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The Language of Jane Austen
Joe Bray
Language, Style, and Literature Series Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 Hardcover. 182 pages. ISBN 978-3319721613. £79
Reviewed by Kathryn Sutherland University of Oxford
There is no danger that Jane Austen will suffer neglect, but she may disappear under the flood of adaptations, re-packagings, and continuations of her novels holding public attention since the make-over moment in the mid-1990s which saw her crowned godmother of teenage romance. For the last twenty years visual media, rather than print, have been more effective in shaping Austen’s reception. Thanks to modern media, Jane Austen is not what she once was: a writer of intimidating classic status, barbed wit, and complex morality. The rebranded Jane Austen is savvy, sexy, and very modern. Television, big screen, and web-based remediations challenge print, translating the words on the page into new forms of expression appropriate to new forms of communication. For the majority of her twenty-first-century readers the screen is either the primary textual encounter or its interpretative filter. The intimacy of film and web fiction repositions the intimate compact between reader and character that constitutes Austen’s narrative art. These popular reimaginings in turn have informed and transformed our critical understanding of her classic fiction. There is no shortage of academic books on Jane Austen; publishers know that in a dwindling market for individual titles, Austen’s appeal is relatively secure; her name still sells books. But our bookish interests in Austen have also adapted to her commercial rebranding: reception studies, contextual readings that enrich our encounters with the worlds in which her characters move or the ways her novels have been read through time and across cultural boundaries, have been more in fashion over recent decades than close attention to the fabric of her texts as they appear in print. The fashion in criticism is to look out from her texts rather than to engage in probing readings that take us deeper inside and towards understanding her use of language to communicate particular effects. Joe Bray’s book is a refreshing departure from this prescription. In it, Professor Bray proposes to reacquaint us with the sophistication and experimental nature of Austen’s way with language, characterisation, and narrative technique through a series of close readings of key passages from her fiction using the analytic tools of modern stylistics. That he believes a return to Austen’s language is long overdue is attested by his regular points of critical reference, the most recent of which is over forty-five years old: Mary Lascelles’s pioneering study Jane Austen and Her Art (1939), Dorrit Cohn’s 1966 essay ‘Narrated Monologue : Definition of a Fictional Style’ (Comparative Literature, 18 : 97-112), and Norman Page’s The Language of Jane Austen (1972). Bray sets out to challenge what he perceives to be the false assumptions accumulating through the twentieth century around Austen’s style: that there is an omniscient narrator, a ‘centralising, authoritative point of view in Austen’s fiction’ [4]; that she puts vulgar language into the mouths of those she judges morally inferior [108]; that her style is balanced, antithetical, and Johnsonian [127]; that she is ‘sceptical, even distrustful, of figurative uses of language’ [145]; and even that ‘Austen has no style’ [2]. On the contrary, the chief argument of this book is that Austen’s use of language is innovative, dynamic, and changeful and that these features signal a style of writing that shifts rapidly and subtly between modes of representation and perspectives. Bray’s guides or templates for analysis are provided by the work of Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, whose 1981 study, Style in Fiction : A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, proposed a two-scale model for speech and thought representation. This is supplemented by more recent work deriving from the combination of stylistic analysis and corpus linguistics brought to bear by Short and Elena Semino (Corpus Stylistics : Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, 2004) on written non-fiction genres (newspapers, biographies, and letters), leading to the introduction of a third model, for written representation, to form a more comprehensive categorisation of language deployment. Each model operates in terms of a variable scale; it is in discerning the movements across each scale rather than the representational category itself (of speech, thought, writing) that we discover the subtlety of Austen’s stylistic effects. Bray enunciates with care the positions available on each scale. For speech representation there are five: Direct Speech, Indirect Speech, Free Direct Speech, Narrative Report of Speech Acts, Free Indirect Speech; subsequently revised to include a sixth, Narrator’s Representation of Voice, even more indirect than Indirect Speech. He then reduces the positions to their initial letters (DS, IS, FDS, NRSA, FIS, NV) before setting them to work in specific passages from the range of Austen’s published fiction. Further chapters work through the scale for representation of thought (again five positions revised to six) and writing (potentially seven positions). While it might have been helpful to extract all the abbreviations and their expansions and hold them apart in a single reference list, easily consulted from the midst of a dense section of explication, there is no doubting the usefulness of these terms as tools for detection and critical evaluation. Distinguishing the almost imperceptible nuances and shifts to which they draw attention has the effect of slowing reading down and inviting a richer interpretation of what might otherwise be run over too hastily. Subtleties of characterisation are seen to depend on how speech and thought are represented—not simply on what a character says or is heard to think—but how what each says or thinks is set alongside other forms of speech and thought representation given to other characters or is intruded upon by the narrator, and how the parts and the whole strike the careful reader. Free indirect thought, the style Austen is often credited with inventing for the English novel, is widely regarded as a tool for introspection, promoting reader intimacy, even identification, with a character, usually the heroine; free indirect speech, by contrast, may open up a gap into which irony or judgement steal, as in Mrs Elton’s reported speech riffs in Emma. Fanny Price, the withdrawn heroine of Mansfield Park, is regularly presented as the silent witness of events and conversations that go on around her; when she does speak, her words are as regularly conveyed in indirect form that minimises her contribution and casts her interlocutors in critical light. If, like Fanny’s, the contributions of Anne Elliot, the introspective heroine of Persuasion, are marked by the most indirect form of speech (NRSA), the free indirect thought that repeatedly establishes our complicity with her point of view and feelings can shade into narrated perception whose assertions are difficult to distinguish from narration proper. Mistaking the heroine’s mind for the narrator’s is a complicating feature of the later novels (Emma and Persuasion); in recognising and unravelling it, we discover Austen’s sophisticated handling of point of view, what Bray nicely summarises as her ‘shifting between centres of subjectivity’ and her questioning of omniscience [27-28]. For as the portrayal of all Austen’s mature heroines suggests, indirect thought also invites irony as indirect speech can denote intimacy. Shifts across a scale within a given passage connote crucial information; among the most crucial to Austen’s slippery art being the slippage of intimacy into irony. This comes into play when narration mimics Emma Woodhouse’s thoughts to expose to the reader the secret vanities and snobbery of which she remains unaware or, more complexly, when Anne Elliot’s self-irony appears to absorb into her own small estimation of herself the dismissive judgements of others—described in a passage that merges narrative report of a thought act (NRTA) with indirect thought (IT) as ‘the art of knowing our own nothingness’ (Persuasion, chapter 6). A chapter on the representation of writing in her published fiction sees Austen building on rather than outgrowing the epistolary form (and its potential for deceit) of her youthful works by using the embedded letter. Letters sent and received foreshorten plot, running over tedious detail and tying up loose ends; but in provoking different reactions and interpretations of both writer and what is written they invite conflicting appraisals of behaviour. Letters thus provide models for reading. Unlike speech or thought, as documentary evidence the letter is more readily available for re-examination. It can be read and re-read by the same person (Elizabeth Bennet re-reading Mr Darcy’s letter in Pride and Prejudice) or by two readers bringing different opinions to bear (Emma and Mr Knightley interpreting Frank Churchill’s). Under the forensic examination of her characters, letters too become complex layerings of direct, indirect, and represented communication, as revealing of the respondents as of their writers. Through careful analysis of chosen passages, Bray explains how variations in the representation of speech, thought, and writing create the subtle shifts in point of view that generate the ambiguity of Austen’s style, an ambiguity that goes to the heart of the endlessly renewable pleasure we find in reading and rereading her. His model is persuasive and illuminating. The suggestion that the structure of Austen’s sentences and the texture of her conversational prose are key to our sense of being inside or knowing her characters is convincingly articulated. How exclusive, though, are these insights? Are they unavailable without the help of Leech, Short, and Semino? Three concluding chapters appear to broaden the book’s thesis as they investigate links between linguistic features and her characters’ moral worth, the Johnsonian influence on Austen’s narrative style, and her preference for non-figurative language. But Bray’s claim that here he is tackling unexamined commonplaces of Austen criticism hardly stands up; these are the weakest chapters in the book and, developed without the scaffolding of his model, they expose a narrowness in his argument as a whole. Work has been done by other critics to explore Austen’s supple use of language in constructing identity, the flexibility of her extraordinarily innovative conversational prose, the politics of her complexly gendered and socially valenced speech, and her archly knowing debunking of Johnsonian style. These are the subjects of studies by J.F. Burrows (Computation into Criticism : A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method, 1987), Casey Finch and Peter Bowen (‘“The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury” : Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma’, Representations, 31, 1990), Patricia Howell Michaelson (Speaking Volumes : Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen, 2002), and Bharat Tandon (Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation, 2003), among others. Terminology and the contours of their arguments may differ, reflecting differences in disciplinary allegiances, but the insights they offer would only support and enrich Bray’s pedagogic approach. Joe Bray has written an interesting and informative study, a useful guide for students wishing to understand the texture of Austen’s language. There is much to learn from it; not least the rewards to be gained by slow reading. But as Michaelson has argued, in Austen, ‘[v]ery little is “mere narrative” … On the contrary, the reader practices constant and flexible personation’ [Speaking Volumes, 198]. Austen’s best criticism is similarly flexible and attentive to other voices.
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