Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma

Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in EmmaGunn, Daniel P.

Narrative, Volume 12, Number 1, January 2004, pp. 35-54 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University PressDOI: 10.1353/nar.2003.0023

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

NARRATIVE, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 2004)Copyright 2004 by The Ohio State University

Free Indirect Discourse andNarrative Authority in Emma

Jane Austen is generally acknowledged to be the first English novelist to makesustained use of free indirect discourse in the representation of figural speech andthought.1 Unfortunately, however, the theory of free indirect discourse (FID) in Eng-lish has not been congenial to Austen’s work, often obscuring the way the techniquefunctions in her novels.2 Two theoretical tendencies, in particular, have contributedto this confusion. First, the most influential accounts of FID in English have tendedto stress the autonomy of FID representations of speech and thought and to contrastthem with authoritative narrative commentary: FID is, on this account, the preemi-nent technique of “objective” narration, in which the narrator supposedly withdrawsor disappears in favor of impersonal figural representation.3 Second, FID has oftenbeen characterized as innately disruptive and destabilizing—a technique that allowsother voices to compete with and so undermine the monologic authority of the nar-rator or the implied author.4 Whatever their relevance to later fiction, these character-izations of FID are inadequate and misleading when applied to Austen’s novels,which deploy FID in conjunction with a trustworthy, authoritative narrative voiceand which repeatedly intertwine FID with narratorial commentary, sometimes insideof a single sentence. Indeed, much of the aesthetic pleasure in Austen’s FID passagescomes from subtle modulations among narrative registers, as the prose moves in andout 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, emphasizingthe narrator’s role in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of Austen’s practicethan 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 figuraldiscourse but as a kind of narratorial mimicry, analogous to the flexible imitations of

Daniel P. Gunn

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others’ discourse we all practice in informal speech and expository prose.5 My prin-cipal interest here is in Austen’s narrative practice: I hope, in particular, to opposethe recent tendency to read FID as subversive of narrative authority and stable inter-pretation in Emma.6 But since this sort of misreading can be traced to the assumptionthat FID entails the displacement of narratorial presence and judgment, I hope alsoto stimulate further theoretical discussion of the interaction between narrative voiceand figural discourse in texts that, like Austen’s, have strong, authoritative narrators.

The assumption that FID is ordinarily a representation of autonomous figuraldiscourse and thus symptomatic of a distinctively “modern” and impersonal narra-tive style is shared by several of the most influential theorists of FID in English. Theseminal work on the topic, Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds, follows F. K. Stanzelin distinguishing between “authorial” and “figural” narrative situations, and associ-ates “narrated monologue” (her term for FID) strongly with the latter: the “normalmilieu for narrated monologue,” she writes, is “serious figural narration,” in whichcharacters are presented “ ‘from within,’ through a profusion of narrated mono-logues” (122). Cohn’s discussion of narrated monologue is subtle and perceptive,and she acknowledges that “the continued employment of third-person references in-dicates, 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 func-tional presence” as FID predominates (“Optics” 14). Similarly, in Unspeakabe Sen-tences, Ann Banfield sees her account of what she calls “represented speech andthought” as offering a scientific, linguistic explanation of the historical developmentof fiction, which emerges finally, in her view, as entirely impersonal, a combinationof purely objective narrative sentences and sentences that dramatize the speech orthought of characters. For Banfield, neither kind of sentence has a speaker; in thename of representation, language has “solved the technical problem of silencing thespeaker and his authority,” even in those sentences that articulate figural subjectivity(274). Finally, even Monika Fludernik’s more nuanced account of FID in The Lan-guages 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 ac-count for a given sentence either as “the narrator’s exclamation” or as the “utter-ance” of a character—the assumption being that if the sentence is FID it is notproduced in any meaningful way by the narrator (452). FID and narratorial commen-tary cannot mingle dialogically, as dual-voice theorists suggest, since “these two lev-els are entirely distinct in the frames that they evoke” (453).7

Certainly, there is good reason to associate FID with figural subjectivity. Ban-field’s analysis of FID at the level of the sentence illuminates the way markers ofsubjectivity ordinarily excluded from indirect discourse—for example, references to“here” or “now” or “tomorrow,” questions, exclamations, and reflexive pronounswithout antecedents—regularly appear in FID, implying the presence of a “deicticcenter” or “SELF” which we cannot identify with the “I” of the sentence. Since, onBanfield’s account, a sentence can have only one “SELF,” she concludes that FID

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sentences are grammatically speakerless, with the subjectivity shifted entirely to thecharacter whose “deictic center” is being represented (Unspeakable Sentences65–108). This analysis dovetails nicely with the idea of “impersonal” representationin what Fludernik calls the “pure reflector mode” (Languages 453): through FID,Banfield argues, the narrator disappears grammatically and is replaced by the focal-izing character. The problem with applying this analysis to a novel like Emma is thatthere, FID sentences are embedded in a context in which the presence of narratorialsubjectivity is firmly established. Thus, for example, a sentence which conforms toBanfield’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, under-cutting Emma’s judgments: “Emma divined what every body present must bethinking” (182).8 This single sentence includes both an echo of Emma’s subjectiv-ity—“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 theway we read and construe the sentence that follows? Is there not some sense inwhich the narrative presence established by this phrase lingers during our reading ofthe second sentence? What is needed, it seems, is an account of Austen’s FID thatwill respond both to its evocation of figural subjectivity and to its continuity withnarrative 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 figuralspeech or thought, in which the narrator echoes or mimics the idiom of the characterfor the purposes of the fiction. In this sense, the continuing presence of the narratorsuggested by the third-person references is crucial, since the imitating voice in-evitably reinflects and modifies the language it imitates. The character’s language isno longer merely the character’s, even in the limited sense that quoted discourse isthe 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 narratorialreport is “strongly affected (or infected) with the mental idiom of the mind it ren-ders” (Cohn, TM 33), might serve as a model for Austen’s use of FID. Because theysee a clear opposition between FID and strong narration, theorists like Cohn andFludernik are not entirely comfortable with the incorporation of figural subjectivityinto sentences that are clearly produced by a narrator, and so they tend to treat suchnarrative appropriation as a special category, different in crucial ways from FIDproper.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 proposethat, in Austen at least, what happens in “stylistic contagion” is the same thing thathappens in FID. Whether it occurs within a sentence or within a paragraph, the es-sential feature of both phenomena is the imitation of figural subjectivity within acontext of narrative report. If we read the narrator as present in FID, mimicking thethought or speech of characters, then the technique shades seamlessly into the morecovert 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 shouldimagine a broad spectrum of largely continuous effects, with a protean narrative

Free Indirect Discourse in Emma 37

voice able to modulate into the voice of figural thought or speech for shorter orlonger periods of time, and in overt or covert ways.10

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

Later in the morning, and just as the girls were going to separate in preparationfor the regular four o’clock dinner, the hero of this inimitable charade walked inagain. 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 apush—of having thrown a die; and she imagined he was come to see how itmight turn up. His ostensible reason, however, was to ask whether Mr. Wood-house’s party could be made up in the evening without him, or whether heshould be in the smallest degree necessary at Hartfield. If he were, everythingelse must give way; but otherwise his friend Cole had been saying so muchabout his dining with him—had made such a point of it, that he had promisedhim conditionally to come. (70)

After the amused narratorial mockery of “the hero of this inimitable charade,” thepassage shifts into an external report of Emma’s response: “her quick eye . . . dis-cerned,” “she imagined.” In the midst of this report, there is a fragment of FID in “ofhaving thrown a die,” which gives us Emma’s imagination of what Mr. Elton mightbe thinking; as is the standard pattern in Austen, indirect discourse—what Cohn calls“psycho-narration”—opens momentarily into represented figural subjectivity, in thefigure’s own idiom. Then, in the sentence that begins “His ostensible reason, how-ever, was to ask,” indirect discourse first resumes, and then shifts into an imitation ofMr. Elton’s speech, with “in the smallest degree necessary.” The final sentence is animitation of Mr. Elton from start to finish (“his friend Cole,” “had made such a pointof it”) and must be called free indirect discourse. But it is entirely continuous withthe previous sentence; in fact it grows out of it, as the fragments of speech in the firstsentence open into the full-fledged imitation of speech in the second. Thus it seemsmisleading 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 de-scribe this as a featureless “objective” narration, which has been “colored” or “con-taminated” by its proximity to Mr. Elton’s subjectivity. This is narratorialsubjectivity, engaging in a kind of verbal play, which includes the imitation of oth-ers’ speech.11 The last sentence, like the phrase “in the smallest degree necessary,” isparodic imitation, in which the narrative voice echoes Mr. Elton’s style for comicpurposes, out of sheer playful exuberance—the same sort of exuberance and sensi-tivity to the absurd that gives us “the hero of this inimitable charade” at the begin-ning of the paragraph.

As they have attempted to apply the theory of FID to Austen’s novels, criticshave had difficulty explaining and describing narrative modulations such as these, inpart because they have insisted on too rigid a theoretical opposition between narrato-rial and figural discourses. I want to turn now to two standard accounts of FID in

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Emma, in order to demonstrate that the model I have proposed offers a more fluid ex-planation of Austen’s narrative practice than has been available previously. HelenDry defines two different sorts of third-person narration in Emma: “first, that whichmight represent a transcript of a character’s conscious thoughts during the action [i. e., FID, which Dry calls “narrated monologue,” following Cohn]; and, second, theso-called ‘exposition,’ which constitutes reports of settings and action, and which isusually felt to be the product of the narrator” (88). For Dry, the former is “marked asEmma’s conscious thought”; the latter consists of “everything that could not betransposed into first-person, present tense and appropriately regarded as part of acharacter’s internal sentences” (89). She claims that there is “generally a sharp con-trast 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 inwhich the exposition makes use of linguistic constructions ordinarily confined to di-rect speech or FID—for example, reflexive pronouns without antecedents—in orderto represent Emma’s point of view, as in the following passage: “With Tuesday camethe agreeable prospect of seeing him again, and for a longer time than hitherto; ofjudging of his general manners, and by inference, of the meaning of his manners to-wards herself; of guessing how soon it might be necessary for her to throw coldnessinto her air . . .” (176; Dry 92). Here, as Dry points out, the use of “herself” withoutan explicit antecedent suggests the presence of Emma’s subjectivity. One could gofurther and hear an evocation of Emma’s self-dramatization in “it might be necessaryfor her to throw coldness into her air.” For Dry, however, this passage “does not rep-resent narrative monologue, since it is incongruous as a transcript of consciousthought” (92). But why should the theoretical construct of FID be limited only tocomplete sentences that provide a transcript of figural thought? The same tendencyto imitate the rhythm of figural thought that we observe in the passages Dry catego-rizes 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 sen-tence cannot be transformed into a figural thought, but figural thought is clearly pre-sent, in fits and starts, nonetheless. In fact, by demonstrating how pervasivelysubjective constructions invade or contaminate the “exposition,” Dry shows that FIDeffects are not limited to whole sentences, but are a consistent feature of Austen’ssupple and responsive narrative style. Dry’s conclusion is that the expressive andcognitive linguistic features she finds in the exposition are evidence that Emma isherself “the narrative equivalent of speaker—that is, the consciousness whose pointof view is reflected in the exposition” (99). But I would argue that they suggest, tothe contrary, that the subjectivities of Emma and the narrator intermingle throughoutEmma, 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 similardistinction between “objective narrative” and “coloured narrative,” both of which hedistinguishes from “free indirect style”—which seems, for him, to be limited to re-ports 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, includ-ing both clear-cut, free-standing examples and examples that other theorists mightcall “stylistic contagion.” He quotes, for example, the following passage in whichEmma 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 withoutlow connections; at the same time not of any family that could fairly object tothe doubtful birth of Harriet. He had a comfortable home for her, and Emmaimagined a very sufficient income; for though the vicarage of Highbury was notlarge, he was known to have some independent property; and she thought veryhighly 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 firstsentence, the second sentence would be classified by any of the classical theorists asFID: it is free-standing, reflects Emma’s subjectivity throughout (and especially in“quite the gentleman himself”), and might be read as “a transcript of consciousthought.” But the evocation of Emma’s consciousness continues in phrases like “acomfortable home for her” and “a good-humoured, well-meaning respectable youngman” below, despite being mixed with language like “Emma imagined” and “shethought” that marks the continuing presence of narratorial subjectivity. In “Emmaimagined,” there is in fact narratorial guidance for the careful reader, since the word“imagined” echoes and reverberates against the pattern of repeated references to thefancy and imagination by means of which the narrator frames Emma’s judgmentsand warns us against them.12 Thus this passage—which Hough classes as “colourednarrative”—includes both FID sentences and the “contamination” of narrative re-port. Their promiscuous intermingling suggests that the distinction between them isarbitrary, at least in Austen’s fiction. In both cases, what occurs is narrative mimicryof figural thought—and in both cases, as Hough himself points out with regard to asimilar passage, “the narrator’s objective judgement is firmly in charge” (210).

This is, I propose, the most helpful way to imagine the entire phenomenon ofFID in Austen’s fiction. On this account, there are typically two subjectivities ex-pressed in Austen’s FID passages—the subjectivity of the imitated character and theunderlying subjectivity of the imitating narrator, whose extended, protean utteranceframes and controls the representation of figural thought or speech in FID. In ordi-nary speech—in a joke, say, or an account of someone else’s conversation—therecan be no doubt that the presence of an imitating voice changes the inflection of anutterance: we hear the same words and expressions differently when they are filteredthrough someone else’s discourse. The same phenomenon occurs when scholars andother expository writers summarize or refer to one another’s discourse. In a recentessay, for example, Cohn describes the “astonishing picture” of the novel created bycritics who read narrative poetics in the light of Foucault: “They all tend to presentthe novel, particularly in its realist guise, as a genre whose form replicates the

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malevolent power structures of a society that both produces and consumes it, a genrethat—though Machiavellian tactics may at times hide its target—exists largely inorder to wield absolute cognitive control over the lives of the characters it incarcer-ates and whose psyches it maliciously invades and inspects” (“Optics” 6). At the endof this sentence, in words and phrases like “incarcerates,” “maliciously invades,” and(especially) “inspects,” Cohn echoes the critical discourse of D. A. Miller, John Ben-der, and other Foucauldian critics.13 As she summarizes their work, she slips intotheir idiom, just as the narrator of Emma slips into the idiom of Harriet Smith orEmma herself when writing about them. In a manner entirely familiar to anyone whowrites critical prose, she does this without quotation marks, in a sentence which be-gins very clearly in her own voice (“They all tend to present,” etc.). But surely itmakes no sense to claim that Cohn has disappeared in this sentence—or, to use thelanguage Cohn uses about FID in this essay, to claim that she has allowed the criticsto “impose their voice on [her]” (5). The effect is just the opposite: by imitating theircritical language in the context of her own sentence, having already characterized itas “astonishing,” Cohn holds it up for our ironic scrutiny, and we are expected to no-tice its exaggeration and paranoia. In the same way, FID functions in Austen’s nov-els as a filtered representation of subjectivity, inflected throughout by the narrator’sirony 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 an-other, given the aesthetic and moral structure of a novel like Emma. FID is, in thefirst place, a comic technique for Austen, allowing her to mimic the subjectivity of awide range of characters for our amusement, drawing their voices into the rich tex-ture of her narration. Once we hear characters like Mr. Woodhouse or Miss Batesspeak, they can return again and again as linguistic traces in the narrative voice, togreat comic effect. Moreover, if, as many of Austen’s readers have concluded, Emmais designed to provide a kind of moral instruction, as Emma makes mistakes and thenrecognizes them, it is necessary both that Emma’s subjectivity be given expressionand 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 HenryFielding or George Eliot, Austen’s narrative voice nevertheless provides that con-taining 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 narra-tor 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 itallows the narrator to represent Emma’s subjectivity with great immediacy while stillproviding 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 passageat the beginning of chapter 3 as a key example of the benefits we derive fromAusten’s narratorial guidance in the novel. “Emma’s unconscious catalog of her ego-tistical uses for Harriet,” he writes, “is . . . given its full force by being framed ex-plicitly in a world of values which Emma herself cannot discover until theconclusion of the book” (258). In other contexts, sustained FID of the sort being de-


scribed here might very well allow figural subjectivity to dominate, without externalcheck, as the prevailing theory suggests. In Emma, we repeatedly experience figuralsubjectivity, as the text falls into parody and imitation, but, as Booth points out, wenever lose contact with the narrator’s authoritative voice, which is essential to thenovel’s design.

It is possible, then, to speak of an interplay between narratorial and figuralvoices in Austen’s FID, with two sensibilities, two languages, placed in tension withone another—and in acknowledging this interplay, I follow theorists like Roy Pascaland Dominick LaCapra in characterizing FID in Austen as a “dual-voiced” phenom-enon.15 I do not think it follows, however, that an interplay of voices necessarily en-tails interpretive instability or the disruption of narrative authority, as many suchtheorists would suggest. Here, not surprisingly, Bakhtin provides a helpful gloss. Inhis account of “parodic stylization” (301) and “hybrid constructions” (304) in Dick-ens and Turgenev, Bakhtin treats a series of passages that contain FID at various lev-els, ranging from brief echoes of speech or thought to sustained figural monologues.For Bakhtin, these are constructions that contain “two utterances, two speech man-ners, two styles” (304); there is a “mimicking” of a character’s words, but thesewords are “permeated with the ironic intonation of the author” (318); there is “innerspeech,” but it is “transmitted in a way regulated by the author, with provocativequestions from the author and with ironically debunking reservations” (319).16 Thesecharacterizations are extremely helpful as an approach to FID in Austen, whose nov-els are, like Little Dorrit, “everywhere dotted with quotation marks” and “washed byheteroglot waves from all sides” (307). But they do not imply, as some critics influ-enced by Bakhtin would suggest, that the presence of multiple voices destabilizes thework of art or disrupts the process of interpretation.17 Here and elsewhere in “Dis-course in the Novel,” Bakhtin stresses artistic control as the context within whichheteroglossia operates in the novel. The languages of heteroglossia are “drawn in bythe novelist for the orchestration of his themes and for the refracted (indirect) ex-pression of his intentions and values” (292); heteroglossia is “subject to an artisticreworking” in the novel (300); the dialogic image “can fully unfold, achieve fullcomplexity and depth and at the same time artistic closure, only under the conditionspresent 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 unifiedmeaning 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, thatthe 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, andit has recently been applied to Emma. Since FID is a liminal phenomenon, with nar-ratorial and figural voices often difficult to disentangle, some theorists suggest that itis inherently disruptive, inconsistent with stable interpretation or determinate mean-ing. In Madame Bovary on Trial, for example, LaCapra claims that the “shifts ormodulations” inherent in FID “create an indeterminacy of narrative voice that unset-tles the moral security of the reader and renders decisive judgment about character orstory difficult to attain” (59–60). These shifts also “raise the question of the relation

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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 isbeing waged between narrators and character-focalizers for control of the word, thetext, and the reader’s sympathy” (66). In Emma, there is a “destabilization of thereader through the indeterminacy created by FID” (75); “the narrator has ‘refracted’her discourse through Emma, in this way diffusing the authority of the monologicauthorial voice, permitting a voice of resistance to the marriage plot, to restrictive so-cial codes and conventions, and to the constrained lives of women” (75; qtg.Bakhtin). Similarly, Casey Finch and Peter Bowen suggest that “the development inAusten’s hands of free indirect style marks a crucial moment in the history of novel-istic technique in which narrative authority is seemingly elided, ostensibly givingway to what Flaubert called a transparent style in which the author is ‘everywherefelt, but never seen’” (3). In Emma, “through a strategic deployment of free indirectstyle, overt narrative authority . . . has been altogether elided as such” (6). All ofthese readings assume that FID works against (and is inconsistent with) narrative au-thority. 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 thedisappearance of the authorial narrator, as in Jamesian theory. “Imagine FID as anexpression of the character’s bid for freedom from the controlling narrator,” Mezeiwrites, “rather like the gingerbread man gleefully escaping from his creator” (68).This autonomy is what creates the destabilizing or undermining effect: free of thecontrolling narrator, the focalizing character creates an alternate site of authority, “avoice of resistance.”

However, as any careful reading of Emma will demonstrate, this is not at allwhat happens when Austen makes use of FID. Rather than operating autonomouslyor freeing themselves from narratorial discourse, Austen’s FID passages are embed-ded in this discourse: they are instances of figural thought or speech fixed or placedby the narrator, voiced by her in a kind of redaction or mimicry. It is questionable, ofcourse, even in cases of dialogue and other direct quotations, to imagine figuralspeech or thought as “free” from authorial control: the motif cannot escape the de-sign of which it is a part. But in the case of Austen’s FID, I think, it is particularlymisleading to think in these terms, since the effect of the technique in Austen’s handsis actually to draw figural speech and thought into the structure of narratorial dis-course, thereby foregrounding the author’s exercise of control through the narrator,whose intonations and inflections shape our response to the represented figuralspeech and thought. In this way, as Bakhtin suggests, the double-voiced effect in FIDcreates neither instability nor thematic ambiguity: the artistic intentions of the authorare first embodied in the narrator and then “refracted” through the imitated figuralvoice. Austen’s FID is thus best seen as the incorporation of figural speech andthought into the complex artifice of narrative voice.

Emma provides a particularly helpful context for understanding Austen’s use ofFID, since the narrator’s imitation of figural subjectivity there takes place in an at-mosphere of pervasive mimicry, in which Emma, in particular, frequently imitatesand mocks the discourse of other characters, thus engaging in “double-voiced dis-


course” herself. After reading Mr. Elton’s charade, which includes the line “Thyready 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 wantingto see the inside of the Vicarage: “Emma could only class it, as a proof of love, withMr. Elton’s seeing ready wit in her” (72). Here, although the sentence is clearly herown, 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 “suitHarriet 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 equalto give the pleased assent, which no doubt he was in the habit of receiving, to emu-late the ‘Very true, my love,’ which must have been usually administered by his trav-eling companion” (95). Once the Eltons are out the door after their first visit toHartfield, Emma falls immediately to imitating Mrs. Elton: “Knightley!—never seenhim 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 wordslike “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 char-acters, and she cannot stop herself from parody and verbal play, in which she appro-priates 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 haunt-ing the Abbey, and thanking him all day long for his great kindness in marryingJane?—‘So very kind and obliging?—But he always had been such a very kindneighbor!’ And then fly off, through half a sentence, to her mother’s old petti-coat. ‘Not that it was such a very old petticoat either—for still it would last agreat while—and, indeed, she must thankfully say that their petticoats were allvery 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 ren-dering 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 mark-ers of her distinctive subjectivity: “his great kindness,” “indeed, she must thankfullysay,” 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 shiftsinto a parodic imitation of Miss Bates: “for his great kindness in marrying Jane.” AsMrs. Weston’s response suggests, there is, for Austen, an unsettling moral content tothis sort of verbal play; the passage, like Emma’s mockery of Miss Bates on BoxHill, demonstrates Austen’s tendency simultaneously to take pleasure in energetic,mocking verbal play and to worry that such play is wrong, dangerous, threatening.

44 Daniel P. Gunn

Whether it is against her conscience or not, the narrator of Emma repeatedly en-gages 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, thenarrator is flexible, playful, always open to parody and imitation in her own dis-course. The difference is that the narrator’s imitations of others’ discourse are neverthemselves ironized, as Emma’s sometimes are. Since the narrator of Emma providesan authoritative center for our judgments and responses throughout the text, her FIDrenderings have a different status from Emma’s; whatever we might think of the nar-rator’s mockery, we have no textual position from which we might judge or commenton her sensibility, while, in Emma’s case, the narrator herself (or a character likeMrs. Weston or Mr. Knightley) frequently provides just this sort of frame. Still, thesame technique of purposeful incorporation and appropriation of the speech of oth-ers is evident in both Emma’s and the narrator’s discourses, and we can no more dis-count the narrator’s mediating role in FID passages than we can discount Emma’s inher own parodic imitations. When several of the principal characters meet at theCrown 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 ofhalf circle round the fire, to observe in their various modes, till other subjects werestarted, 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 aboutthe weather—“though May,” “very pleasant”—is embedded in a sentence that beginsas a third-person report. Although these phrases echo a collective subjectivity otherthan 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 whenthe narrator refers to one character by the name another might use. Thus Emma is al-ways “Miss Woodhouse” when Harriet is in question—“They remained but a fewminutes together, as Miss Woodhouse must not be kept waiting” (28)—and Isabellais likely to become “poor Isabella” even when Mr. Woodhouse is being described ina narratorial sentence: “and it was therefore many months since they had been seenin a regular way by their Surry connections, or seen at all by Mr. Woodhouse, whocould not be induced to get so far as London, even for poor Isabella’s sake” (78). Butmore frequently the narrator shifts her voice into an imitation of figural subjectivityfor longer periods, falling into passages that make sustained use of FID. Even inthese sustained passages, the narrator is a consistent presence, always capable ofstepping 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 ofthe most consistently focalized sections of the novel. One sentence during this scenebegins in FID, with “must” characteristically indicating the movement of conscious-ness, the formulation of a thought: “But he had fancied her in love with him; that ev-idently must have been his dependence” (114). But as the sentence continues, thenarrator steps in to comment on what Emma has just been thinking: “and after ravinga little about the seeming incongruity of gentle manners and a conceited head, Emmawas obliged in common honesty to stop and admit that her own behavior to him hadbeen so complaisant and obliging, so full of courtesy and attention, as (supposing herreal 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 misinter-preted his feelings, she had little right to wonder that he, with self-interest to blindhim, should have mistaken her’s” (114). In “raving” and “Emma was obliged . . . tostop and admit,” there is clear evidence of the subjectivity of an authoritative narra-tor, who recognizes what is excessive in Emma’s response before she does and whodescribes for us the exact moment when she concedes this herself, providing us witha context within which we can place the surrounding representations of Emma’s sub-jectivity. After this intervention, the narrative voice again begins to mimic Emma’sthinking, in the meditative repetition of “so complaisant and obliging, so full ofcourtesy and attention” and in the rueful and mortified intensification of “a very de-cided favourite.” Since this language follows “admit that,” it is technically narrator-ial report—but it modulates into Emma’s subjectivity just as certainly as thefree-standing FID sentence that follows it. In a single sentence, then, Austen movesback and forth between FID and authoritative narratorial report several times withoutthe slightest difficulty. Several paragraphs below, after a passage of quoted mono-logue in which Emma considers the possibility of bringing Harriet and William Coxtogether, the narrator steps in to say, “She stopt to blush and laugh at her own re-lapse, and then resumed a more serious, more dispiriting cogitation on what hadbeen, and might be, and must be” (114). Again there is an external report on Emma’sthinking (she “stopt,” then “resumed a more serious, more dispiriting cogitation”)and a judgment (“relapse”), followed by a return to FID in the movement from “hadbeen” to “might be” and “must be.” Although we might think of the relation betweenthese two subjectivities—the one who thinks, and the one who imitates and judgesthinking—as dialogic, there is no sense in which Emma’s consciousness can be seenas replacing or undermining the narrative voice; it makes little sense to speak of thenarrator as “a merely functional presence” in this passage. Here, as elsewhere, thenarrator’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 subjec-tivity precisely because her FID is represented for us through the medium ofAusten’s narrative voice.

Sometimes, the narrator’s representation of figural subjectivity extends throughseveral levels of filtering, as when Harriet reports what she has heard from MissNash about Mr. Elton’s conversation with Mr. Perry:

Miss Nash had been telling her something, which she repeated immediatelywith 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 comingback yesterday from Clayton Park, he had met Mr. Elton, and found to his greatsurprize that Mr. Elton was actually on his road to London, and not meaning toreturn till the morrow, though it was the whist-club night, which he had beennever 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, andtried very much to persuade him to put off his journey only one day; but itwould not do; Mr. Elton had been determined to go on, and had said in a very

46 Daniel P. Gunn

particular way indeed, that he was going on business that he would not put offfor any inducement in the world; and something about a very enviable commis-sion, and being the bearer of something exceedingly precious. (58–59)

Here several successive layers of transmission are represented by means of FIDechoes: Harriet’s report in the breathless stringing together of clauses with “and” andthe repetitions of “Miss Nash”; Mr. Perry’s account of his conversation in phraseslike “how shabby it was” and “in a very particular way” (although the italics here areprobably an indication of the overlay of girlish interest in this phrase added by MissNash and Harriet Smith); and Mr. Elton’s own language in “a very enviable commis-sion” and “the bearer of something exceedingly precious.” All of this is reported withdetached interest by the narrator, who observes at the outset that Harriet repeatedMiss Nash’s story “immediately” and “with great delight.”18

In a similar manner, the narrator sometimes in a single passage will representboth the idiom of Emma’s thinking and the idiom of the speaker about whom Emmathinks:

To restrain him as much as might be, by her own manners, she was immediatelypreparing to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of the weather and thenight; but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate andjoined 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 mustbe already well known, hoping—fearing—adoring—ready to die if she refusedhim; but flattering himself that his ardent attachment and unequalled love andunexampled passion could not fail of having some effect, and in short, verymuch 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 stophim; but vainly; he would go on, and say it all. Angry as she was, the thought ofthe moment made her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak. She feltthat half this folly must be drunkenness, and therefore could hope that it mightbelong only to the passing hour. (108)

Both Emma’s subjectivity and Mr. Elton’s speech are represented by means of FIDhere. 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 thispassage, it is the narrator who reports that Emma hoped to “restrain” Mr. Elton andthat she was “preparing” for speech, just as, after the proposal, it is the narrator whoprovides the important information that Emma resolved “to restrain herself when shedid speak,” in generous allowance for Mr. Elton’s having drunk too much wine. Inbetween these narratorial reports, the hint of Emma’s subjectivity in “exquisite calm-ness and gravity” opens first into a representation of her bewilderment in the repeti-tion of “scarcely,” the alarmed dashes which surround “her hand seized,” and theword “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 inthe way Mr. Elton’s language unfolds and adjusts itself (“hoping—fearing—ador-ing—ready to die”) must be read both as self-conscious narratorial invention—it isthe rhetoric of parodic excess, each turn adding to the comic portrait—and as a rep-resentation of Emma’s heightening surprise and resentment: this is also the rhetoricof indignation. From both perspectives, the comedy involves the narrator imitatingfigural language for our amusement—for, of course, Emma’s surprise is every bit asfunny as Mr. Elton’s lovemaking: “Mr. Elton, the lover of Harriet, was professinghimself her lover.” What must impress us, in a passage like this one, is the tremen-dous flexibility of Austen’s narrative language, which moves in and out of the figurallanguages effortlessly, evoking them by the sheer exactness of her ear, her sensitivityto diction and the rhythms of speech, and the human presence, the orchestratingvoice behind it all. This is energetic play, presented to us by the narrator, as is mostof Austen’s FID.

Of course, the increasingly sustained use of FID to represent Emma’s thoughtsand perceptions in volumes 2 and 3 of Emma includes many narrative passages thatare far less complex than those I have been discussing. In order to invite the reader tofall into Emma’s imaginings and deceptions, Austen must suppress the sorts of overtcompeting narratorial judgments and reports that might provide a corrective toEmma’s mistakes. After the simple and tightly controlled burlesque of the episodeswith Mr. Elton and Harriet, the social world of the novel becomes more complex andless easy to interpret in the scenes involving Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, andAusten seems to want us to struggle, with Emma, to interpret it. There is also an in-creasing tendency to blur the distinction between the narrator’s report and Emma’sfocalizing perceptions in innocuous, unproblematical cases, so that inattentive read-ers will be more likely to trust Emma (and so err) when she makes judgments on the-matically important material. Finally, when Emma recognizes her mistakes, Austentends to represent her thoughts at great length, inviting the reader to experience em-barrassment and shame along with her. Thus it is not difficult to find sequences ofseveral 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 tillactually assured of it!—But Harriet was less humble, had fewer scruples thanformerly.—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 her-self?—Who but herself had taught her, that she was to elevate herself if possi-ble, 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)

48 Daniel P. Gunn

Passages like these are highly rhetorical—often featuring question marks, exclama-tions, and subjunctive transformations, as in this example—and they are closeenough to direct representations of figural thought to be sometimes placed in quota-tion marks. In characterizing Austen’s FID as I have, I don’t mean to suggest thatsuch passages do not exist—only that they do not tell the whole story and that, takenout of context, they provide a misleading picture of what the technique looks like inAusten’s hands. Even in this example, the narratorial comments that introduce thepassage provide a context that influences our reading: Emma is trying to “under-stand, thoroughly understand her own heart”; she uses “every leisure moment” inthis endeavor; she is “ashamed of every sensation” aside from her love for Mr.Knightley (339). These observations establish the narrative frame within which weread the extended FID that follows, and they guide and influence our response toEmma’s mortified thoughts. Thus, even as we find ourselves fully inside of Emma’sconsciousness in a passage like this one, her thoughts are still inflected by the sur-rounding narratorial context. Emma cannot be said to have “escaped from her cre-ator” in any meaningful way.

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

There was no occasion to press the matter farther. The conviction seemedreal; 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 camein, and were talked to and admired amid the usual rate of conversation; a fewclever things said, a few downright silly, but by much the larger proportion nei-ther the one nor the other—nothing worse than every day remarks, dull repeti-tions, 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 entrée of her own partic-ular little friend, and if she could not exult in her dignity and grace, she couldnot only love the blooming sweetness and the artless manner, but could mostheartily rejoice in that light, cheerful, unsentimental disposition which allowedher so many alleviations of pleasure, in the midst of the pangs of disappointedaffection. There she sat—and who would have guessed how many tears she hadbeen lately shedding? To be in company, nicely dressed herself and seeing oth-ers nicely dressed, to sit and smile and look pretty, and say nothing, was enoughfor 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 havingloved even Mr. Elton in vain—by the surrender of all the dangerous pleasure ofknowing herself beloved by the husband of her friend. (181–82)

This is an intensively focalized passage, to be sure, but the narrator’s voice mixeswith Emma’s throughout. As we emerge from Frank’s quoted speech, we first en-counter Emma’s judgments and perceptions, presented in FID: “There was no occa-sion 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 thedinner: 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 re-marks, dull repetitions, old news, and heavy jokes.” And it is this voice, too, that de-scribes 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 againabout to be represented—and even as early as “her own particular little friend” thereis some indication, in the affectionate excess of the phrase, that the narrator is shift-ing into Emma’s register. By the time we get to “who would have guessed how manytears she had been lately shedding?” and “yes, of having loved even Mr. Elton invain,” we are in full-fledged FID, with the narrator imitating Emma’s reactions in herown language, and the passage draws us gently from the foolishness of Emma’s par-tiality toward Harriet to the genuine danger of her mistaken assumptions about JaneFairfax and Mr. Dixon. But even toward the end of the passage, the frame of narrato-rial report is not completely abandoned: “Emma suspected” marks what follows asthe narrator’s indirect account of Emma’s consciousness—but it is an account thatagain includes mimicry of Emma’s idiom and the movement of her thought. Emma’scontemptuous reference to Harriet’s emotional life here—“yes, of having loved evenMr. Elton”—is consistent with the way she imagines her elsewhere, and is perhapsas blamable as her conjectures about Jane Fairfax. Because we have seen Emmamake this sort of confident, fanciful judgment before—because we recognize herdistinctive quickness and the way her mind runs—we are prepared to recognize thesentimental 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 orHarriet earlier in the novel.

If the account I have given of FID in Emma is accurate, then the framing pres-ence of the narrator plays a greater role in Austen’s FID than has usually been ac-knowledged. Rather than disappearing or suffering a diminution of authority, thenarrator provides a consistent discursive context within which shifts into figuralthought or speech register as imitations, in an atmosphere of pervasive mimicry andcomic play. Hough speaks of the “continual diversification of the surface” inAusten’s fiction, which is “very largely a matter of continual slight shifts in the pointof view” (210), and I think many readers would agree that this effect is part of whatis distinctive about Austen’s narrative style. But rather than creating “an indetermi-nacy of narrative voice” or a “destabilization of the reader,” these continual shiftsand modulations are indications of Austen’s prodigious artistic control.

50 Daniel P. Gunn

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 historyin German and French criticism (summarized in Pascal 1–30), FID had, until the 1970s, been “virtu-ally ignored” in English, with “no standard name” attached to the technique (Cohn, TM 108). Thepublication of an English translation of M. M. Bakhtin’s essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagi-nation gave additional support to theorists who saw FID as a dual-voiced phenomenon. Dominick La-Capra comments on Cohn, Pascal, and Bakhtin in developing his own reading of FID in MadameBovary on Trial. Monika Fludernik provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and practi-cal issues surrounding FID and develops a “frame-theoretical” approach in The Fictions of Languageand the Languages of Fiction, the most recent full-length study devoted to the topic. For treatment ofFID in the standard theories of narrative, see Chatman 198–209, Genette 169–75, and Bal 44–52. Fora 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 extremelyclear 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 withthe 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 asnonobligatory “signals or indices” (95–99).

3. See the discussions of Banfield, Cohn, Fludernik, and Finch and Bowen below. It is striking, in read-ing through the most influential narratological theory on FID, how strongly the Jamesian view of thenovel described and problematized by Booth as early as 1961 continues to influence the way narrationand FID are characterized. By “Jamesian” here I mean the view that defines representation throughthe medium of a strong narrator in opposition to “dramatic” or “figural” representation and that seesthe history of the novel as developing from the former to the latter. In “Optics and Power,” for exam-ple, Cohn writes: “One can . . . readily discern an overall historical change in the course of the nine-teenth century, with Flaubert and James credited for an influential role in moving the novel from thefirst type [authorial narration] to the second [figural narration]. In terms of novelistic technique, thischange 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 ac-count relies on Finch and Bowen and includes several key errors, among them a confusion about theFrench 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 inflectionsunavailable in written narrative. The similarity I refer to is thus not a similarity of technique but of ef-fect. Although written prose has a more limited range of techniques for indicating imitation and in-flection, 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, theyare 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 isconsistent 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 asdestabilizing force in Persuasion, see Giordano—e. g., “Both narrative and cultural indeterminacyare mirrored in the battle between narrator and character for possession of the word, another contestwhere victory is never won” (113).

7. Fludernik’s account of FID is complex and not always easy to pin down. On one hand, as a sensitiveand 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 Europeanfiction, 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 fora lack of linguistic precision—“it fails to describe textual phenomena and meaning effects with anyacceptable precision and ultimately exposes itself to the charge of mere amateurish impressionisticdabbling” (351)—and seems then to fall back on a theoretical opposition between narratorial and fig-ural voices, qualified by a schematic (rather than mimetic) approach to the representation of subjec-tivity and by a sensitive, frame-theoretical account of a reader’s differentiation between the two. Ipropose, in contrast, that in Austen the narrative voice incorporates the figural voice and so remainssimultaneously present during FID, inflecting and altering what it imitates. I realize that by attempt-ing to break down the distinction between FID and Ansteckung and to see FID as part of a broad con-tinuum of imitative effects, I may be open to the charge of “mere amateurish impressionisticdabbling” myself. However, I think the categories of a scientific linguistics can take us only so far inthe interpretation of literary texts, and we must finally rely on (and attempt to explain) our judgmentsas 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 “Lin-guistic Illusion” 111.

9. See Fludernik, Fictions 332–38; and Cohn, TM 32–33. For other accounts of this phenomenon, seeKenner on the “Uncle Charles Principle,” which he describes as “something new in fiction, the nor-mally neutral narrative vocabulary pervaded by a little cloud of idioms which a character might use ifhe 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”; forher, 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 Prin-ciple, as a technique separate from FID, “constituted a really sensational find in the field of Joycestudies” (332). However, the more flexible definition of FID in “Linguistic Illusion” would seem toinclude 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 alsoMcHale, who suggests a range of formal options for representing subjectivity.

11. In several formulations in “Linguistic Illusion,” Fludernik seems to be imagining FID in similarterms—e. g., “Viewed linguistically . . . polyvocality can be reduced to a mere semblance of dualvoice, an illusion of alterity, deriving in fact from an active manipulation of deictic terms by the cur-rent producer of the discourse” (106). My emphasis here is precisely on the “active manipulation ofdeictic 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 andFrench narrative practice as coercive and sinister—a sort of Panoptical surveillance, through whichthe narrator exercises “infallible supervision” over characters and the fictional world. Cohn arguesthat 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 therelation between narrator and characters is any way comparable to power relations in the world. Onthe important questions she raises, it is hard not to sympathize with Cohn; I am entirely persuaded byher argument about the invalidity of the Panopticon as an analogy for authoritative narration, and Ithink she is right to criticize Bender for inattention to the narratological concepts on which he drawsin his argument. What is more interesting for my purposes here, however, is the way Cohn character-izes 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 embar-rassment” for their arguments about power—something “to be explained away, as sham or alibi” (8),

52 Daniel P. Gunn

since the narrator allows characters to “impose their voice on him” (5). Bender, in contrast, stressesthe narrator’s continuing presence (and control) in sustained FID passages, which, given her assump-tions about FID, Cohn sees as ludicrous. It is one thing, she implies, to criticize the heavy-handednessof one of Fielding’s narrators, say, or one of Thackeray’s—but how can a narrator who has been re-duced to “vacuity” (10) or “a merely functional presence” (14) by FID be accused of exerting coer-cive 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 makingsuch 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 theterm “free indirect discourse,” Butler refers to Austen’s “skill in modulating between the heroine’sunreliable 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 orher own voice during the fiction, mimicking the voices of characters, expressing reservations, andasking questions. Modern narratology would assign these functions to the narrator. To preserve thisimportant 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 theabsolute sense impossible” (23).

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

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Emma. Edited by Fiona Stafford. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Michael Holquist and CarylEmerson. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981.

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2d ed. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press,1997.

Banfield, Ann. “L’écriture et Le Non-Dit.” Diacritics 21, no. 4 (1991): 21–31.

———. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston:Routledge, 1982.

Bender, John. “Making the World Safe for Narratology.” New Literary History 26 (1995): 29–33.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell Univ.Press, 1978.

Cohn, Dorrit. “Optics and Power in the Novel.” New Literary History 26 (1995): 3–20.

———. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1978.

Dry, Helen. “Syntax and Point of View in Jane Austen’s Emma.” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977):87–99.

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