We spoke about the advances Austen made in character dialogue a little bit last Thursday and I wanted to take this opportunity to comment on what was being said. A moment that interested me appears on pages 185-186 and features Miss Bates talking to Emma about Frank Churchill repairing Mrs Bates’ glasses. In this passage, Miss Bates invites Emma over to her house, reports to Emma her earlier conversation with Frank Churchill, and includes many hyphenated breaks in the dialogue. What interests me about this moment is the different techniques Austen incorporates within one set of quotation marks: there is the initial layer of Miss Bates’ direct speech to Emma, followed be her indirect report of what Frank Churchill had told her, and followed by the implied questions Emma asks her, signified by the hyphenated breaks, and their subsequent answer. Thinking in terms of novelization, this technique of dialogue features two relationships based on confidence: between Emma and Miss Bates and between the reader and the novel. In the former, Emma has to trust Miss Bates in what Frank Churchill has said to her, and have confidence that what she said is true. In the latter, the reader has to fill in the implied questions Emma asks Miss Bates so that they match Miss Bates’ answers. By incorporating these two relationships within her dialogue, Austen succeeds in including the readers themselves into the dialogue, therefore increasing the self-awareness of the amount of confidence between the reader and the novel.
I was wondering what anyone else thought about the dialogue in Emma, and if there is a way to compare it to Roxana? Is there a way to read the dialogue of this novel more economically?
Hey Liam,
Thanks for the post! I like your use of “confidence” at the end, and the importance that we hold in having confidence in the narrator(s) in our novels. We’ve seen this word “confidence” floating around in a few different realms of study between Roxana and Emma, and I want to tie this back to a post by Phillip in early February, “Money and War”. Bronwyn commented about the idea of trust in one’s nation through war – in the Monarchy, the army, and the nation as a whole. As Bronwyn said, being in a state of war meant a state of insecurity for Britain, and when the certainty of the nation is unstable, the idea of confidence disappears with it.
We have questioned the trust we have as readers in the narrators of both Emma and Roxana – can we as readers fully trust the narrator(s), especially when a text like Emma weaves different layers of narration and stylistic discourse into the text. I see this issue of confidence as a mirror to the floating feeling of confidence, or lack of it, in the changing system of economics in Britain at the time. As we have said in class, the monetary system is compared to a well oiled machine – if all parts are working and in place, then the system works. That is, if everyone has confidence and trust that the system is not only working, but also working in their favour, it can continue without interruption. Yet, in Emma especially I got a sense throughout the entire text that there was a hanging question of trust, and that something in Emma wasn’t quite right. It was a constant feeling and question of slight insecurity, and that the world of Emma could come crashing down rather quickly.
As Phillip said, “Times of war seem to question the stability of currency and shake the trust people have in the economy, and standards of currency as well”. This shaken trust seems to run deep in Austen’s text, and the reader (or at least me as a reader) is left questioning the confidence in the narrator, the closed world of Highbury, and the influence that the changing British economy had on Austen’s writing and perspectives.