Free indirect discourse and narrative authority in Emma.(Critical Essay)

Gunn, Daniel P. "Free indirect discourse and narrative authority in Emma.(Critical Essay)." Narrative 12.1 (2004): 35+. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.Document URLhttp://find.galegroup.com.ezp-alumni.unimelb.edu.au/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A114326248&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=unimelb&version=1.0

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Jane Austen is generally acknowledged to be the first English novelist to make sustained use of free indirect discourse in the representation of figural speech and thought. (1) Unfortunately, however, the theory of free indirect discourse (FID) in English has not been congenial to Austen's work, often obscuring the way the technique functions in her novels. (2) Two theoretical tendencies, in particular, have contributed to this confusion. First, the most influential accounts of FID in English have tended to stress the autonomy of FID representations of speech and thought and to contrast them with authoritative narrative commentary: FID is, on this account, the preeminent technique of "objective" narration, in which the narrator supposedly withdraws or disappears in favor of impersonal figural representation. (3) Second, FID has often been characterized as innately disruptive and destabilizing--a technique that allows other voices to compete with and so undermine the monologic authority of the narrator or the implied author. (4) Whatever their relevance to later fiction, these characterizations of FID are inadequate and misleading when applied to Austen's novels, which deploy FID in conjunction with a trustworthy, authoritative narrative voice and which repeatedly intertwine FID with narratorial commentary, sometimes inside of a single sentence. Indeed, much of the aesthetic pleasure in Austen's FID passages comes from subtle modulations among narrative registers, as the prose moves in and out of a complex array of voices, including that of the narrator herself. In this essay, I will examine Austen's use of FID in a series of passages from Emma, emphasizing the narrator's role in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of Austen's practice than has been available in criticism influenced by the prevailing theoretical accounts. In Emma, I will argue, FID is best seen not as a representation of autonomous figural discourse but as a kind of narratorial mimicry, analogous to the flexible imitations of others' discourse we all practice in informal speech and expository prose. (5) My principal interest here is in Austen's narrative practice: I hope, in particular, to oppose the recent tendency to read FID as subversive of narrative authority and stable interpretation in Emma. (6) But since this sort of misreading can be traced to the assumption that FID entails the displacement of narratorial presence and judgment, I hope also to stimulate further theoretical discussion of the interaction between narrative voice and figural discourse in texts that, like Austen's, have strong, authoritative narrators.

The assumption that FID is ordinarily a representation of autonomous figural discourse and thus symptomatic of a distinctively "modern" and impersonal narrative style is shared by several of the most influential theorists of FID in English. The seminal work on the topic, Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds, follows F. K. Stanzel in distinguishing between "authorial"

and "figural" narrative situations, and associates "narrated monologue" (her term for FID) strongly with the latter: the "normal milieu for narrated monologue," she writes, is "serious figural narration," in which characters are presented "'from within,' through a profusion of narrated monologues" (122). Cohn's discussion of narrated monologue is subtle and perceptive, and she acknowledges that "the continued employment of third-person references indicates, no matter how unobtrusively, the continued presence of a narrator" (112). But, as the term "monologue" will itself suggest, she insists that it is the narrator's "identification ... with the character's mentality that is supremely enhanced" by FID (112), and she has argued recently that the narrator is "reduced to a merely functional presence" as FID predominates ("Optics" 14). Similarly, in Unspeakabe Sentences, Ann Banfield sees her account of what she calls "represented speech and thought" as offering a scientific, linguistic explanation of the historical development of fiction, which emerges finally, in her view, as entirely impersonal, a combination of purely objective narrative sentences and sentences that dramatize the speech or thought of characters. For Banfield, neither kind of sentence has a speaker; in the name of representation, language has "solved the technical problem of silencing the speaker and his authority," even in those sentences that articulate figural subjectivity (274). Finally, even Monika Fludernik's more nuanced account of FID in The Languages of Fiction and the Fictions of Language ends by rejecting what she calls "dual-voice" theory and implying that "the reader's inferencing activity" must account for a given sentence either as "the narrator's exclamation" or as the "utterance" of a character--the assumption being that if the sentence is FID it is not produced in any meaningful way by the narrator (452). FID and narratorial commentary cannot mingle dialogically, as dual-voice theorists suggest, since "these two levels are entirely distinct in the frames that they evoke" (453). (7)

Certainly, there is good reason to associate FID with figural subjectivity. Banfield's analysis of FID at the level of the sentence illuminates the way markers of subjectivity ordinarily excluded from indirect discourse--for example, references to "here" or "now" or "tomorrow," questions, exclamations, and reflexive pronouns without antecedents--regularly appear in FID, implying the presence of a "deictic center" or "SELF" which we cannot identify with the "I" of the sentence. Since, on Banfield's account, a sentence can have only one "SELF," she concludes that FID sentences are grammatically speakerless, with the subjectivity shifted entirely to the character whose "deictic center" is being represented (Unspeakable Sentences 65-108). This analysis dovetails nicely with the idea of "impersonal" representation in what Fludernik calls the "pure reflector mode" (Languages 453): through FID, Banfield argues, the narrator disappears grammatically and is replaced by the focalizing character. The problem with applying this analysis to a novel like Emma is that there, FID sentences are embedded in a context in which the presence of narratorial subjectivity is firmly established. Thus, for example, a sentence which conforms to Banfield's analysis--"She was his object, and every body must perceive it" (182)--is immediately preceded by a sentence in which a narrator is clearly present, undercutting Emma's judgments: "Emma divined what every body present must be thinking" (182). (8) This single sentence includes both an echo of Emma's subjectivity--"what every body present must be thinking"--and a narrative frame. And how, we must ask, does the context provided by the irony in "Emma divined" affect the way we read and construe the sentence that follows? Is there not some sense in which the narrative presence established by this phrase lingers during our reading of the second sentence? What is needed, it seems, is an account of Austen's FID that will respond both to its evocation of figural subjectivity and to its continuity with narrative commentary and report, which inevitably establishes a second subjectivity, outside of the character's.

I propose that we imagine FID in Austen as primarily an imitation of figural speech or thought, in which the narrator echoes or mimics the idiom of the character for the purposes of the fiction. In this sense, the continuing presence of the narrator suggested by the third-person references is crucial, since the imitating voice inevitably reinflects and modifies the language it imitates. The character's language is no longer merely the character's, even in the limited sense that quoted discourse is the character's; rather, it is embedded in a new utterance spoken by the narrator, where it takes on new accretions of meaning and implication. From this perspective, the phenomenon known as "stylistic contagion" or Ansteckung, in which narratorial report is "strongly affected (or infected) with the mental idiom of the mind it renders" (Cohn, TM 33), might serve as a model for Austen's use of FID. Because they see a clear opposition between FID and strong narration, theorists like Cohn and Fludernik are not entirely comfortable with the incorporation of figural subjectivity into sentences that are clearly produced by a narrator, and so they tend to treat such narrative appropriation as a special category, different in crucial ways from FID proper. (9) But why, in a narrative situation like Austen's, should such "coloured" or "infected" passages be seen as a phenomenon distinct from FID? I would propose that, in Austen at least, what happens in "stylistic contagion" is the same thing that happens in FID. Whether it occurs within a sentence or within a paragraph, the essential feature of both phenomena is the imitation of figural subjectivity within a context of narrative report. If we read the narrator as present in FID, mimicking the thought or speech of characters, then the technique shades seamlessly into the more covert or fragmented mimicry usually treated as "stylistic contagion." In my view, when we look at FID in Austen, or in other texts with a strong narrator, we should imagine a broad spectrum of largely continuous effects, with a protean narrative voice able to modulate into the voice of figural thought or speech for shorter or longer periods of time, and in overt or covert ways. (10)

Consider, for example, the passage that describes Mr. Elton's return to Hartfield after having delivered his charade to Emma and Harriet:

Later in the morning, and just as the girls were going to separate in preparation for the regular four o'clock dinner, the hero of this inimitable charade walked in again. Harriet turned away; but Emma could receive him with the usual smile, and her quick eye soon discerned in his the consciousness of having made a push--of having thrown a die; and she imagined he was come to see how it might turn up. His ostensible reason, however, was to ask whether Mr. Woodhouse's party could be made up in the evening without him, or whether he should be in the smallest degree necessary at Hartfield. If he were, everything else must give way; but otherwise his friend Cole had been saying so much about his dining with him--had made such a point of it, that he had promised him conditionally to come. (70)

After the amused narratorial mockery of "the hero of this inimitable charade," the passage shifts into an external report of Emma's response: "her quick eye ... discerned," "she imagined." In the midst of this report, there is a fragment of FID in "of having thrown a die," which gives us Emma's imagination of what Mr. Elton might be thinking; as is the standard pattern in Austen, indirect discourse--what Cohn calls "psycho-narration"--opens momentarily into represented figural subjectivity, in the figure's own idiom. Then, in the sentence that begins "His ostensible reason, however, was to ask," indirect discourse first resumes, and then shifts into an imitation of Mr. Elton's speech, with "in the smallest degree necessary." The final sentence is an imitation of Mr. Elton from start to finish ("his friend

Cole," "had made such a point of it") and must be called free indirect discourse. But it is entirely continuous with the previous sentence; in fact it grows out of it, as the fragments of speech in the first sentence open into the full-fledged imitation of speech in the second. Thus it seems misleading to describe what happens here theoretically as an instance of the narrator "disappearing" or evolving into vacuity or absence. Nor does it seem accurate to describe this as a featureless "objective" narration, which has been "colored" or "contaminated" by its proximity to Mr. Elton's subjectivity. This is narratorial subjectivity, engaging in a kind of verbal play, which includes the imitation of others' speech. (11) The last sentence, like the phrase "in the smallest degree necessary," is parodic imitation, in which the narrative voice echoes Mr. Elton's style for comic purposes, out of sheer playful exuberance--the same sort of exuberance and sensitivity to the absurd that gives us "the hero of this inimitable charade" at the beginning of the paragraph.

As they have attempted to apply the theory of FID to Austen's novels, critics have had difficulty explaining and describing narrative modulations such as these, in part because they have insisted on too rigid a theoretical opposition between narratorial and figural discourses. I want to turn now to two standard accounts of FID in Emma, in order to demonstrate that the model I have proposed offers a more fluid explanation of Austen's narrative practice than has been available previously. Helen Dry defines two different sorts of third-person narration in Emma: "first, that which might represent a transcript of a character's conscious thoughts during the action [i. e., FID, which Dry calls "narrated monologue," following Cohn]; and, second, the so-called 'exposition,' which constitutes reports of settings and action, and which is usually felt to be the product of the narrator" (88). For Dry, the former is "marked as Emma's conscious thought"; the latter consists of "everything that could not be transposed into first-person, present tense and appropriately regarded as part of a character's internal sentences" (89). She claims that there is "generally a sharp contrast between ... narrated monologue style and the style of the exposition" (89). However, her essay goes on to point out that there are frequent instances in Emma in which the exposition makes use of linguistic constructions ordinarily confined to direct speech or FID--for example, reflexive pronouns without antecedents--in order to represent Emma's point of view, as in the following passage: "With Tuesday came the agreeable prospect of seeing him again, and for a longer time than hitherto; of judging of his general manners, and by inference, of the meaning of his manners towards herself; of guessing how soon it might be necessary for her to throw coldness into her air ... " (176; Dry 92). Here, as Dry points out, the use of "herself" without an explicit antecedent suggests the presence of Emma's subjectivity. One could go further and hear an evocation of Emma's self-dramatization in "it might be necessary for her to throw coldness into her air." For Dry, however, this passage "does not represent narrative monologue, since it is incongruous as a transcript of conscious thought" (92). But why should the theoretical construct of FID be limited only to complete sentences that provide a transcript of figural thought? The same tendency to imitate the rhythm of figural thought that we observe in the passages Dry categorizes as "narrated monologue" are unequivocally present in "towards herself" and in "throw coldness into her air." It is just that they are more fragmentary, less sustained, and more clearly embedded in the frame of the narrator's discourse. The entire sentence cannot be transformed into a figural thought, but figural thought is clearly present, in fits and starts, nonetheless. In fact, by demonstrating how pervasively subjective constructions invade or contaminate the "exposition," Dry shows that FID effects are not limited to whole sentences, but are a consistent feature of Austen's supple and responsive narrative style. Dry's conclusion is that the expressive and cognitive linguistic features she finds in the exposition axe evidence that Emma is herself "the narrative equivalent of speaker--that is, the consciousness whose point of view is reflected in the exposition" (99).

But I would argue that they suggest, to the contrary, that the subjectivities of Emma and the narrator intermingle throughout Emma, as the narrator modulates her voice to imitate what Emma thinks or says. FID thus occurs in the context of narrative report and is framed by narrative metalanguage.

In "Narrative and Dialogue in Jane Austen," Graham Hough makes a similar distinction between "objective narrative" and "coloured narrative," both of which he distinguishes from "free indirect style"--which seems, for him, to be limited to reports of actual speech, rather than thought (203-205). But Hough's examples make it clear that most of what he describes as "coloured narrative" is in fact FID, including both clear-cut, free-standing examples and examples that other theorists might call "stylistic contagion." He quotes, for example, the following passage in which Emma thinks over Mr. Elton's qualifications as a lover for Harriet:

The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of expediency. Mr. Elton's situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connections; at the same time not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emma imagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought very highly of him as a good-humoured, well-meaning, respectable young man, without any deficiency of useful understanding or knowledge of the world. (31; Hough 204)

After the narratorial frame provided by "she considered" and "her sense" in the first sentence, the second sentence would be classified by any of the classical theorists as FID: it is free-standing, reflects Emma's subjectivity throughout (and especially in "quite the gentleman himself"), and might be read as "a transcript of conscious thought." But the evocation of Emma's consciousness continues in phrases like "a comfortable home for her" and "a good-humoured, well-meaning respectable young man" below, despite being mixed with language like "Emma imagined" and "she thought" that marks the continuing presence of narratorial subjectivity. In "Emma imagined," there is in fact narratorial guidance for the careful reader, since the word "imagined" echoes and reverberates against the pattern of repeated references to the fancy and imagination by means of which the narrator frames Emma's judgments and warns us against them. (12) Thus this passage--which Hough classes as "coloured narrative"--includes both FID sentences and the "contamination" of narrative report. Their promiscuous intermingling suggests that the distinction between them is arbitrary, at least in Austen's fiction. In both cases, what occurs is narrative mimicry of figural thought--and in both cases, as Hough himself points out with regard to a similar passage, "the narrator's objective judgement is firmly in charge" (210).

This is, I propose, the most helpful way to imagine the entire phenomenon of FID in Austen's fiction. On this account, there are typically two subjectivities expressed in Austen's FID passages the subjectivity of the imitated character and the underlying subjectivity of the imitating narrator, whose extended, protean utterance frames and controls the representation of figural thought or speech in FID. In ordinary speech--in a joke, say, or an account of someone else's conversation--there can be no doubt that the presence of an imitating voice changes the inflection of an utterance: we hear the same words and expressions differently when they are filtered through someone else's discourse. The same phenomenon occurs when scholars and other expository writers summarize or refer to one another's discourse. In a recent essay, for example, Cohn describes the "astonishing picture" of the novel created by

critics who read narrative poetics in the light of Foucault: "They all tend to present the novel, particularly in its realist guise, as a genre whose form replicates the malevolent power structures of a society that both produces and consumes it, a genre that--though Machiavellian tactics may at times hide its target--exists largely in order to wield absolute cognitive control over the lives of the characters it incarcerates and whose psyches it maliciously invades and inspects" ("Optics" 6). At the end of this sentence, in words and phrases like "incarcerates," "maliciously invades," and (especially) "inspects," Cohn echoes the critical discourse of D. A. Miller, John Bender, and other Foucauldian critics. (13) As she summarizes their work, she slips into their idiom, just as the narrator of Emma slips into the idiom of Harriet Smith or Emma herself when writing about them. In a manner entirely familiar to anyone who writes critical prose, she does this without quotation marks, in a sentence which begins very clearly in her own voice ("They all tend to present," etc.). But surely it makes no sense to claim that Cohn has disappeared in this sentence--or, to use the language Cohn uses about FID in this essay, to claim that she has allowed the critics to "impose their voice on [her]" (5). The effect is just the opposite: by imitating their critical language in the context of her own sentence, having already characterized it as "astonishing," Cohn holds it up for our ironic scrutiny, and we are expected to notice its exaggeration and paranoia. In the same way, FID functions in Austen's novels as a filtered representation of subjectivity, inflected throughout by the narrator's irony and her moral sensibility, as reflected in her language elsewhere.

It is natural that Austen should choose to deploy FID in this way, rather than another, given the aesthetic and moral structure of a novel like Emma. FID is, in the first place, a comic technique for Austen, allowing her to mimic the subjectivity of a wide range of characters for our amusement, drawing their voices into the rich texture of her narration. Once we hear characters like Mr. Woodhouse or Miss Bates speak, they can return again and again as linguistic traces in the narrative voice, to great comic effect. Moreover, if, as many of Austen's readers have concluded, Emma is designed to provide a kind of moral instruction, as Emma makes mistakes and then recognizes them, it is necessary both that Emma's subjectivity be given expression and that it be contained by a more comprehensive and authoritative subjectivity. (14) While it is less direct and obtrusive than what we might find in the fiction of Henry Fielding or George Eliot, Austen's narrative voice nevertheless provides that containing subjectivity, standing in for the implied author and embodying her designs. As Wayne C. Booth pointed out many years ago, the principal function of the narrator in Emma is to "reinforce ... the double vision that operates throughout the book: our inside view of Emma's worth and our objective view of her great faults" (256). FID is a particularly helpful mechanism for articulating this "double vision," since it allows the narrator to represent Emma's subjectivity with great immediacy while still providing a frame within which that subjectivity can be understood and placed. When employed by this narrator, then, FID is an instrument of what Booth might call "control of distance" in Emma--and, in fact, Booth offers the sustained FID passage at the beginning of chapter 3 as a key example of the benefits we derive from Austen's narratorial guidance in the novel. "Emma's unconscious catalog of her egotistical uses for Harriet," he writes, "is ... given its full force by being framed explicitly in a world of values which Emma herself cannot discover until the conclusion of the book" (258). In other contexts, sustained FID of the sort being described here might very well allow figural subjectivity to dominate, without external check, as the prevailing theory suggests. In Emma, we repeatedly experience figural subjectivity, as the text falls into parody and imitation, but, as Booth points out, we never lose contact with the narrator's authoritative voice, which is essential to the novel's design.

It is possible, then, to speak of an interplay between narratorial and figural voices in Austen's FID, with two sensibilities, two languages, placed in tension with one another--and in acknowledging this interplay, I follow theorists like Roy Pascal and Dominick LaCapra in characterizing FID in Austen as a "dual-voiced" phenomenon. (15) I do not think it follows, however, that an interplay of voices necessarily entails interpretive instability or the disruption of narrative authority, as many such theorists would suggest. Here, not surprisingly, Bakhtin provides a helpful gloss. In his account of "parodic stylization" (301) and "hybrid constructions" (304) in Dickens and Turgenev, Bakhtin treats a series of passages that contain FID at various levels, ranging from brief echoes of speech or thought to sustained figural monologues. For Bakhtin, these are constructions that contain "two utterances, two speech manners, two styles" (304); there is a "mimicking" of a character's words, but these words are "permeated with the ironic intonation of the author" (318); there is "inner speech," but it is "transmitted in a way regulated by the author, with provocative questions from the author and with ironically debunking reservations" (319). (16) These characterizations are extremely helpful as an approach to FID in Austen, whose novels are, like Little Dorrit, "everywhere dotted with quotation marks" and "washed by heteroglot waves from all sides" (307). But they do not imply, as some critics influenced by Bakhtin would suggest, that the presence of multiple voices destabilizes the work of art or disrupts the process of interpretation. (17) Here and elsewhere in "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin stresses artistic control as the context within which heteroglossia operates in the novel. The languages of heteroglossia are "drawn in by the novelist for the orchestration of his themes and for the refracted (indirect) expression of his intentions and values" (292); heteroglossia is "subject to an artistic reworking" in the novel (300); the dialogic image "can fully unfold, achieve full complexity and depth and at the same time artistic closure, only under the conditions present in the genre of the novel" (278 emphasis mine); each element in the novel "supports the accent of the whole and participates in the process whereby the unified meaning of the whole is structured and revealed" (262). Given these formulations, we should be skeptical, I think, when FID theorists assume, in Bakhtin's name, that the evocation of figural voices in FID necessarily entails interpretive instability.

There is a history of this sort of reading in the "dual-voice" theory of FID, and it has recently been applied to Emma. Since FID is a liminal phenomenon, with narratorial and figural voices often difficult to disentangle, some theorists suggest that it is inherently disruptive, inconsistent with stable interpretation or determinate meaning. In Madame Bovary on Trial, for example, LaCapra claims that the "shifts or modulations" inherent in FID "create an indeterminacy of narrative voice that unsettles the moral security of the reader and renders decisive judgment about character or story difficult to attain" (59-60). These shifts also "raise the question of the relation between unifying and 'decentering' forces" in the text" (60). Writing about Austen, Kathy Mezei goes further, arguing that in novels where FID is present, "a struggle is being waged between narrators and character-focalizers for control of the word, the text, and the reader's sympathy" (66). In Emma, there is a "destabilization of the reader through the indeterminacy created by FID" (75); "the narrator has 'refracted' her discourse through Emma, in this way diffusing the authority of the monologic authorial voice, permitting a voice of resistance to the marriage plot, to restrictive social codes and conventions, and to the constrained lives of women" (75; qtg. Bakhtin). Similarly, Casey Finch and Peter Bowen suggest that "the development in Austen's hands of free indirect style marks a crucial moment in the history of novelistic technique in which narrative authority is seemingly elided, ostensibly giving way to what Flaubert called a transparent style in which the author is 'everywhere felt, but never seen'" (3). In Emma, "through a strategic deployment of free indirect style, overt narrative authority ... has been altogether elided as such" (6). All

of these readings assume that FID works against (and is inconsistent with) narrative authority. Moreover, as the quotation from Finch and Bowen makes particularly clear, they all rely on a model of FID that stresses the autonomy of the focalizer and the disappearance of the anthorial narrator, as in Jamesian theory. "Imagine FID as an expression of the character's bid for freedom from the controlling narrator," Mezei writes, "rather like the gingerbread man gleefully escaping from his creator" (68). This autonomy is what creates the destabilizing or undermining effect: free of the controlling narrator, the focalizing character creates an alternate site of authority, "a voice of resistance."

However, as any careful reading of Emma will demonstrate, this is not at all what happens when Austen makes use of FID. Rather than operating autonomously or freeing themselves from narratorial discourse, Austen's FID passages are embedded in this discourse: they are instances of figural thought or speech fixed or placed by the narrator, voiced by her in a kind of redaction or mimicry. It is questionable, of course, even in cases of dialogue and other direct quotations, to imagine figural speech or thought as "free" from authorial control: the motif cannot escape the design of which it is a part. But in the case of Austen's FID, I think, it is particularly misleading to think in these terms, since the effect of the technique in Austen's hands is actually to draw figural speech and thought into the structure of narratorial discourse, thereby foregrounding the author's exercise of control through the narrator, whose intonations and inflections shape our response to the represented figural speech and thought. In this way, as Bakhtin suggests, the double-voiced effect in FID creates neither instability nor thematic ambiguity: the artistic intentions of the author are first embodied in the narrator and then "refracted" through the imitated figural voice. Austen's FID is thus best seen as the incorporation of figural speech and thought into the complex artifice of narrative voice.

Emma provides a particularly helpful context for understanding Austen's use of FID, since the narrator's imitation of figural subjectivity there takes place in an atmosphere of pervasive mimicry, in which Emma, in particular, frequently imitates and mocks the discourse of other characters, thus engaging in "double-voiced discourse" herself. After reading Mr. Elton's charade, which includes the line "Thy ready wit the word will soon supply," Emma thinks, "Humph--Harriet's ready wit!" (62)--and she later echoes the same phrase when she wonders at Harriet's wanting to see the inside of the Vicarage: "Emma could only class it, as a proof of love, with Mr. Elton's seeing ready wit in her" (72). Here, although the sentence is clearly her own, she falls into Mr. Elton's verbal register for comic purposes in the phrase "ready wit." She mimics another phrase of his when thinking of the way he will "suit Harriet exactly": "It will be an 'Exactly so,'" she thinks, "as he says himself" (43). When Mr. John Knightley complains about going to the Westons' dinner party, Emma silently imitates her sister's treatment of him. She does not "find herself equal to give the pleased assent, which no doubt he was in the habit of receiving, to emulate the 'Very true, my love,' which must have been usually administered by his traveling companion" (95). Once the Eltons are out the door after their first visit to Hartfield, Emma falls immediately to imitating Mrs. Elton: "Knightley!--never seen him in her life before and call him Knightley!--and discover that he is a gentleman! A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her cara sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and under-bred finery" (229). Even single words like "gentleman" and "resources" are derisive echoes of Mrs. Elton's speech here. Emma is acutely sensitive to language, and to its indiosyncratic use by various characters, and she cannot stop herself from parody and verbal play, in which she appropriates the language of those around her and incorporates it into her own discourse. At one point, when she is imagining Mr. Knightley married to Jane Fairfax, Mrs. Weston even gently reprimands her for this tendency:

"How would he bear to have Miss Bates belonging to him?--To have her haunting the Abbey, and thanking him all day long for his great kindness in marrying Jane?--'So very kind and obliging?--But he always had been such a very kind neighbor!' And then fly off, through half a sentence, to her mother's old petticoat. 'Not that it was such a very old petticoat either--for still it would last a great while--and, indeed, she must thankfully say that their petticoats were all very strong.'" "For shame, Emma! Do not mimic her. You divert me against my conscience." (186)

If we look at Emma's parody of Miss Bates, we will find that it is itself an FID rendering of speech, just as in the narration proper: the verbs are shifted--"had been," "was," "would," "were"--and Miss Bates appears as "she," but with all of the markers of her distinctive subjectivity: "his great kindness," "indeed, she must thankfully say," etc. Notice, too, that Emma begins one phrase in her own (narrating) voice--"To have her haunting the Abbey, and thanking him all day long"--and then shifts into a parodic imitation of Miss Bates: "for his great kindness in marrying Jane." As Mrs. Weston's response suggests, there is, for Austen, an unsettling moral content to this sort of verbal play; the passage, like Emma's mockery of Miss Bates on Box Hill, demonstrates Austen's tendency simultaneously to take pleasure in energetic, mocking verbal play and to worry that such play is wrong, dangerous, threatening.

Whether it is against her conscience or not, the narrator of Emma repeatedly engages in precisely the same sort of mocking imitation that Emma engages in here, and it is in this context that we must see the narrator's use of FID. Like Emma, the narrator is flexible, playful, always open to parody and imitation in her own discourse. The difference is that the narrator's imitations of others' discourse are never themselves ironized, as Emma's sometimes are. Since the narrator of Emma provides an authoritative center for our judgments and responses throughout the text, her FID renderings have a different status from Emma's; whatever we might think of the narrator's mockery, we have no textual position from which we might judge or comment on her sensibility, while, in Emma's case, the narrator herself (or a character like Mrs. Weston or Mr. Knightley) frequently provides just this sort of frame. Still, the same technique of purposeful incorporation and appropriation of the speech of others is evident in both Emma's and the narrator's discourses, and we can no more discount the narrator's mediating role in FID passages than we can discount Emma's in her own parodic imitations. When several of the principal characters meet at the Crown Inn to plan the ball, for example, we read: "The whole party walked about, and looked, and praised again; and then, having nothing else to do, formed a sort of half circle round the fire, to observe in their various modes, till other subjects were started, that, though May, a fire in the evening was still very pleasant" (265). Here, just as in Emma's imitation of Miss Bates, the distinctive flavor of insipid talk about the weather--"though May," "very pleasant"--is embedded in a sentence that begins as a third-person report. Although these phrases echo a collective subjectivity other than the narrator's, they are voiced by her and are clearly under her ironic control.

Sometimes the verbal echoes in the narrator's discourse are quite brief, as when the narrator refers to one character by the name another might use. Thus Emma is always "Miss Woodhouse" when Harriet is in question--"They remained but a few minutes together, as Miss Woodhouse must not be kept waiting" (28)--and Isabella is likely to become "poor Isabella" even when Mr. Woodhouse is being described in a narratorial sentence: "and it was therefore many months since they had been seen in a regular way by their Surry connections,

or seen at all by Mr. Woodhouse, who could not be induced to get so far as London, even for poor Isabella's sake" (78). But more frequently the narrator shifts her voice into an imitation of figural subjectivity for longer periods, falling into passages that make sustained use of FID. Even in these sustained passages, the narrator is a consistent presence, always capable of stepping outside of the imitated figural thought and speech to comment or describe. We can see this particularly well in the scene following Mr. Elton's proposal, one of the most consistently focalized sections of the novel. One sentence during this scene begins in FID, with "must" characteristically indicating the movement of consciousness, the formulation of a thought: "But he had fancied her in love with him; that evidently must have been his dependence" (114). But as the sentence continues, the narrator steps in to comment on what Emma has just been thinking: "and after raving a little about the seeming incongruity of gentle manners and a conceited head, Emma was obliged in common honesty to stop and admit that her own behavior to him had been so complaisant and obliging, so full of courtesy and attention, as (supposing her real motive unperceived) might warrant a man of ordinary observation and delicacy, like Mr. Elton, in fancying himself a very decided favourite. If she had so misinterpreted his feelings, she had little right to wonder that he, with self-interest to blind him, should have mistaken her's" (114). In "raving" and "Emma was obliged ... to stop and admit," there is clear evidence of the subjectivity of an authoritative narrator, who recognizes what is excessive in Emma's response before she does and who describes for us the exact moment when she concedes this herself, providing us with a context within which we can place the surrounding representations of Emma's subjectivity. After this intervention, the narrative voice again begins to mimic Emma's thinking, in the meditative repetition of "so complaisant and obliging, so full of courtesy and attention" and in the rueful and mortified intensification of "a very decided favourite." Since this language follows "admit that," it is technically narratorial report--but it modulates into Emma's subjectivity just as certainly as the free-standing FID sentence that follows it. In a single sentence, then, Austen moves back and forth between FID and authoritative narratorial report several times without the slightest difficulty. Several paragraphs below, after a passage of quoted monologue in which Emma considers the possibility of bringing Harriet and William Cox together, the narrator steps in to say, "She stopt to blush and laugh at her own relapse, and then resumed a more serious, more dispiriting cogitation on what had been, and might be, and must be" (114). Again there is an external report on Emma's thinking (she "stopt," then "resumed a more serious, more dispiriting cogitation") and a judgment ("relapse"), followed by a return to FID in the movement from "had been" to "might be" and "must be." Although we might think of the relation between these two subjectivities--the one who thinks, and the one who imitates and judges thinking--as dialogic, there is no sense in which Emma's consciousness can be seen as replacing or undermining the narrative voice; it makes little sense to speak of the narrator as "a merely functional presence" in this passage. Here, as elsewhere, the narrator's subjectivity provides a gently ironic frame for Emma's FID thoughts, which are mediated and inflected by their incorporation into narratorial discourse. We are able to derive moral instruction from the contemplation of Emma's subjectivity precisely because her FID is represented for us through the medium of Austen's narrative voice.

Sometimes, the narrator's representation of figural subjectivity extends through several levels of filtering, as when Harriet reports what she has heard from Miss Nash about Mr. Elton's conversation with Mr. Perry:

Miss Nash had been telling her something, which she repeated Immediately with great delight. Mr. Perry had been to Mrs. Goddard's to attend a sick child, and Miss Nash had seen him, and he had told Miss Nash, that as he was coming back yesterday from Clayton Park,

he had met Mr. Elton, and found to his great surprize that Mr. Elton was actually on his road to London, and not meaning to return till the morrow, though it was the whist-club night, which he had been never known to miss before; and Mr. Perry had remonstrated with him about it, and told him how shabby it was in him, their best player, to absent himself, and tried very much to persuade him to put off his journey only one day; but it would not do; Mr. Elton had been determined to go on, and had said in a very particular way indeed, that he was going on business that he would not put off for any inducement in the world; and something about a very enviable commission, and being the bearer of something exceedingly precious. (58-59)

Here several successive layers of transmission are represented by means of FID echoes: Harriet's report in the breathless stringing together of clauses with "and" and the repetitions of "Miss Nash"; Mr. Perry's account of his conversation in phrases like "how shabby it was" and "in a very particular way" (although the italics here are probably an indication of the overlay of girlish interest in this phrase added by Miss Nash and Harriet Smith); and Mr. Elton's own language in "a very enviable commission" and "the bearer of something exceedingly precious." All of this is reported with detached interest by the narrator, who observes at the outset that Harriet repeated Miss Nash's story "immediately" and "with great delight." (18)

In a similar manner, the narrator sometimes in a single passage will represent both the idiom of Emma's thinking and the idiom of the speaker about whom Emma thinks:

To restrain him as much as might be, by her own manners, she was immediately preparing to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of the weather and the night; but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than she found her subject cut up--her hand seized--her attention demanded, and Mr. Elton actually making violent love to her: availing himself of the precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already well known, hoping--fearing--adoring--ready to die if she refused him; but flattering himself that his ardent attachment and unequalled love and unexampled passion could not fall of having some effect, and in short, very much resolved on being seriously accepted as soon as possible. It really was so. Without scruple--without apology--without much apparent diffidence, Mr. Elton, the lover of Harriet, was professing himself her lover. She tried to stop him; but vainly; he would go on, and say it all. Angry as she was, the thought of the moment made her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak. She felt that half this folly must be drunkenness, and therefore could hope that it might belong only to the passing hour. (108)

Both Emma's subjectivity and Mr. Elton's speech are represented by means of FID here. But they are represented in the context of the narrator's framing discourse, from which each of the figural languages provides a departure. At the outset of this passage, it is the narrator who reports that Emma hoped to "restrain" Mr. Elton and that she was "preparing" for speech, just as, after the proposal, it is the narrator who provides the important information that Emma resolved "to restrain herself when she did speak," in generous allowance for Mr. Elton's having drunk too much wine. In between these narratorial reports, the hint of Emma's subjectivity in "exquisite calmness and gravity" opens first into a representation of her bewilderment in the repetition of "scarcely," the alarmed dashes which surround "her hand seized," and the word "actually" in "Mr. Elton actually making violent love to her," and then, in the same sentence, into a burlesque of the proposal itself, with all of its stock phrases,

hesitations, and excesses. Because of the double FID filtering here, the comic play in the way Mr. Elton's language unfolds and adjusts itself ("hoping--fearing--adoring--ready to die") must be read both as self-conscious narratorial invention--it is the rhetoric of parodic excess, each turn adding to the comic portrait--and as a representation of Emma's heightening surprise and resentment: this is also the rhetoric of indignation. From both perspectives, the comedy involves the narrator imitating figural language for our amusement--for, of course, Emma's surprise is every bit as funny as Mr. Elton's lovemaking: "Mr. Elton, the lover of Harriet, was professing himself her lover." What must impress us, in a passage like this one, is the tremendous flexibility of Austen's narrative language, which moves in and out of the figural languages effortlessly, evoking them by the sheer exactness of her ear, her sensitivity to diction and the rhythms of speech, and the human presence, the orchestrating voice behind it all. This is energetic play, presented to us by the narrator, as is most of Austen's FID.

Of course, the increasingly sustained use of FID to represent Emma's thoughts and perceptions in volumes 2 and 3 of Emma includes many narrative passages that are far less complex than those I have been discussing. In order to invite the reader to fall into Emma's imaginings and deceptions, Austen must suppress the sorts of overt competing narratorial judgments and reports that might provide a corrective to Emma's mistakes. After the simple and tightly controlled burlesque of the episodes with Mr. Elton and Harriet, the social world of the novel becomes more complex and less easy to interpret in the scenes involving Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, and Austen seems to want us to struggle, with Emma, to interpret it. There is also an increasing tendency to blur the distinction between the narrator's report and Emma's focalizing perceptions in innocuous, unproblematical cases, so that inattentive readers will be more likely to trust Emma (and so err) when she makes judgments on thematically important material. Finally, when Emma recognizes her mistakes, Austen tends to represent her thoughts at great length, inviting the reader to experience embarrassment and shame along with her. Thus it is not difficult to find sequences of several consecutive sentences without any narrative intrusion or commentary at all, particularly toward the end of the novel:

How Harriet could ever have had the presumption to raise her thoughts to Mr. Knightley!--How she could dare to fancy herself the chosen of such a man till actually assured of it!--But Harriet was less humble, had fewer scruples than formerly.--Her inferiority, whether of mind or situation, seemed little felt.--She had seemed more sensible of Mr. Elton's being to stoop in marrying her, than she now seemed of Mr. Knightley's--Alas! was not that her own doing, too? Who had been at pains to give Harriet notions of self-consequence but herself?--Who but herself had taught her, that she was to elevate herself if possible, and that her claims were great to a high worldly establishment?--If Harriet, from being humble, were grown vain, it was her doing too. (340)

Passages like these are highly rhetorical--often featuring question marks, exclamations, and subjunctive transformations, as in this example--and they are close enough to direct representations of figural thought to be sometimes placed in quotation marks. In characterizing Austen's FID as I have, I don't mean to suggest that such passages do not exist--only that they do not tell the whole story and that, taken out of context, they provide a misleading picture of what the technique looks like in Austen's hands. Even in this example, the narratorial comments that introduce the passage provide a context that influences our reading: Emma is trying to "understand, thoroughly understand her own heart"; she uses "every leisure moment" in this endeavor; she is "ashamed of every sensation" aside from her

love for Mr. Knightley (339). These observations establish the narrative frame within which we read the extended FID that follows, and they guide and influence our response to Emma's mortified thoughts. Thus, even as we find ourselves fully inside of Emma's consciousness in a passage like this one, her thoughts are still inflected by the surrounding narratorial context. Emma cannot be said to have "escaped from her creator" in any meaningful way.

But the more significant danger in seeing Austen's handling of FID through the medium of this sort of passage is that it will obscure the continuing interaction between narratorial commentary and FID, even during scenes that seem to be limited narrowly to Emma's point of view. As I have said, we never lose touch completely with the narrator: she continues to assert her presence in instances in which her judgments do not prematurely undercut Emma's, and the complex interplay between narratorial and figural voices that I have discussed above continues throughout the entire novel. At the Coles' party, for example, after Frank has assented to Emma's conjecture about Mr. Dixon having bought the pianoforte, we read the following:

There was no occasion to press the matter farther. The conviction seemed real; he looked as if he felt it. She said no more, other subjects took their turn; and the rest of the dinner passed away; the dessert succeeded, the children came in, and were talked to and admired amid the usual rate of conversation; a few clever things said, a few downright silly, but by much the larger proportion neither the one nor the other--nothing worse than every day remarks, dull repetitions, old news, and heavy jokes. The ladies had not been long in the drawing-room, before the other ladies, in their different divisions, arrived. Emma watched the entree of her own particular little friend, and if she could not exult in her dignity and grace, she could not only love the blooming sweetness and the artless manner, but could most heartily rejoice in that light, cheerful, unsentimental disposition which allowed her so many alleviations of pleasure, in the midst of the pangs of disappointed affection. There she sat--and who would have guessed bow many tears she had been lately shedding? To be in company, nicely dressed herself and seeing others nicely dressed, to sit and smile and look pretty, and say nothing, was enough for the happiness of the present hour. Jane Fairfax did look and move superior; but Emma suspected she might have been glad to change feelings with Harriet, very glad to have purchased the mortification of having loved--yes, of having loved even Mr. Elton in vain--by the surrender of all the dangerous pleasure of knowing herself beloved by the husband of her friend. (181-82)

This is an intensively focalized passage, to be sure, but the narrator's voice mixes with Emma's throughout. As we emerge from Frank's quoted speech, we first encounter Emma's judgments and perceptions, presented in FID: "There was no occasion to press the matter farther. The conviction seemed real; he looked as if he felt it." But what follows is a characteristically cynical narratorial account of the rest of the dinner: here is the detached, jaded voice of the text, making its own judgments on the "usual rate of conversation," the progression of dessert, children, "every day remarks, dull repetitions, old news, and heavy jokes." And it is this voice, too, that describes the entrance of the "other ladies," drily noting their "different divisions." When we reach "Emma watched," there is a signal that Emma's perspective is again about to be represented--and even as early as "her own particular little friend" there is some indication, in the affectionate excess of the phrase, that the narrator is

shifting into Emma's register. By the time we get to "who would have guessed how many tears she had been lately shedding?" and "yes, of having loved even Mr. Elton in vain," we are in full-fledged FID, with the narrator imitating Emma's reactions in her own language, and the passage draws us gently from the foolishness of Emma's partiality toward Harriet to the genuine danger of her mistaken assumptions about Jane Fairfax and Mr. Dixon. But even toward the end of the passage, the frame of narratorial report is not completely abandoned: "Emma suspected" marks what follows as the narrator's indirect account of Emma's consciousness--but it is an account that again includes mimicry of Emma's idiom and the movement of her thought. Emma's contemptuous reference to Harriet's emotional life here--"yes, of having loved even Mr. Elton"--is consistent with the way she imagines her elsewhere, and is perhaps as blamable as her conjectures about Jane Fairfax. Because we have seen Emma make this sort of confident, fanciful judgment before--because we recognize her distinctive quickness and the way her mind runs--we are prepared to recognize the sentimental excess of her fancy here, and to see the FID as a piece of ironic mimicry, different in degree but not in kind from the comic representations of Mr. Elton or Harriet earlier in the novel.

If the account I have given of FID in Emma is accurate, then the framing presence of the narrator plays a greater role in Austen's FID than has usually been acknowledged. Rather than disappearing or suffering a diminution a diminution of authority, the narrator provides a consistent discursive context within which shifts into figural thought or speech register as imitations, in an atmosphere of pervasive mimicry and comic play. Hough speaks of the "continual diversification of the surface" in Austen's fiction, which is "very largely a matter of continual slight shifts in the point of view" (210), and I think many readers would agree that this effect is part of what is distinctive about Austen's narrative style. But rather than creating "an indeterminacy of narrative voice" or a "destabilization of the reader," these continual shifts and modulations are indications of Austen's prodigious artistic control.

ENDNOTES

(1.) See, for example, Cohn, TM 108; Lodge 126; Pascal 34; Finch and Bowen 4; Mezei 75.

(2.) The most important early works on FID in English are Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice; Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds; and Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences. Despite its lengthy theoretical history in German and French criticism (summarized in Pascal 1-30), FID had, until the 1970s, been "virtually ignored" in English, with "no standard name" attached to the technique (Cohn, TM 108). The publication of an English translation of M. M. Bakhtin's essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagination gave additional support to theorists who saw FID as a dual-voiced phenomenon. Dominick LaCapra comments on Cohn, Pascal, and Bakhtin in developing his own reading of FID in Madame Bovary on Trial. Monika Fludernik provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and practical issues surrounding FID and develops a "frame-theoretical" approach in The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, the most recent full-length study devoted to the topic. For treatment of FID in the standard theories of narrative, see Chatman 198-209, Genette 169-75, and Bal 44-52. For a direct exchange between Banfield and Fludernik on FID, see Banfield, "L'Ecriture et le Non-Dit"; and Fludernik, "The Linguistic Illusion of Alterity." In this latter essay, Fludernik offers an extremely clear practical definition of FID: at a minimum, the conjunction of a posited "discourse of alterity" distinct from the current narrator with two necessary syntactic conditions (anaphoric alignment with the reporting discourse, the absence of verb-plus-complement clause structure), with other features (e. g., temporal shift, narrative

parentheticals, deictic alignment with the reported discourse) seen as nonobligatory "signals or indices" (95-99).

(3.) See the discussions of Banfield, Cohn, Fludernik, and Finch and Bowen below. It is striking, in reading through the most influential narratological theory on FID, how strongly the Jamesian view of the novel described and problematized by Booth as early as 1961 continues to influence the way narration and FID are characterized. By "Jamesian" here I mean the view that defines representation through the medium of a strong narrator in opposition to "dramatic" or "figural" representation and that sees the history of the novel as developing from the former to the latter. In "Optics and Power," for example, Cohn writes: "One can ... readily discern an overall historical change in the course of the nineteenth century, with Flaubert and James credited for an influential role in moving the novel from the first type [authorial narration] to the second [figural narration]. In terms of novelistic technique, this change is associated with increasing doses of free indirect style injected into novelistic discourse" (14). Cohn treats this historical shift as part of "a set of well-established narratological views" (13). Hale has also remarked on the Jamesian character of Cohn's approach to FID (91).

(4.) See the discussion of LaCapra, Mezei, and Finch and Bowen below. See also Ferguson, whose account relies on Finch and Bowen and includes several key errors, among them a confusion about the French tense for FID and references to non-FID examples as FID.

(5.) I recognize, of course, that instances of imitation in speech include oral intonations and inflections unavailable in written narrative. The similarity I refer to is thus not a similarity of technique but of effect. Although written prose has a more limited range of techniques for indicating imitation and inflection, imitated phrases in FID have the same discursive status as imitated phrases in oral speech; rather than being independent or autonomous representations of the speech or thought of others, they are mediated by the imitating discourse that generates them.

(6.) See, for example, Mezei 72-75; Finch and Bowen 5-6; and Ferguson 171, 176-77. This approach is consistent with other recent readings that construe Emma as destabilizing authoritarian structures--for example, Johnson 121-43 and Wallace 77-97. For a similar Bakhtin-influenced account of FID as destabilizing force in Persuasion, see Giordano--e. g., "Both narrative and cultural indeterminacy are mirrored in the battle between narrator and character for possession of the word, another contest where victory is never won" (113).

(7.) Flodernik's account of FID is complex and not always easy to pin down. On one hand, as a sensitive and perceptive reader of literary texts, including many from the nineteenth century and earlier, she clearly recognizes the interplay between narrative and figural subjectivities in traditional European fiction, and she faults Banfield for inattention to the continuing presence of the narrator in such texts. Nevertheless, she concludes her discussion of "the dual voice hypothesis" in Fictions by faulting it for a lack of linguistic precision--"it falls to describe textual phenomena and meaning effects with any acceptable precision and ultimately exposes itself to the charge of mere amateurish impressionistic dabbling" (351)--and seems then to fall back on a theoretical opposition between narratorial and figural voices, qualified by a schematic (rather than mimetic) approach to the representation of subjectivity and by a sensitive, frame-theoretical account of a reader's differentiation between the two. I propose, in contrast, that in Austen the narrative voice incorporates the figural voice and so remains simultaneously present during FID, inflecting and altering what it imitates. I realize that by

attempting to break down the distinction between FID and Ansteckung and to see FID as part of a broad continuum of imitative effects, I may be open to the charge of "mere amateurish impressionistic dabbling" myself. However, I think the categories of a scientific linguistics can take us only so far in the interpretation of literary texts, and we must finally rely on (and attempt to explain) our judgments as readers, with all of the ambiguity and complexity that this entails.

(8.) Fludernik offers a similar critique of Banfield's account in Fictions 319-21,439-40, and in "Linguistic Illusion" 111.

(9.) See Fludernik, Fictions 332-38; and Cohn, TM 32-33. For other accounts of this phenomenon, see Kenner on the "Uncle Charles Principle," which he describes as "something new in fiction, the normally neutral narrative vocabulary pervaded by a little cloud of idioms which a character might use if he were managing the narrative" (17), and Hough on "coloured narrative" (204-205). Cohn treats "stylistic contagion" under the heading of "psycho-narration" rather than "narrated monologue"; for her, the phenomenon occurs in "places where psycho-narration verges on the narrated monologue" (TM 33 emphasis mine). For Fludernik in Fictions, Kenner's "discovery" of the Uncle Charles Principle, as a technique separate from FID, "constituted a really sensational find in the field of Joyce studies" (332). However, the more flexible definition of FID in "Linguistic Illusion" would seem to include even fragmentary instances of stylistic contagion, since it requires only "discourse of alterity" in the context of narratorial report (95).

(10.) Fludernik suggests the possibility of such a continuum in "Linguistic Illusion" (102). See also McHale, who suggests a range of formal options for representing subjectivity.

(11.) In several formulations in "Linguistic Illusion," Fludernik seems to be imagining FID in similar terms--e, g., "Viewed linguistically ... polyvocality can be reduced to a mere semblance of dual voice, an illusion of alterity, deriving in fact from an active manipulation of deictic terms by the current producer of the discourse" (106). My emphasis here is precisely on the "active manipulation of deictic terms"--and figural idioms--by the narrator of Emma, who is the "producer of the discourse" in the passages I discuss. I cannot see, however, why this reduces dual voice to a "mere semblance"--or why we should not imagine two represented subjectivities here, one folded inside the other.

(12.) See Tave 205-55 on this point.

(13.) Cohn's essay traces the way Bender, Miller, and Mark Seltzer have read traditional English and French narrative practice as coercive and sinister--a sort of Panoptical surveillance, through which the narrator exercises "infallible supervision" over characters and the fictional world. Cohn argues that the analogy between the Panopticon and the novel in the eighteenth century is "entirely spurious" on historical grounds (9), and she goes on to claim that all three critics have erred in assuming that the relation between narrator and characters is any way comparable to power relations in the world. On the important questions she raises, it is hard not to sympathize with Cohn; I am entirely persuaded by her argument about the invalidity of the Panopticon as an analogy for authoritative narration, and I think she is right to criticize Bender for inattention to the narratological concepts on which he draws in his argument. What is more interesting for my purposes here, however, is the way Cohn characterizes the relation between FID and narrative authority in the course of her argument. In one respect, she prefers Miller and Seltzer to Bender, since they recognize that FID is

"something of an embarrassment" for their arguments about power--something "to be explained away, as sham or alibi" (8), since the narrator allows characters to "impose their voice on him" (5). Bender, in contrast, stresses the narrator's continuing presence (and control) in sustained FID passages, which, given her assumptions about FID, Cohn sees as ludicrous. It is one thing, she implies, to criticize the heavy-handedness of one of Fielding's narrators, say, or one of Thackeray's--but how can a narrator who has been reduced to "vacuity" (10) or "a merely functional presence" (14) by FID be accused of exerting coercive authority over a fictional world? On this point, Bender seems to me to be right--right, that is, about the kind of political analogy one might make about FID, if not about the wisdom of making such analogies. See Bender and Cohn, "Optics and Power."

(14.) See, for example, Tave 205-55, Duckworth 146-178, Butler 250-74. While she does not use the term "free indirect discourse," Butler refers to Austen's "skill in modulating between the heroine's unreliable cast of thought, and her own ironically detached judgment of it" (262).

(15.) See, for example, Pascal 26, 32; LaCapra 59-60, 134-35.

(16.) In these and the following quotations, Bakhtin seems to be assuming that the novelist speaks in his or her own voice during the fiction, mimicking the voices of characters, expressing reservations, and asking questions. Modern narratology would assign these functions to the narrator. To preserve this important distinction, we might substitute "narrator" or "authorial narrator" for Bakhtin's "author" or "novelist" here and below.

(17.) See, for example, Lodge, After Bakhtin: "To allow characters to speak in their own social, regional, and individual accents ... by means of the free indirect style ... is to make interpretive closure in the absolute sense impossible" (23).

(18.) Flavin has noticed a similar effect in a passage from Persuasion.

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Pascal, Roy. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Function in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1977.

Tare, Stuart. Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973.

Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. Jane Austen and Narrative Authority. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Daniel P. Gunn is Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has published essays on the English novel and the theory of the novel in The Georgia Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, Eighteen-Century Fiction, and other journals.

Gale Document Number:A114326248