a man of information?’ – ‘At a watering-place, or in a common London acquaintance, it was difficult to decide on such points. Manners were all that could be safely judged of, under a much longer knowledge than they had of Mr. Churchill. She believed every body found his manners pleasing.’ Emma could not forgive her. (E 151)

Emma’s real war, however, is with Mr Knightley; and it is a war she will finally lose by accepting marriage. Theirs is a clash between opposing world-views – not, as Knightley would have Emma and us believe, a conflict between ‘fancy’ and 22

‘Be careful not to appear dark and mysterious, lest you should be thought suspicious; than which there cannot be a more unamiable character. If you appear mysterious and reserved, others will be truly so with you; and in this case, there is an end to improvement, for you will gather no information. Be reserved, but never seem so’ (Trusler 1775: 99–100).


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‘judgment’, but one between her will and his own. They have their worst row over Harriet’s prospective marriage to Mr Martin – an event which Knightley deems desirable and Emma improper. Beside himself with rage at Emma’s momentary triumph, Knightley does not lose any of his time and energy in tactful repartees, and ends up flatly contradicting her propositions: ‘Come,’ said she, ‘I will tell you something, in return for what you have told me [he has just informed her of Martin’s intentions]. He did speak yesterday – that is, he wrote, and was refused.’ This was obliged to be repeated before it could be believed; and Mr. Knightley actually looked red with surprize and displeasure, as he stood up, in tall indignation, and said, ‘Then she is a greater simpleton than I ever believed her. What is the foolish girl about?’ ‘Oh! to be sure,’ cried Emma, ‘it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.’ ‘Nonsense! a man does not imagine any such thing. But what is the meaning of this? Harriet Smith refuse Robert Martin? madness, if it is so; but I hope you are mistaken.’ ‘I saw her answer, nothing could be clearer.’ ‘You saw her answer! you wrote her answer too. Emma, this is your doing. You persuaded him to refuse him.’ ‘And if I did, (which, however, I am far from allowing,) I should not feel that I had done wrong. Mr. Martin is a very respectable young man, but I cannot admit him to be Harriet’s equal ...’. ‘Not Harriet’s equal!’ exclaimed Mr. Knightley loudly and warmly; and with calmer asperity, added, a few moments afterwards, ‘No, he is not her equal indeed, for he is as much her superior in sense as in situation ...’. (E 54)

Emma, however, is tamed by no argument, whether advanced by Mr Knightley or anybody else: her final defeat is a practical one, in the sense that events refuse to obey her. Mr Elton proposes to her instead of Harriet, and she is forced to acknowledge that her plans have been defeated – that her vision of reality has been proven wrong. We can ask ourselves what would have happened had she managed to direct Miss Smith’s destiny as she had directed Miss Taylor’s – for after all, Emma marries the only man who has been able to stand his conversational ground with her, and to win an argument with the incontrovertible strength of facts. Persuasion P is, like MP, a Cinderella story. Anne Elliot has a vain and selfish father (Sir Walter, a baronet), an unmarried elder sister exactly like him (Elizabeth), and a very self-centred younger sister (Mrs Charles Musgrove). She herself is modest and self-effacing, both by inclination and as a consequence of an unhappy love affair – seven years before the events related in the novel, she fell in love with Captain

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Wentworth, whom her family and friends persuaded her not to marry. By chance, Captain Wentworth – now a rich and successful navy officer – is thrown back on her path: after recovering from the shock of finding her altered for the worse, he experiences a renewal of his feelings, proposes to her again, and is accepted. There are no all-round boors or fools in P, though Sir Walter and Anne’s sisters are certainly foolish, and exposed as such. Sir Walter is a man with two hobby horses, both pivoting on his own person: rank and personal beauty (‘Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character’, as the narrator informs us; P 10). He continually pesters people with these fixations, and uses them as yardsticks to judge everything and everybody: ‘Yes; [the navy] is in two points offensive to me; I have two strong grounds of objection to it. First, as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and secondly, as it cuts up a man’s youth and vigour most horribly; a sailor grows old sooner than any other man; I have observed it all my life. A man is in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to, and of becoming prematurely an object of disgust himself, than in any other line ...’. (P 22)

His eldest daughter is almost an exact copy of himself. Quite often, they are attended in their house by Mr Shepherd and Mrs Clay, a lawyer and his widowed daughter – two exponents of that ‘pseudo-gentry’ that moved in the same sphere as the landed gentry, but had to support themselves through work (Spring: 1983). In order to conciliate and get round Sir Walter (whom Mrs Clay hopes to marry, and both hope to persuade to move house for financial reasons), they adopt a very prudent and tactful ‘complying’ style: ‘I must take leave to observe, Sir Walter,’ said Mr. Shepherd one morning ... Mr. Shepherd laughed, as he knew he must, at this wit, and then added, ‘I presume to observe, Sir Walter ...’. Sir Walter only nodded. But soon afterwards, rising and pacing the room, he observed sarcastically, ‘There are few among the gentlemen of the navy, I imagine, who would not be surprised to find themselves in a house of this description.’ ‘They would look around them, no doubt, and bless their good fortune,’ said Mrs. Clay, for Mrs. Clay was present ... Here Anne spoke, – ‘The navy, I think, who have done so much for us, have at least an equal claim with any other set of men, for all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give. Sailors work hard for their comforts, we must all allow.’ ‘Very true, very true. What Miss Anne says, is very true,’ was Mr. Shepherd’s rejoinder, and ‘Oh! certainly,’ was his daughter’s; but Sir Walter’s remark was, soon afterwards – ’ (P 20–22)

Sir Walter’s youngest daughter, while perhaps slightly less vain, is no less selfcentred than he is. Her conversational manner is the very opposite of ‘female


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style’, because she always speaks in the first person and puts her own needs before the welfare of others: ‘I am sorry to find you unwell,’ replied Anne. ‘You sent me such a good account of yourself on Thursday!’ ‘Yes, I made the best of it; I always do; but I was very far from well at the time; and I do not think I ever was so ill in my life as I have been all this morning – very unfit to be left alone, I am sure. Suppose I were to be seized of a sudden in some dreadful way, and not able to ring the bell! So, Lady Russel would not get out. I do not think she has been in this house three times this summer.’ (P 35)

By contrast, Anne is always silent about herself. Like Fanny, she tends to disappear from all interactions involving more than two people: during one of the first conversations including Wentworth and the Musgraves, she does not utter a single word, even when she is spoken to (‘Anne suppressed a smile, and listened kindly’; P 56). Like Fanny’s, her interventions are often summed up by the narrator. When she does speak, she usually speaks of others, reserving for herself the role of helper or comforter – doing what Arlie Hochschild calls ‘emotional labour’.23 Even when she has to act, and as a consequence to speak, she does so in a very modest way. When Louisa Musgrove falls and hits her head on the Cobb in Lyme Regis, she finds herself in the necessity of taking charge, and therefore of using ‘language in action’ (Carter and McCarthy 1996: 58–9). Her first directives (Searle 1979: 13–14) are formulated in the imperative mood, but very soon she masters herself so well as to be able to formulate her orders as questions: ‘Go to him, go to him,’ cried Anne, ‘for heaven’s sake go to him. I can support her myself. Leave me, and go to him. Rub her hands, rub her temples; here are salts, – take them, take them.’ ... ‘A surgeon!’ cried Anne ... ‘Captain Benwick, wouldn’t it be better for Captain Benwick? He knows where a surgeon is to be found.’ (P 92)

Her rise from her initial unimportant and neglected state is mirrored in her acquisition of relative conversational dominance – for in Austen’s novels, becoming powerful means gaining a right to speak, just as losing power means being sentenced to silence (or to harmless, meaningless chatter, which is another form of silence). In the course of the novel, Anne gradually finds a polite but assured voice. After Wentworth’s second proposal, she goes so far as to gently reprehend him about what he ‘should’ or ‘should not’ have thought: ‘You should have distinguished,’ replied Anne. ‘You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different. If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, I thought it was my duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.’ (P 197) 23 In Deborah Cameron’s summary, ‘the kind of work that involves making others feel good’ (Cameron 2000: 80).


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Sanditon This final fragment of a novel contains some interesting characters and at least one thematic novelty, though its plot is only a sketch. Mr and Mrs Parker have a cart accident somewhere in Sussex; he sprains an ankle, and they are helped and welcomed by the Heywood family. When they go back to their home town of Sanditon, they carry along one of Mr Heywood’s daughters, Miss Charlotte, ‘a very pleasing woman of two and twenty’ (S 303), who is to stay with them for a while. From the structural point of view, Charlotte functions as the alien reflector casting back an image of the Parkers’ home town to the reader. Sanditon has been transformed into a seaside resort, and in Mr Parker’s intentions (‘Sanditon was a second Wife and four Children to him’; S 302) it is meant to compete with Brighton and Eastbourne. The novel is cut short before any couples are formed, but it appears quite likely that Charlotte will fall in love with Mr Parker’s absent younger brother, Sidney. Mr Parker is no doubt the most interesting character in the fragment, and he also provides the link with its new thematic net. By birth, he belongs to the landed gentry (he himself proudly presents his family as ‘holding Landed Property in the Parish of Sanditon’; S 298), yet he also shares the aspirations of the rising commercial class, of which he is a member by inclination if not by business instinct. It is interesting that while all characters with commercial connections are shown as vulgar in the other novels, in S we see a refined country gentleman joining in the gold rush (the gold rush itself is mildly satirized). The novelty is not only of a thematic, but also of a linguistic nature. When he speaks of his commercial enterprise and hobby horse, Mr Parker employs the language of selling and advertising. He employs no adjectives but in the superlative, lists all the required qualities (breeze, sand, bathing, distance from London), and appeals to the authority of unspecified but multitudinous admirers: ‘... Such a place as Sanditon, Sir, I may say was wanted, was called for. – Nature had marked it out – had spoken in most intelligible characters – the finest, purest Sea Breeze on the Coast – acknowledged to be so – Excellent bathing – fine hard Sand – Deep Water ten yards from the Shore – no Mud – no Weeds – no slimey rocks – Never was there a place more palpably designed by Nature for the resort of the Invalid – the very Spot which Thousands seemed in need of. – The most desirable distance from London! (S 299)

The other inhabitants of S lead the reader to suspect that Austen was coming back to the lighter characterization techniques of the Steventon novels, because most characters are comic types. Lady Denham is an upstart and a boor: she married a rich Mr Hollis, and then a Sir Denham. Used as she is to being deferred to by everybody (she is the ‘grand lady’ of Sanditon), in her conversation she is (quantitatively, semantically, strategically) domineering, but blundering. She uses vulgar intensifiers like ‘monstrous’ (S 325), and refers too openly to (small) financial matters and her own (social, financial) importance, thus implicitly betraying her


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commercial descent. She is Mr Parker’s partner in the Sanditon business, but lacks the high-flown enthusiasm which in his case redeems commercial interest: ‘Oh! – well. – But I should not like to have Butcher’s meat raised, though – and I shall keep it down as long as I can. – Aye – that young Lady smiles I see; – I dare say she thinks me an odd sort of a Creature, – but she will come to care about such matters herself in time. Yes, yes, my Dear, depend upon it, you will be thinking of the price of Butcher’s meat in time – though you may not happen to have quite such a Servants Hall full to feed, as I have. – And I do beleive those are best off, that have fewest Servants. – I am not a Woman of Parade, as all the World knows, and if it was not for what I owe to poor Mr. Hollis’s memory, I should never keep up Sanditon House as I do; – it is not for my own pleasure. – Well Mr. Parker – and the other is a Boarding school, a French Boarding School, is it? – No harm in that. – They’ll stay their six weeks. – And out of such a number, who knows but some may be consumptive and want Asses milk – and I have two Milch asses at this present time. – But perhaps the little Misses may hurt the Furniture. – I hope they will have a good sharp Governess to look after them. – ’ (S 318–19)

Another set of comic, excessive characters is formed by Arthur, Susan, and Diana, Mr Parker’s brother and sisters: they do not merely have a hobby horse, they live in it. Their hobby horse and purpose in life is illness, and their conversational goal is getting other people to pity them. Diana Parker is the leader of this small cohesive group: ‘Invalides indeed. – I trust there are not three People in England who have so sad a right to that appellation! – But my dear Miss Heywood, we are sent into this World to be as extensively useful as possible, and where some degree of Strength of Mind is given, it is not a feeble body which will excuse – or incline us to excuse ourselves. – The World is pretty much divided between the Weak of Mind and the Strong – between those who can act and those who can not, and it is the bounden Duty of the Capable to let no opportunity of being useful escape them. – My Sister’s Complaints and mine are happily not often of a Nature, to threaten Existence immediately – and as long as we can exert ourselves to be of use to others, I am convinced that the Body is the better, for the refreshment the Mind receives in doing its Duty ...’. (S 332)

A different kind of comic character is Sir Edward, Lady Catherine’s nephew, who allows Austen to write a parody of romantic excess and of literary jargon in general. Sir Edward is a would-be rake, an inept seducer bred on ‘more Sentimental novels than agreed with him’ (S 327), from Richardson to a host of minor imitators. His style is a mixture of clichés and bad linguistic habits copied from the time’s literary critics and conversationalists: ‘... I am no indiscriminate Novel-Reader. The mere Trash of the Common Circulating Library, I hold in the highest contempt. You will never hear me advocating those puerile Emanations which detail nothing but discordant

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques Principles incapable of Amalgamation, or those vapid tissues of ordinary Occurrences from which no useful Deductions can be drawn. – In vain may we put them into a literary Alembic; – we distil nothing which can add to Science ... The Novels which I approve of are such as display Human Nature with Grandeur – such as shew her in the Sublimities of intense Feeling – such as exhibit the progress of strong Passion from the first Germ of incipient Susceptibility to the utmost Energies of Reason half-dethroned, – where we see the strong spark of Woman’s Captivations elicit such Fire in the Soul of Man as leads him – (though at the risk of some Aberration from the strict line of Primitive Obligations) – hazard all, dare all, atcheive all, to obtain her ... and even when the Event is mainly anti-prosperous to the high-toned Machinations of the prime Character, the potent, pervading Hero of the Story, it leaves us full of Generous Emotions for him; – our Hearts are paralized. – T’were Pseudo-Philosophy to assert that we do not feel more enwrapped by the brilliancy of his Career, than by the tranquil and morbid Virtues of any opposing Character ...’. (S 327)

As shown by these soliloquizing fragments, Austen was perhaps falling back on the portrayal of excessive comic characters whose bad conversational habits betray their mental and moral deficiencies. Nonetheless, there also appears to be a fundamental difference between Sir Edward and the Parker brothers on the one hand, and such characters as Mr Dashwood and Mr Collins on the other: while in S&S and P&P, as well as in the Chawton novels, the fools show their foolishness by failing to master the same conversational strategies correctly employed by others, in S the fools are almost possessed by discoursive practices which are marked as distinct from the social-conversational rule. In other words, though it would not do to formulate any definitive statements on the basis of an unfinished fragment, it is a fair guess that Austen was passing from using dialogue in order to show off characters to using characters in order to criticize bad linguistic and conversational habits: she had probably caught the scent of something new in the air of English conversation, and was proceeding to ridicule its excesses just as she had done with the excesses of fiction, when she had first embarked on her narrative enterprise.

Chapter 6

Winning the War of Conversation in Emma In Chapters 4 and 5, various types of conversational behaviour have been seen in a fairly static manner. In order to identify the connections between conversation and character on the one hand and character and plot on the other; changes in conversational habits have been observed which are functional to the enfolding of Austen’s plots (e.g., Marianne’s conversational taming in S&S). Conversation in Austenland, however, is far from static – it is never a fixed system that can be analyzed in its general outline, with no attention being paid to the single elements making up the whole. If anything, each single spoken interaction in Austen’s novels – particularly in her mature novels – is a moving, developing system – a battle the outcome of which is produced by the endless clash of personalities and conversational moves. Richard J. Watts’s ‘network/status’ theory provides a perfect description of what takes place in Austen’s multiple verbal interactions. In this conversational model, all participants in a given exchange are seen as involved in a hierarchical network; their respective positions change continually as they acquire or lose status by ‘scoring points’ against one another: In terms of the verbal interaction in which individuals are involved, status is gained or lost by carrying out various kinds of verbal activity ... If speaker A orders or requests speaker B to carry out some action, whether verbal or nonverbal, and B complies, then A gains in status. B, however, does not necessarily lose status. If B refuses to comply, then A loses status ... If speaker A asserts something ... with a commitment to the “truth” of that information, then s/he has set up an argument position and gains in status by doing so. Any support of this position by A or any other member of the group will increase status still further. If the position is countered by B, A will lose the status s/he previously gained and B will gain status. (Watts 1997: 88)

The famous ‘Box Hill’ episode of E (E 331–41) can easily be interpreted in this light, even though on the surface, the characters are simply playing conversational games or speaking of indifferent matters. Emma, Frank Churchill, Mr Knightley, Jane Fairfax, Mr and Mrs Elton, Miss Bates, and Mr Weston take active part in the The selection of this particular episode for detailed analysis is motivated by the assumption that individual conversational abilities are most severely tested in what David Monaghan calls ‘social rituals’: since ‘in the eighteenth century the “ceremonies of life” ... were characterised by particularly strict codes of behaviour ... By examining formal social occasions ... we can learn some important things about Jane Austen’s social ideals, and about her sense of how well her society is living up to these ideals’ (Monaghan 1980: 4, 12).


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conversation, Harriet Smith being the only listener who remains silent throughout the scene. This very complex multiple interaction takes place in Volume III, Chapter VII, only a few chapters away from the final denouement. At this stage of the plot, the tensions between characters are already more or less clear, though not openly declared (the Eltons against Emma, Emma against Jane Fairfax, Mr Knightley against Frank Churchill). Only one of the marriages has been celebrated (the Eltons’); Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax’s attachment has not yet been revealed, and there is still no reason to think that Harriet Smith will marry the farmer Robert Martin, or that Emma will marry Mr Knightley. Given these tensions and these mysteries, it comes as no surprise that many conversational acts are aggressive, even if they remain ostensively polite. Mrs Elton is of course particularly busy committing off-record face-threatening acts against Miss Woodhouse, but even the gentlemanlike Mr Knightley and the modest Miss Fairfax try to ‘score points’ against Frank Churchill. It is perhaps ironical that the only open FTA is committed by Emma against Miss Bates – the most obvious interpersonal interpretation being that the eponymous heroine discharges all the tension she has accumulated as a primary or indirect target on the most helpless victim available. The whole interaction can be interpreted as a struggle for ‘dominance’ (Linell 1990) as well as ‘status’ – but dominance, on the whole, seems to be more predetermined and less changeable (less ‘negotiable’). In the Box Hill episode, ‘semantic dominance’ is exercised throughout by Frank Churchill, who conducts the conversation and selects the topics; ‘quantitative dominance’ is neatly distributed between Frank Churchill and the embittered Mrs Elton; while ‘strategic dominance’ can be incontestably attributed (here as in the whole novel) only to Mr Knightley – and perhaps to Jane Fairfax when Frank Churchill bows ‘in submission’ at her indirect reproach. It can be said that the way in which these patterns of dominance are perceived leads the characters to attempt to ‘score points’ against each other: Mr Knightley is irritated by Frank Churchill’s dominant behaviour (as well as by his courting of Emma); whereas Mrs Elton is offended by the status accorded to Emma in Churchill’s playful opening moves. If the Box Hill episode is seen as a struggle, however, it must be described as a covert one: all the participants, as is the rule with Austen’s later novels (cf. Chapters 4 and 5), master the art of indirection – i.e., they know how to ‘score points’ without incurring censure. Therefore, if it is true that pragmatics is the study of ‘the relations of signs to interpreters’ (Morris 1938/1971: 43) and of all the ‘aspects of meaning not captured in a semantic theory’ (Levinson 1983: 12), only a pragmatic analysis will enable us to distinguish between what the characters ‘say’ and what they ‘mean’, or between what they say and what they do (socially, conversationally) with words. The narrator is not very helpful in this sense, because he/she is at least as reticent and as indirect as the beleaguered Miss Fairfax.

Douthwaite (2000: 166–7) underlines the centrality of pragmatics within the domain of stylistics: ‘The practical application of pragmatics to the analysis of literary and nonliterary texts is as important as it is vast ... It might be noted in passing that the introduction of pragmatics as an analytical tool reinstates content as a source of meaning’.

Winning the War of Conversation in Emma

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In what follows, I use the tools of pragmatics to uncover the strategies employed by the Box Hill interactants (and, occasionally, by the Box Hill narrator) to score social-conversational points against one another (or to mystify the reader and arouse his/her curiosity). In order to show what a fine balance is struck between saying and meaning, directness and indirection, I compare the English text with three Italian translations, in which that balance is often modified or lost, owing to the translators’ misreading of Austen’s complexities. While these alterations and erasures make Austen’s Italian dialogue more wooden and less sparkling, in the present context they are very useful to highlight the characters’ indirect striving for status by way of ‘interlingual’ contrast (Jakobson 1959: 233). Of course, the following bi-textual analysis does not amount to a full criticism of the three translations under discussion, which are merely used as distorting mirrors for their source text. In a recent article (Morini 2008), I outline the details of a ‘pragmatic theory of translation’ whereby I seek to renovate traditional linguistic theories and to unify a number of pragmatic intuitions on the nature of the translational process (cf. Neubert 1968/1981; Reiss and Vermeer 1984/1991; Fawcett 1998; Hatim 1998). My theory posits three textual functions according to which the relationship between source and target texts can be described: the performative (textual illocution and perlocution), the interpersonal (textual cooperation and politeness), and the locative function (textual deixis). In what follows, the similarities and differences between Austen’s Emma and its Italian translations are only analysed on the interpersonal plane, while a more complete description is set aside for a more appropriate context. The Analysis For reasons of space as well as analytic convenience, I confine myself to the central part of the interaction (E 334–7), which is richest in conversational hit-andparry. The pragmatic analysis of the original is marked [ST], while the analysis of the translations is marked [TT]. Source and target texts are kept separated in the interests of reader comprehensibility . The three Italian versions span half a century: the earliest, by Mario Praz, was originally published in 1951 and has been reprinted several times by Garzanti; the version by Pietro Meneghelli was first published by Newton & Compton in 1996; the one by Anna Luisa Zazo is the most recent, having been published by Mondadori in 2002. For the sake of brevity, these three translations are labelled G, N and M.

For the implications of using the term ‘bi-text’, cf. Harris (1988). It would be particularly interesting to study the three target texts from a (temporal) ‘locative’ point of view. The formal register and syntax in which all translations from Austen (and most Italian translations from the classics) are written creates an ‘archaizing’ impression (Holmes 1971/1988) that the original does not justify. There appears to be an unwritten ‘translation norm’ (Toury 1995) that leads translators/editors/publishers to produce versions which sacrifice liveliness on the altar of a stereotyped idea of ‘classicality’.

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[ST] The interaction is initiated and conducted by Frank Churchill, who decides to involve the others in his bantering flirtation with Emma, by means of an open lie that ‘Miss Woodhouse ... desires to know what you are all thinking of’. At this, some of the characters laugh and answer ‘good-humouredly’, while the reactions of others (Mr Knightley, Mrs Elton) are not quite so favourable. Piqued at the idea of ‘Miss Woodhouse’s presiding’ over the conversation in her place (she, being newly-wed, should have that honour), Mrs Elton ‘swells’, presumably with anger and hurt pride (E 334). It is a case of constituent underdetermination, activating what Bach (1994) calls ‘implicitures’, that is, inferences triggered by the lack of a (syntactic, semantic) element which has to be supplied by the receiver. Bertuccelli Papi (2000: 147) defines as ‘subplicit’ all those implicit meanings which ‘may glide into the mind of the hearer as side effects of what is said or not said’: the narrator does not choose to tell us explicitly, but leaves us to infer, what it is Mrs Elton is swelling with. [TT] In all the translations, this impliciture is cancelled by the addition of the missing constituent: the three translators write that Mrs Elton ‘si gonfiò di sdegno [swelled with indignation]’, thus making the narrator speak more explicitly than in the original, and narrowing down the reader’s scope for interpretation (G 276; N 242; M 371). [ST] Mr Knightley, for different reasons from Mrs Elton’s, is as upset as the latter is by Frank Churchill’s flirtation with Emma, and therefore reacts rather strongly to the proposal by saying, ‘Is Miss Woodhouse sure that she would like to hear what we are all thinking of?’ (E 334). If one thinks of the conversation which is taking place as a cooperative effort, where Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its related maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) are generally respected (Grice 1967/1991), one is faced here with a small breach of the maxim of Relation: why, instead of voicing his thoughts as requested, should Mr Knightley ask whether Emma’s desire to know everybody’s thoughts is genuine? The answer, of course, is that Mr Knightley is not being literal, and that his answer sets up conversational implicatures which might not be pleasant to some of the people involved (‘everybody’, Mr Knightley means, ‘thinks that you two are behaving shamefully’). However, the fact that Mr Knightley does not choose to make his thoughts explicit is itself significant: good manners (what Brown and Levinson (1987) would call the Bach’s ‘implicitures’ and Bertucelli Papi’s ‘subplicit meanings’ cover cases in which the implicit part of discourse cannot be satisfactorily described as an ‘implicature’. ‘Implicitures’ are not ‘implicated’ by what is said, but rather implicit in it. ‘Subplicit meanings’ are more general, and less intentional, than ‘implicatures’: ‘Grice identified as implicated only those meanings which derive from the reflexive intention that they be recognized by the reader as intentionally meant by the speaker, thus leaving aside a host of implicit meanings which I would like, on the contrary, to include in my definition of implicitness. I will label them subplicit: the term is meant to suggest that they may glide into the mind of the hearer as side effects of what is said or not said, and become the most relevant information that is retained of a whole message or be used as premises for the derivation of other implicated meanings’ (Bertuccelli Papi 2000: 147).


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rules of ‘Politeness’) require that unpleasant comments be shrouded, if possible, in indirection. A number of ‘off-record’ strategies are available which allow speakers to make these comments without seeming to make them, thus avoiding open FTAs (Brown and Levinson 1987: 211 ff.), which humiliate people and/or force them to respond in the same vein. Therefore, Mr Knightley is not saying but ‘hinting’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 213) that Emma and Frank Churchill are behaving shamefully: the vagueness of the terms he uses (‘what we are all thinking of’) will allow Emma, in her answer, to laugh off the offensive implicature. Another feature of indirection in Mr Knightley’s speech is the fact that he does not choose to address his addressee directly (‘Are you sure that you would like to hear ...’): he prefers to slightly ‘displace his hearer’ (another strategy for off-record comments; Brown and Levinson 1987: 226) by asking his question in the third person, perhaps also in order to hint at the fact that it is not Emma but Frank Churchill, his rival in the fight for Emma’s love, that he is really addressing. [TT] The three translators try different ways to keep the same balance between what is said and what is meant in Mr Knightley’s speech. A sensitive point is the translation of ‘what’, the pragmatic force of which is kept more or less unaltered by two out of three translators: while G and N translate it quite literally with ‘cosa’ (G 276) or ‘che cosa’ (N 242), M chooses the word ‘quello’ (‘E’ certa la signorina Woodhouse che le piacerebbe sapere quello a cui tutti noi stiamo pensando? [Is Miss Woodhouse sure that she would like to know the thing that we are all thinking of?]’; M 372), which, being more specific, implicates that it is one particular thought that they all have in mind. Mr Knightley’s comment, in this Italian translation, becomes slightly less indirect, and as a consequence slightly more offensive. Another point of some pragmatic relevance is the translation of Mr Knightley’s ‘displacing’ technique, by means of which he addresses one person while seeming to address another. G and M, in this case, preserve Knightley’s strategy, while N prefers to turn Knightley’s question into a direct one (‘E’ proprio sicura, signorina Woodhouse, che le piacerebbe sentire a cosa stiamo pensando tutti? [Are you quite sure, Miss Woodhouse, that you would like to hear what we are all thinking of?]’). In this case, since as G and M show Mr Knightley’s indirect question can be reproduced in Italian, N’s choice must be interpreted as pertaining to the realm of ‘translational stylistics’ (Malmkjær 2004: 16; cf. also Boase-Beier 2006): N chooses to make the exchange more straightforward than it is in English. [ST] After Knightley’s slightly cross comment, and Emma’s answer to the effect that she had rather not hear their thoughts (Mr Weston’s and Harriet’s excepted), Mrs Elton resumes her onslaught: ‘It is a sort of thing,’ cried Mrs. Elton emphatically, ‘which I should not have thought myself privileged to inquire into. Though, perhaps, as the Chaperon of the party – I never was in any circle – exploring parties – young ladies – married women – ’ (E 334)

Like Mr Knightley, Mrs Elton employs an ‘off-record’ strategy in order to convey her disapproval of Emma’s behaviour, and, conversely, to stress her own (unfairly

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neglected) social ‘consequence’. Brown and Levinson (1987) use the term ‘contrastive stress’ for the type of conversational technique that Mrs Elton uses here. ‘Contrastive stress’ is a variety of the strategy of ‘presupposing’ which ‘in conjunction with a contextual violation of the Relevance maxim carries a criticism’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 217). Mrs Elton’s slight violation of Grice’s maxim of Relation (her statement does not clearly link up with Frank Churchill’s proposal, Mr Knightley’s question, or Emma’s parry), together with the ‘contrastive stress’ ‘emphatically’ expressed by her statement, combine in building up a criticism of Emma and of the whole proceedings (‘Contrary to her, I would never dream of asking such questions, though it is me, if anybody, as the chaperon of the party, who should ask them’). Once this ‘contrastive stress’, highlighted by the phonetic/ graphic emphasis on I, is caught, the ‘mutterings’ that follow (as the narrator calls them) are easily understood (‘I never was in any circle where young ladies behaved in this way and robbed married women of their social rights’). [TT] In Italian, it is not as common as it is in English to highlight a point of prosodic emphasis by the use of italics: therefore, all three translators decide not to employ the graphic device. None of them, however, tries to compensate for the loss by using analogous Italian techniques, e.g. by adding a reinforcing tag (‘di mio’, ‘per conto mio’, i.e., ‘on my part’), or by foregrounding the subject in final position (‘Non avrei ritenuto di avere il privilegio d’indagare, io’). Two of them, to preserve some ‘contrastive stress’, keep the subject explicit (G: ‘E’ un genere di cose ... in cui io non avrei ritenuto d’avere il privilegio d’indagare [It is a sort of thing ... which I would not have thought myself privileged to inquire into]’ (G 276); M: ‘E’ un genere di cose ... che io non mi sarei sentita autorizzata a chiedere [It is a sort of thing...which I would not have felt authorized to ask]’; M 372); N, while translating almost exactly like G, makes the subject implicit (‘E’ un genere di cose ... in cui non avrei ritenuto di avere il privilegio di indagare’; N 242). In this case, all three translators have made Mrs Elton’s disparaging comments less explicit than they are in the original by erasing, or not reproducing, some of the means by which ‘contrastive stress’ is produced. [ST] Mr Elton comes to his wife’s aid, though he prefers to murmur (audibly, we are given to understand) rather than voice his opinions loudly. He makes his wife’s comments more explicit (‘Exactly so, indeed – quite unheard of – but some ladies say any thing’), and reiterates her ‘contrastive stress’ (‘Every body knows what is due to you’). It is also of some importance to note the title he uses to address her: ‘my love’, rather than ‘my dear’, a small breach of the conventions presiding over the small society of Highbury, signalling the couple’s bad manners and vulgar taste (E 334). [TT] As in the case of Mrs Elton’s comments, of course, the three translators disregard the phonetic/graphic emphasis on you, and do not provide compensations. As regards the title used by Mr Elton, two out of three translators render it literally (‘amor mio’, G 276; ‘amore mio’, N 242), whereas one chooses to mute the social implications of ‘my love’ by the selection of a more socially acceptable term of endearment (‘mia cara [my dear]’; M 372).


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[ST] Frank Churchill understands that some of his fellow speakers are offended, and decides to change his line of attack by lying (again, openly) that Emma ‘demands of you either one thing very clever ... or two things moderately clever ... or three things very dull indeed’ (E 335). At this, Miss Bates sees an opening for a contribution to the conversation (the first one recorded by the narrator): she picks up the third of Emma’s/Churchill’s proposals and jokes that ‘That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? – (looking round with the most goodhumoured dependence on every body’s assent) – Do not you all think I shall? (E 335)

Miss Bates’s speech can be analysed by means of that ‘Politeness Principle’ (PP) which Leech (1983) has envisaged as complementing Grice’s ‘Cooperative Principle’ (CP) in directing face-to-face interaction. One of the ‘maxims of politeness’ making up the PP is termed by Leech ‘modesty maxim’, and can be summed up in the twin imperatives ‘(a) Minimize praise of self [(b) Maximize dispraise of self]’ (Leech 1983: 132). Miss Bates is trying to ‘maximize dispraise of self’, and in doing so she even seeks everybody else’s approval through the use of a tag question and a final request for confirmation. This is one of the techniques described by Brown and Levinson as belonging to the category of ‘positive politeness’, whereby the speaker claims ‘common ground’ with the hearer(s): Miss Bates wants to indicate ‘that S [the speaker] and H [the hearer(s)] belong to the same set of persons who share specific wants, including goals and values’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 103). Therefore, the tag question and the final question, as well as the repetition of ‘shall/shan’t I/shall’, are the focal points of her speech, the means by which she insistently seeks approval of her fool-role within the company. [TT] In Italian, in order to ask for approval/confirmation after a question, the speaker has to append a tag phrase at the end of the sentence (‘vero? [isn’t that true?]’, ‘giusto? [am I right?]’, ‘non è così? [isn’t that so?]’). Two out of three translators use some such tag, but only one of them tries to recreate the linguistic means (the repetition of ‘shall-questions’) by which Miss Bates’s insistence is realized. M loses Miss Bates’s certainty (‘I shall be sure ...’) but reproduces her insistence by a repetition-with-variation: ‘dirò tre cose sciocche appena aprirò la bocca, non è così? ... Non pensate tutti che sarà così? [I will say three foolish things as soon as I open my mouth, isn’t that so? ... Do you not all believe it will be so?]’ (M 372–3). G misinterprets, or interprets too literally the phrase ‘I shall be sure’, and makes no attempt to reproduce the repetition of ‘shall’: ‘Io son sicura di dire tre cose scipite appena apro bocca, non è così? ... Non credete tutti che ci riuscirò? [I am sure I will say three dull things as soon as I open my mouth ... Do you not all believe I will manage to do it?]’ (G 277). N, perhaps out of forgetfulness, As seen in Chapter 1, ‘confirmation tags’ are part of the bag of tricks of ‘female style’ (cf. Lakoff 1973, 1975).

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totally omits Miss Bates’s first question plus tag, and renders her final question exactly like G (N 242). On the whole, Miss Bates is less good-humouredly insistent in seeking agreement in the Italian versions than in the original: her style becomes more formal than ‘female’. [ST] Quite unprovoked (at least by Miss Bates), Emma commits the only open FTA of the whole exchange by stating that Miss Bates’s only difficulty might reside in the number of dull things allowed (‘only three at once’). Miss Bates, according to the narrator, does not immediately catch Emma’s meaning, but when she does ‘it could not anger, though a slight blush showed that it could pain her’ (E 335). Some implicatures are set off by that double ‘could’, because the narrator does not explain why Emma’s meaning could not anger Miss Bates, thus breaching, or exploiting, one of Grice’s maxims of Quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’) or of Manner (‘Avoid ambiguity’) (Grice 1967/1991: 26–7). The most likely meaning of ‘could’ is that Miss Bates cannot be angry at Emma’s words because she is too good-natured to do so; but another implicated meaning, caught by those conscious of social relationships in the novel, might be that Miss Bates cannot be angry because she is not in a position to be. Thus, the slight ambiguity of ‘could’ activates implicatures which have to do with power relationships in the small society of Highbury. [TT] Two out of three translators keep the ambiguity (and the implicatures) of ‘could’ by the use of the analogous Italian verb ‘potere’ (G: ‘non potè farla stizzire, sebbene un lieve rossore mostrasse che poteva addolorarla [it could not irritate her, though a slight blush showed that it could pain her]’ (G 277); M: ‘non avrebbe potuto suscitare in lei collera, ma un leggero rossore mostrò che poteva suscitare pena [it could not have caused anger, but a light blush showed that it could cause anguish]’; M 373). The third, however, makes the narrator’s ambiguous description of Miss Bates’s feelings more explicit: in this version, Emma’s joke is ‘not enough’ to vex Miss Bates, though it may have been enough to cause her some discomfort (N: ‘non bastò a farla irritare, anche se un lieve rossore fece capire che poteva averle dato un po’ fastidio’; N 242). In this Italian translation, the narrator’s hint at the social and financial distance between the heiress, Emma, and the poor spinster, Miss Bates, is suppressed. [ST] Miss Bates expresses her ‘pain’ through a veiled criticism of Emma, preceded, however, by another illustration of the ‘modesty maxim’ (‘I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend’). Mr Weston, apparently not having noticed Emma’s FTA or Miss Bates’s pained reaction, offers to make a conundrum (‘How will a conundrum reckon?’). His son, Frank Churchill, accepts the offer, though complaining about his father’s choice of genre (‘“Low, I am afraid, sir, very low,” answered his son; – “but we shall be indulgent – especially to any one who leads the way.”’; E 335). Here it is of some importance to note that Frank Churchill calls his father ‘sir’, rather than ‘father’ (or a more familiar ‘daddy’ or ‘papa’): a title which reminds us of the different conventions of address of Austen’s times, but also of the long severance between father and son, due to Frank’s adoption by his mother’s brother and sister-in-law after his mother’s death.


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[TT] The three translators react differently to Frank’s choice of title: M is the only one who keeps the same distance between the two characters by the use of a term with the same social value (‘signore’; M 373); G halves the distance by writing ‘babbo’ (‘father’; G 277); whereas N bridges the gap by writing ‘papà’ (‘daddy’, ‘papa’; N 242). [ST] Emma insists that Mr Weston’s conundrum will be very welcome, and Mr Weston goes on: the conundrum consists of a compliment to Emma (‘What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection?...M. and A. – Em – ma. – Do you understand?’), accompanied by another pair of implicit compliments to the same. Before proposing the conundrum to the others, he complains that it is not very clever because it is ‘too much a matter of fact’ – giving his listeners to understand that it is too simple, but also hinting that Emma’s perfection is not an opinion but a fact. When Emma protests that she has no idea about the solution, Mr Weston comments that ‘you will never guess. You, (to Emma), I am certain, will never guess’ (E 336) – thus implicating not that Emma is too slow-witted to understand, but that she is too modest to catch the compliment. In both cases, Mr Weston breaches, and exploits, one or two of the sub-maxims of Grice’s maxim of Manner (‘Avoid obscurity of expression’, or ‘Avoid ambiguity’), thus activating implicatures which become clear only when the solution is disclosed. [TT] Of course, all three translators keep Mr Weston’s hint at Emma’s modesty (G, for instance: ‘“Ah, non l’indovinerete mai. Voi,” a Emma, “son sicuro che non l’indovinerete mai” [“Ah, you will never guess. You,” to Emma, “I am sure will never guess”]’; G 277). Mr Weston’s first reference to Emma’s perfection, however, is understood, or reproduced, only by one out of three translators (G: ‘E’ troppo una constatazione di fatto [It is too much the observation of a fact]’; G 277). The other two catch only half of Mr Weston’s meaning, and thus lose the hinted compliment: in M, Mr Weston says that perhaps the conundrum is too ‘facile’ (‘easy’; M 373), in N that it is too ‘elementare’ (‘elementary’, ‘straightforward’; N 243). Once again, a thread of the fine, intricate web of covert compliments or offences running through the grain of the conversation gets lost in translation. [ST] Emma is of course gratified when she understands, but the others are less enthusiastic: some look ‘very stupid about it’, and Mr Knightley comments: ‘This explains the sort of clever thing that is wanted, and Mr. Weston has done very well for himself; but he must have knocked up every body else. Perfection should not have come quite so soon.’ (E 336)

As for the first sentence, we are again faced with a case of constituent underdetermination triggering an ‘impliciture’ (Bach 1994): we might ask, ‘wanted by whom?’, and the answer could be ‘everybody’, but, more likely, ‘Emma’, or ‘Frank Churchill’, or both. Mr Knightley voices his irritation (caused also, we will discover later, by Miss Bates’s humiliation at Emma’s hands), and his jealousy, while remaining vague enough not to be openly offensive. An important element of Mr Knightley’s very indirect criticism of the whole drift of the conversation is the verb phrase ‘knocked up’: he means, literally, that after such a start nobody can


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hope to do better, but his lexical choice triggers subplicit meanings which are not quite so flattering (‘this has exhausted all the others’). [TT] Two out of three translators render the first sentence very literally, though the Italian verb form replacing ‘is wanted’ does not presuppose a missing constituent (G, N: ‘Questo spiega il genere di cosa brillante che si desidera [This explains the sort of witty thing that is wanted]’; G 278; N 243). The third, however, renders ‘is wanted’ in such a way as to make Mr Knightley’s speech more generic, but also more suggestive of hidden, unpleasant meanings (M: ‘Questo spiega che cosa si intenda con qualcosa di intelligente [This explains what is meant by “something clever”]’; M 374). As for the subplicit meaning in ‘knocked up’, two out of three translators lose it (M: ‘non può non aver messo fuori gioco tutti gli altri [he cannot help having sidelined all the others]’; N: ‘ha messo nei guai tutti gli altri [he got everybody else into trouble]’), whereas one makes it Mr Knightley’s explicit meaning (G: ‘deve aver sfinito tutti gli altri [he must have exhausted all the others]’). [ST] There follows a rather long comment of Mrs Elton’s, more or less on the same lines as her previous contributions. She implicitly contrasts her behaviour with Emma’s, censures Mr Weston’s conundrum (‘Oh! for myself, I protest I must be excused ... I really cannot attempt ... I am not one of those who have witty things at every body’s service. I do not pretend to be a wit’), relates an anecdote aimed at showing she has admirers as well (‘I had an acrostic once sent to me upon my own name, which I was not at all pleased with. I knew who it came from. An abominable puppy!’), and states the reasons for her disapproval of what is taking place as a general rule (‘These kind of things are very well at Christmas, when one is sitting round the fire; but quite out of place, in my opinion, when one is exploring about the country in summer’; E 336). Her husband agrees with her, and proposes a walk. He also adds a covertly offensive remark: ‘I have nothing to say that can entertain Miss Woodhouse, or any other young lady. An old married man – quite good for nothing.’ (E 336)

If understood literally, Mr Elton’s remark means that he has, generally, nothing entertaining to say – but of course, one must suppose that he also is exploiting Grice’s maxim of Manner, i.e., that he is being ambiguous in order to suggest implicated meanings. Those implicated meanings, as set off by the first part of his speech, would be very offensive (‘Someone praised Miss Woodhouse, which is the way to entertain her: I have nothing to say in her praise, therefore, I can say nothing This sense of ‘knock up’ is now obsolete. According to the Macmillan English Dictionary (2002), ‘knocking up’ is currently used with the informal or slang meanings of ‘producing something quickly and easily’, ‘waking or calling someone by knocking on the door’, or ‘making a woman pregnant’. ‘State the FTA [face-threatening act] as a general rule’ is one of the strategies of ‘negative politeness’ as described by Brown and Levinson (1987: 206–7).


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to entertain her’): perhaps Mr Elton realizes he is in danger of committing a FTA, because he immediately tries to ‘cancel’ the implicatures he set off by ‘adding some additional premises to the original ones’ (‘or any other young lady’; Levinson 1983: 114), and then makes use of the socially acceptable technique of blaming himself (‘An old married man – quite good for nothing’; Leech 1983: 132). [TT] The three translators, as on the previous occasions, mostly ignore Mrs Elton’s ‘contrastive stress’, which focuses on the repetition and highlighting of the first-person pronoun. They reproduce, of course, both her anecdote and her remarks on conundrums and summer excursions. A point of some interest, however, is the translators’ rendering of ‘at every body’s service’ – a vague, ambiguous comment implicating that one must be indeed ready to serve everybody if one chooses to be at Emma Woodhouse’s service. Two out of three translators catch the implicature and emphasize it almost to the point of making it Mrs Elton’s literal meaning (G: ‘a disposizione di chiunque [at anybody’s disposal]’ (G 278); M: ‘a servizio di chiunque [at anybody’s service]’; M 374); the third seems, instead, to have slightly misunderstood Mrs Elton (‘Non sono di quelle che hanno battute su tutti a disposizione [I am not one of those women who have jokes about everybody at their command]’; N 243). As for Mr Elton’s speech, a very subtle effect is obtained, in the original, by the insertion of a comma between his initial disparaging comment and the clause he adds in order to cancel the offensive implicature (‘..., or any other young lady’). Two out of three translators keep the comma (G: ‘Io non ho niente da dire che possa divertire Miss Woodhouse, o qualunque altra giovane signora [I have nothing to say that can entertain Miss Woodhouse, or any other young lady]’ (G 278); N is to all effects identical); whereas the third prefers to remove it (M: ‘Non ho nulla da dire che possa divertire la signorina Woodhouse o un’altra giovane signora [I have nothing to say that can entertain Miss Woodhouse or another young lady]’; M 374), thus making Mr Elton’s evasive technique less evident. [ST] Mrs Elton agrees ‘with all my heart’ to walk with her husband, because, she says, ‘I am really tired of exploring so long on one spot’ (E 337). Since this statement superficially breaches Grice’s first maxim of Quality (‘Do not say what you believe to be false’; Grice 1967/1991: 27), because in Mrs Elton’s world and ours one cannot be exploring while one is not moving, one must assume that there is a non-literal, ironic side to her meaning (‘We are supposed to be exploring, but we are not moving’). However, given all that has just been said, one might also catch in Mrs Elton’s speech a subplicit strike at Emma: ‘I am really tired of talking Grice (1967/1991: 39) lists a series of features a conversational implicature must possess in order to be ‘what it is’. One of these features is what Levinson (1983: 114) calls ‘cancellability’ or ‘defeasibility’: ‘a generalized conversational implicature can be canceled in a particular case. It may be explicitly canceled, by the addition of a clause that states or implies that the speaker has opted out, or it may be contextually canceled, if the form of utterance that usually carries it is used in a context that makes it clear that the speaker is opting out’.

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so long about the same subject’. In other words, Mrs Elton’s exploitation of the maxim of Quality, by leaving her primary meaning indeterminate, sets off more than a single conversational implicature. [TT] In Italian, the implicit and subplicit meanings activated by Mrs Elton will conceivably be kept if her ironic statement is translated literally. Two out of three translators, indeed, keep so close to the original that they formulate an awkward sentence (G: ‘Son proprio stanca di esplorare per tanto tempo uno stesso posto [I am really tired of exploring so long one same spot]’ (G 278); N to all effects the same). The third, however, turns Mrs Elton’s paradox into a logical statement conforming to the Cooperative Principle (M: ‘Sono stanca di partecipare a un’escursione restando sempre nello stesso luogo [I am tired of taking part in an excursion while always remaining on the same spot]’; M 374), thus losing the conversational implicatures which constitute Mrs Elton’s last volley against Emma before sounding the retreat. [ST] The Eltons go for a walk, and as soon as they are ‘out of hearing’, Frank Churchill makes an ironic comment on ‘how well they suit one another’, adding that it is a lucky couple that can be said to have married happily on so short an acquaintance in Bath ‘or any public place’, for ‘many a man has committed himself on a short acquaintance, and rued it all the rest of his life’ (E 337). He is hinting, though only one person in the whole company can understand his covert meaning, at his own attachment to Jane Fairfax, but he is doing so by stating his FTA as a general rule. Jane Fairfax responds, and her words are recorded by the narrator for the first time in this conversation, in such a way as to alert us that what she is about to say is of some moment: Miss Fairfax, who had seldom spoken before, except among her own confederates, spoke now. ‘Such things do occur, undoubtedly.’ – She was stopped by a cough. Frank Churchill turned towards her to listen. ‘You were speaking,’ said he, gravely. She recovered her voice. (E 337)

One thing must be noted in the narrator’s introduction of Jane Fairfax’s speech, in connection with the fact that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill’s attachment has not yet been disclosed (within a few days, and a few chapters, Emma and the reader are going to learn that this conversation has helped precipitate events and hurry that disclosure): it is the functional contrast placed upon that final ‘spoke now’ (which is also foregrounded by virtue of its position) in the first sentence: if ‘Miss Fairfax, who had seldom spoken before’, chooses to speak now, there must be some good reason to do so. [TT] All three translators keep Frank Churchill’s hints, but they react variously to the narrator’s introduction of Jane Fairfax’s speech. That final, foregrounded, ‘spoke now’, is kept by one (G: ‘Miss Fairfax, che aveva di rado parlato prima ... parlò adesso [Miss Fairfax, who had seldom spoken before ... spoke now]’; G 278), slightly modified by another (N: ‘La signorina Fairfax, che fino a quel momento


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aveva parlato raramente ... ora parlò [Miss Fairfax, who up to that moment had spoken but seldom ... now spoke]’; N 244), all but lost by the third (M: ‘La signorina Fairfax, che prima aveva parlato pochissimo ... ora disse: [Miss Fairfax, who had spoken very little before ... now said]’; M 375). [ST] Jane Fairfax has perfectly understood Frank Churchill’s technique of covering his meaning in general terms, and employs it in her turn in order to give him to understand that, if he so wishes, he is free from all obligations: ‘I was only going to observe, that though such unfortunate circumstances do sometimes occur both to men and women, I cannot imagine them to be very frequent. A hasty and imprudent attachment may arise – but there is generally time to recover from it afterwards. I would be understood to mean, that it can be only weak, irresolute characters ... who will suffer an unfortunate acquaintance to be an inconvenience, an oppression for ever. (E 337)

A focal point in her speech is the verb phrase ‘I would be understood to mean’, which may be said to amount to a breach of Grice’s second maxim of Quantity (‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’; Grice 1967/1991: 26). By using more words than are here necessary (‘I mean’, ‘What I mean is’), Jane Fairfax is indicating that her choice of words is meaningful: the conversational implicature, here, is that she wants to be understood, indeed will be understood, by someone in particular. [TT] Two out of three translators render Jane Fairfax’s words by an expression which conveys her insistence on being understood (‘Vorrei che si capisse [I’d like it to be understood]’; G 279; N 244), whereas one employs a shorter, weaker expression which does not activate as clearly the same conversational implicatures (‘Quello che intendo dire [What I mean to say]’; M 375). [ST] Frank Churchill does not answer, but ‘merely looked, and bowed in submission’ (E 337), before turning to Emma for another flirting spell, and virtually putting an end to the general conversation. What is significant is that Frank Churchill, according to the narrator, does not merely bow, or make a courteous bow, but bows ‘in submission’. Though no doubt signalling Frank Churchill’s politeness, the narrator’s description of his motives for bowing seems slightly exaggerated – once again, a small breach of Grice’s maxim of Relation: why should he bow ‘in submission’, if there has not been a struggle between him and Jane Fairfax, and if he were not admitting that she won? The answer, of course – the conversational implicature activated by the narrator’s words – is that there has been a struggle, and that he is admitting that his lover/rival won. [TT] None of the three translators renders ‘submission’ literally as ‘sottomissione’, or, also quite literally, as ‘ubbidienza’ (obedience). Two of them interpret ‘submission’ as ‘deference’, thus highlighting Frank Churchill’s good manners (G: ‘s’inchinò con deferenza [bowed deferentially]’ (G 279); N to all effects the same). The third translator interprets it as ‘assent’, thus presenting Frank Churchill’s gesture as an acknowledgment that Jane Fairfax is right (M: ‘si limitò a guardarla e inchinarsi in segno di assenso [He merely looked at her and bowed in assent]’; M 375).

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The Final Score The Italian translators often lose track of Austen’s fine balance between explicit and implicit meanings. As a consequence, the Italian reader vaguely understands that points are being scored and hits are being parried in a complex game of attack and defense, but some of the actions become less clear, while on other occasions the attack becomes too straightforward, too ingenuous (and the reader is left wondering why nobody reacts more strongly). However, if the interlingual passage tends to blur some of the points, the final score is almost as indecipherable for the English pragmatician as it is for the Italian reader. The game of conversation is much more complicated than a tennis match. In a tennis match, the chair umpire determines the exact outcome of every shot – give or take a few balls near the lines – and the final score is usually not a debatable matter. In conversation, the goals of each interactant may not be immediately clear, and every participant will have his/her own idea of the outcome. In Austen’s dialogue, turn-taking and goal-seeking may be more formalized than even in Austen’s own society: but while we understand that various characters are trying to score points and/or to ‘win’ the conversation, we remain in the dark as to who actually won – the narrator-umpire, as seen above, being of little help. An attempt at assigning points, however, can and must be made, because scoring points is clearly what this conversation is about. The one character who attempts to score most consistently is Mrs Elton, twice backed by her husband. Her target is Emma – of whose position as everybody’s favourite she is envious – and she manages to offend her chosen opponent while stopping short of committing any open FTAs. Her gain in status, however, is doubtful: because after all, many of her comments seem to be meant for her husband rather than for the whole group (‘Her mutterings were chiefly to her husband’; E 334), and the Eltons are covertly made fun of by Frank Churchill (and shunned by Jane Fairfax) as soon as they go for a walk. Mr Knightley also has his own axes to grind. On a couple of occasions, he attacks Emma and Mr Weston: whatever his primary target, his irritation seems to be directed against Emma, though one suspects that the true goal of his conversational moves might be scoring points against his rival, Frank Churchill. If compared with Mrs Elton’s, Mr Knightley’s onslaught seems even more direct, at least on one occasion (‘Is Miss Woodhouse sure that she would like to hear what we are all thinking of?’ E 334). On the other hand, Mr Knightley’s remarks are perhaps heard more deferentially by the others (Emma, for one, answers his rhetorical question): partly, this may be due to the fact that while Mrs Elton’s mutterings are peevish and self-centred, his are seemingly more dignified and other-centred (at least grammatically: he never says ‘I’); but also, one must not forget that Knightley’s position of authority, of ‘strategic dominance’, ensures that he is listened to when he speaks. Other characters seem less intent on scoring points than on playing games, complimenting each other, or simply listening. But even being playful or complimentary can entail scoring points, because it calls for somebody else’s


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contribution or reciprocation. And on a couple of occasions, points are scored by unexpected players. When Emma commits a FTA against Miss Bates, she may think she is selecting a soft target, but in the end it is perhaps only her victim who gains status, while Emma gains Mr Knightley’s censure (‘How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?’ E 339).10 Another unexpected winner is Jane Fairfax, who answers Frank Churchill’s ‘general’ face-threatening remarks in the same vein, thus obtaining his ‘submission’. As noted above, it is very difficult, and perhaps meaningless, to decide ‘who won.’ In part, this is because while we can make surmises on the speakers’ goals, and on the degree to which these goals are achieved, the narrator tells us little about the listeners’ goals, or about their reactions – and ‘status’ points, in group interactions, are often assigned by the audience.11 But above all, the difficulty is due to the inherent complexity and ambivalent character of spoken interaction: each participant can form a different judgment of what is going on; each may convince him/herself that he/she has gained status, and his/her vision need have no relation whatsoever with anybody else’s. In the end, one is tempted to look at how the novels unfold to distinguish the winners from the losers: after her blunder on Box Hill, Emma ‘submits’ to Mr Knightley’s ‘superior judgment’; after their envious mutterings, the Eltons are definitively marginalized from the main plot (and Mrs Elton is made fun of by the narrator just before the close of the novel); after her firm repartee, Jane Fairfax manages to ‘tame’ Frank Churchill and marry him. But after all, assigning points in this way would mean judging the battle only by the outcome of the war: whereas the battle, if seen from the ranks or from a neighbouring hill, remains a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying what little meaning the scholar manages to find in it or invest it with.

10 In connection with this episode, it is interesting to mention Michael Burgoon’s ‘Language Expectancy Theory’, according to which ‘change in the direction desired by an actor occurs when positive violations of expectations occur ... (1) when the enacted behaviour is better or more preferred than that which was expected in the situation, or (2) when negatively evaluated sources conform more closely than expected to cultural values, societal norms, or situational exigencies’ (Burgoon 1995: 30). In this case, the reverse happens: a positively evaluated source (Emma) conforms less closely than expected to a societal norm, and the outcome is a change in an undesired direction (Knightley’s censure). 11 As Gillian Brown has noted, ‘listeners may have intentions and goals in listening which are, to a greater or lesser degree, independent of those of the speaker’ (Brown 1996: 201).


Conclusion The War of Ideas and the Sea of Possibility In Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools’, the oblivion incumbent on old age is contrasted with the oblivion preceding birth, ‘all the time merging with a unique endeavour / To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower / Of being here’ (Larkin 1988: 196): to exist is to solidify a sea of possibility into a beach of actuality, and with every second of existence that beach loses a grain of sand, until it is a strip of land newly surrounded by water. It is more or less the same with criticism, linguistic or of any other description: when one merges the sum of one’s insight into a unified analysis, all the lost possibilities can at most be hinted at in passing; and in presenting itself as the only true interpretation, every reading submerges or subsumes all the others. At the end of this enterprise, it is time to reinstate all the remaining options: The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her unconsciousness ... (Southam 1987: 230) [Jane Austen] is, in English fiction, as Milton in English poetry, the one completely conscious and almost unerring artist. (Southam 1987: 250) The world of Emma’s fancy fades in the clear, cool light of day. (Lascelles 1939: 76) But the difficulty of Emma is never overcome. (Trilling 1957/1991: 122) The thesis of Mansfield Park is severely moral: that one world, representing the genteel orthodoxy of Jane Austen’s time, is categorically superior to any other. (Mudrick 1952: 155) In Mansfield Park, [Austen] examines the power relationships that develop between women-as-writers and as-readers, and the institutions that reduce their options and make them marginal, especially in the field of letters. (Gardiner 1995: 151) Amelia and Mansfield Park highlight what was occluded in the earlier works, more vociferously espousing traditional values yet more clearly exposing their deficiencies. (Parker 1998: 14) Whatever a reader thinks Mansfield Park is up to at any moment, it is all too likely to do something different – or, still more challengingly, to do nothing at all. (Tandon 2003: 195) The themes and techniques of Pride and Prejudice accomplish their eighteenthcentury didactic end, moral and emotional instruction, at the same time that they

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Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques create a degree of intimacy with the characters and an absorption in the world of the novel surpassed only by the reader’s response to the novels which follow it, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. (Fergus 1983: 9) Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe…calculatedly devoted their fiction to challenging the repressive sexual politics promoted by the conduct books of the day, a politics that erected a patriarchal domestic ideology that demanded that the female be kept at home, educated only to be sexually attractive and submissive to her husband. (Mellor 2000: 103) ... we cannot accept a version of Jane Austen – of all people – that characterises her ... as a mere inert reflector of the commonplaces of her age – as one who, to take an example often trotted out, took the female conduct books of Gregory, Fordyce, Gisborne etc. with a kind of paralysed seriousness. (Gard 1992: 6) Yet Austen’s characters relentlessly seek that “complete truth.” ... Their attempts to impose epistemological stability on their world mimic the reader’s own search for determinate readings of the texts. That enterprise has never really succeeded, despite the fact that Austen’s novels have long been considered “classic” in Roland Barthes’ sense of the word. (Patteson 1981: 455)

While all these can be seen as alternative readings, and have been viewed in that light throughout the present study, they can also be pieced together to form the complete Austen jigsaw puzzle. At the very least, all of these perceptive critics tell us something about reading Jane Austen’s novels, if not about the novels themselves. Henry James’s unconscious grace and facility reflect a typical ‘first impression’ elicited by Jane Austen – though grace and facility are probably obtained at the price of great labour, in a conscious effort of ‘unerring art’ (Farrer). Lascelles’s ‘bright and sparkling’ reading of E reflects a quality which many readers find in that most difficult and ‘undecidable’ of novels (Trilling). MP can be read as a paean for Old Tory England (Mudrick), as a manifesto of feminist subversion (Gardiner), as both (Parker) or as a post-structuralist, slippery creature (Tandon). Jane Austen’s novels are didactic, anti-didactic, and free from didacticism (Fergus, Mellor, Gard). They contain a vast number of ‘truths’, yet none of these truths can be finally relied upon (Patteson). Even though Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques stands in sharp opposition to those studies that treat novels as if they were pamphlets, it does not wish to suggest that there are no ideologies at war in Austen’s novels. The ideologies are there, the war is there, but owing to Austen’s ‘chameleonic’ ability, it is close to impossible, in the end, to separate winners and losers, just as it is very difficult to decide who wins the conversational tennis-match on Box Hill. Therefore, the analysis offered in the present study supplements all preceding readings, rather than supplanting them: it provides a (technical) framework which accounts for the existence of a plethora of interpretations. Plethora means fullness – and fullness, in critical thought, is synonymous with richness. The abundance of critical versions of Jane Austen is a good thing, not

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merely because diversity of opinion is a symptom of intellectual vitality, but above all because critical richness is (almost) always a mirror of literary richness – of a primary vitality engendering a secondary one. In other words, if there are so many interpretations of Austen’s novels, it is because they are all contained, embedded, envisaged as possibilities in the originals. Critics read the events of S&S like Elinor or Marianne, judge the characters in E like Emma or Mr Knightley, watch the theatricals in MP like Edmund Bertram, Fanny Price, Mary Crawford or Sir Thomas. By so doing, they augment our understanding of Austen’s works, or, at the very least, of the social and intellectual contexts in which they were conceived. In this plethora of primary and secondary readings, ‘Jane Austen’ – that, when all is said and done, is the ideological beginning and end of this study – remains in the background, hidden behind her characters and her narrators-as-characters. Maybe because her fictional structures go against the grain of her ideological purposes. Maybe because she feels a secret sympathy for the characters that she ought to reprimand. Maybe because it is the nature of all fiction to dethrone the author in the narrator’s name. Or maybe – but this is just one of many possible explanations – because she wishes to remain hidden. Because she prefers to leave the vulgar work of extracting meanings from her novels to someone else. But then again, Katherine Mansfield’s famous epistolary remark resounds as a final warning note: The truth is that every true admirer of her novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has become the secret friend of the author. (Mansfield 1928: 335)


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Index

Note: The letter “n” following a page number denotes that the index entry can be found in the footnote. Abington, F. 26n Addison, J. 90n Anderson, L. 19 Appleton, M. 11 Arndt, H. 106n Atkins, B. 94n Austen, C. 70n Austin, J.L. 11, 114n Babb, H.S. 11, 107n Bach, K. 132, 137 Bakhtin, M. 7, 24, 31 Bamford, J. 19 Battaglia, B. 6n, 29n, 41n Bayley, J. 6n Bell, D.V.J. 114n, 120 Berger, C.R. 109 Berger, D.A. 11 Bertuccelli Papi, M. 132 Billi, M. 57n Black, E. 17, 30, 38, 40 Blair, H. 80n Blake, N.F. 11 Boase-Beier, J. 133 Booth, W. 10, 29–30, 35, 54 Bowen, P. 34 Brooke, C. 5n Brown, G. 143n Brown, J.P. 52n Brown, L.W. 101n Brown, P. 83, 87, 88, 101, 109, 110, 119, 132–3, 134, 135, 138n Bublitz, W. 87 Burgoon, M. 143n Burke, P. 81, 85, 88, 93n, 101 Burney, F. 81 Burrows, J.F. 9–10 Butler, M. 2–5 Butte, G. 54n Byrne, P. 45n

Cameron, D. 125n Carroll, L. (C.L. Dodgson) 21 Carter, R. 101n, 125 Carver, R. 70n Castiglione, B. 36 Chesterfield, Lord (P.D. Stanhope) 79–80n, 82, 85, 87n, 92n, 99n, 101n Coates, J. 85 Conrad, J. (Józef Korzeniowski) 19 Copeland, E. 67n Cortazzi, M. 19, 24, 43n Coulthard, M. 86, 91, 100n Cowper, W. 101n Davidson, J. 11, 80n de Marco, N. 40n DeForest, M. 10, 31n Dendrinos, B. 94 Devlin, D.D. 97n Dickens, C. 20–21, 23 Dilthey, W. 62n Dossena, M. 18n Douthwaite, J. 28n, 130n Downes, W. 106n Duckworth, A.M. 4 Dussinger, J.A. 82n Eco, U. 17n Edgeworth, M. 26n, 81, 146 Eggins, S. 18n Ehrenpreis, I. 15 Eliot, G. (M.A. Evans) 6n Evans, M. 4 Farrer, R. 2, 15, 16, 145–6 Fawcett, P. 131 Fergus, J. 97n, 146 Fielding, H. 81, 82 Finch, C. 34 Firth, A. 95

162


Flaubert, G. 2, 5 Fleischman, S. 17 Fludernik, M. 23n, 33n Foppa, K. 84 Ford, F.M. (F.M. Hueffer) 20 Fowler, R. 16, 19, 35n, 61, 63–4 Fritzer, P.J. 11 Galperin, W.H. 53n Gard, R. 2, 5, 146 Gardiner, E. 145–6 Gay, P. 15n, 26n, 45n, 57 Genette, G. 19n Gilbert, S.M. 2–5 Gilmour, R. 11, 80n Goffman, E. 84 Graham, P.W. 6n, 31–2n, 72n Grice, P. 11, 28n, 42, 87, 100, 112, 132–41 Guazzo, S. 85 Gubar, S. 2–5 Halliday, M.A.K. 20n, 31–2, 71, 73 Harding, D.W. 2, 3, 95n Harris, B. 131n Hasan, R. 71, 73 Hatim, B. 131 Hobbes, T. 75 Hoey, M.P. 19, 86 Holly, G.I. 7, 23 Holmes, J.S. 131n Honan, P. 37n Hough, G. 8, 11, 33n Hudson, G.A. 6 Hughes, T. 12 Hunston, S. 20, 22, 33n, 61 Hymes, D. 92 Inchbald, E. 15n, 26n, 67–8, 81 Iser, W. 17n Ishiguro, K. 19, 53 Jakobson, R. 131 James, H. 2, 5, 6n, 19, 36, 46, 145–6 Janney, R.W. 106n Jaworski, A. 88 Jefferson, G. 83 Jin, L. 19, 24, 43n Johnson, C.L. 4, 16n Johnson, E. 10, 31n

Johnson, S. 108 Jordan, D. 26n Joyce, J. 16, 20, 61, 63 Jucker, A.H. 18n Kaplan, D. 4 Kelly, G. 81n Kirkham, M. 4 Knox-Shaw, P. 6n Konigsberg, I. 31n Kotzebue, A. von 15n Kroeber, K. 11 La Faye, D. 70n Labov, W. 17–18, 24 Lakoff, R. 93–4, 135n Larkin, P. 145 Lascelles, M. 49n, 121n, 145–6 Lawrence, D.H. 23 Leavis, F.R. 2 Leavis, Q.D. 2 Leech, G.N. 26, 27, 34, 61–3, 87, 88, 110, 116, 120, 135, 139 Levinson, S. 83, 87, 88, 101, 109, 110, 112, 119, 130, 132–3, 134, 135, 138n, 139 Linell, P. 57, 84, 130 Locke, J. 31n, 75 Looser, D. 4 Lyons, J. 64 McCarthy, M. 83, 101n, 125 McIlvanney, W. 21 McMaster, J. 11, 69n Malmkjær, K. 133 Mandal, A. 6n, 36n, 118n Mandala, S. 9n Mansfield, K. 147 Markova, P. 84 Marroni, F. 107n Martin, J.R 24 Mellor, A.K. 146 Meneghelli, P. 131 Meyersohn, M. 11 Michaelson, P.H. 80n, 90n Miller, D.A. 7, 15, 23, 29, 57n Monaghan, D. 129n Mooneyham, L.G. 97 More, H. 117–18

Index Morini, M. 19, 33, 53, 131 Morris, C. 130 Mudrick, M. 35, 145–6 Nardin, J. 15 Neubert, A. 131 O’Barr, W. 94n Oliphant, M. 53 Orwell, G. 72, 74–6 Page, N. 10, 11, 80n Paris, B.J. 23–4 Park, Y.-m. 5 Parker, J.A. 145–6 Pascal, R. 11, 33n Patteson, R.F. 7, 8, 23, 146 Phillips, K.C. 10, 11 Poovey, M. 4, 72n Pratt, M.L. 17 Praz, M. 131 Radcliffe, A. 41n, 81, 146 Ramus, P. (P. de la Ramée) 63 Rand Schmidt, K.-A. 10, 94n Reiss, K. 131 Ribeiro Pedro, E. 94 Richardson, S. 81, 127 Rosmarin, A. 23 Ross, A.S.C. 91 Sacks, H. 83, 100n Said, E. 4 Schegloff, E.A. 83 Schleiermacher, F. 62n Scott, W. 2, 26n, 53n Searle, J.R. 125 Seeber, B.K. 7n Semino, E. 35n Short, M.H. 26, 61–3 Simpson, P. 19, 21, 24, 34 Sinclair, J.McH. 86 Slade, D. 18n

163

Sotirova, V. 33n Southam, B.C. 2, 15, 16, 53, 145 Speer, S.A. 93–4 Sperber, D. 34–5 Spitzer, L. 62 Sprat, T. 75 Spring, D. 72n, 124 Stenström, A. 98, 104, 110n Stockwell, P. 17n, 52n Stokes, M. 10 Stout, J.P. 36n Sulloway, A.G. 4 Sunder Rajan, R. 5 Sutherland, J. 28, 46 Tandon, B. 11, 145–6 Tanner, T. 3n Tave, S.M. 10, 11 Thompson, G. 20, 22, 33n, 61 Thompson, J. 26n Toolan, M. 18, 23n, 33n Toury, G. 131n Trilling, L. 15, 145–6 Trusler, J. 80n, 82, 83n, 85, 87n, 89, 90n, 91n, 92n, 100n, 101n, 105n, 120n, 122n Vermeer, H. 131 Waldron, M. 5–6n Wallace, T.G. 23 Watts, R.J. 98n, 129 White, P.R.R. 24 Wiesenfarth, J. 10n, 101n Williams, R. 2–5, 6n, 11 Wilson, D. 34–5 Wiltshire, J. 88n Winborn, C. 83n Wittgenstein, L. 11 Wollstonecraft, M. 4 Woolf, V. 15, 20, 23 Zazo, A.L. 131 Zunshine, L. 54n

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