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’\u00a0glasses. 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\u00a0within one set of quotation marks: there is the initial layer of Miss Bates’ direct speech to Emma, followed be her indirect report\u00a0of what Frank Churchill had told her, and followed by the implied questions Emma asks her, signified by the hyphenated breaks,\u00a0and 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\u00a0the readers themselves into the dialogue, therefore increasing the self-awareness of the amount of confidence between the reader and the novel.<\/p>\n
I was wondering what anyone else thought about the dialogue in Emma<\/em>, and if\u00a0there is a way to compare it to Roxana<\/em>? Is there a way to read the dialogue of this novel more economically?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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’\u00a0glasses. In this passage, Miss … Continue reading