Speaking fictions: the genres of talk in Sense and Sensibility.

McMaster, Juliet

IN HIS JOURNAL. The Loiterer, Jane Austen's brother James wrote about language with heavy irony: "Language," he says, used to be defined as "the Art of expressing our Ideas." But nowadays, he suggests, it can more justly be called "the Art of concealing our Ideas." Catherine Morland may well wonder, "How were people, at that rate, to be understood?" (NA 211).

Sense and Sensibility can be read as a set of variations on this "Art of concealing our Ideas." The uses and abuses of language, spoken and written, are constantly before us. Always alert to the speech habits of her characters, Austen is here particularly concerned to explore how their speech falls into different recurring modes of talk, developing several different branches of the art of concealing ideas, or of speaking, in Swift's phrase, "the thing which is not." Speech in Sense and Sensibility is all too often fiction, and fiction, we know, has its genres. Here I shall consider not the idiolects or individual speech patterns that make the characters' voices so instantly recognizable, but rather the recurring modes of speech that groups of characters share.

The most approved characters are aware of the tendency of language to slide towards fiction or misrepresentation, and try to combat it. Edward, for instance, lingers over the specialized terminology of the picturesque, and apologizes, '"I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged .... You must be satisfied with such admiration as I can honestly give'" (97).

This is a moment in which Edward, for once, deserves his status as the hero of Sense and Sensibility: for all too few characters bother themselves about admiring and speaking "honestly." Edward insists that Elinor "'must allow me to feel no more than I profess'" (98). He is really concerned to be exact in his expression, and not to get carried away, as other characters do, by pressure to speak emphatically, and merely for effect. "'[M]y idea of a fine country,'" he explains, is the landscape that "'unites beauty with utility'" (97).

In the same passage Marianne laments that because "'[e]very body pretends to feel'" for landscape, the terms have become "'worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning'" (97). The same vision of the devaluation of language by dishonest practice, I suggest, pertains at large in Sense and Sensibility, which presents with wonderful vividness and variety the verbal abuses that come so trippingly to so many tongues. Edward, with his concern for honesty, and Elinor, who tries valiantly to "explain the real state of the case" in her feelings for Edward (21), are a blessed minority among a crowd of characters whose speech is employed to dazzle and misrepresent. They earn their place in a moral center for their commitment to seeing and representing a thing, in Arnold's phrase, "as in itself it really is." For them language, like a fine country, should unite beauty with utility.

What is the "use" of language, spoken and written? The idealized view is that it is for the exact communication of truth, or for expressing our Ideas, as James Austen says: it is not to draw attention to itself, but rather to act as the transparent medium, like a pane of glass, through which we can view reality. But what Jane Austen does in all her novels, and in Sense and Sensibility especially, is to look at speech rather than through it, to examine not only what it truly communicates, but also the ways in which it colors, distorts, reverses, and misrepresents.

The abuses of language explored in Sense and Sensibility are not so much the debased diction and misuses of particular words that Henry Tilney makes his target in Northanger Abbey, but rather the abuses of truth and honesty that language, as our best means of communication, is meant to guard. Sense and Sensibility is the most satiric of Austen's novels, the one that presents the sourest view of human nature in general and of human speech in particular. On this very matter of habits of speech, we hear of Mrs. Ferrars: "She was not a woman of many words: for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas" (232). A pauper in ideas, she is likewise niggardly in speech, whereas "people in general," with nothing substantial to say, spill out words incessantly and wastefully. And Austen's skeptical view of speech is also built into the characters' dramatization of themselves, as their varied expressions take the form of one deception or self-deception after another.

Jane Austen has some exact phrases of her own for certain kinds of speech: We hear not only of "'plain and open avowal'" (81) and "blunt sincerity" (267), but also of "natural embellishments of... fancy" (336), "conjectural assertion" (234), "hard labour of incessant talking" (363), and "'every common-place phrase by which wit is intended'" (45). More at large, we can categorize certain genres of speech that are employed for particular kinds of misrepresentation.

To be fair, I will begin with a positive example of oral exchange, the "conversation." Of course we know that not all speech qualifies as conversation. [1] Mrs. Jennings, for instance, though an inveterate talker, has no real conversation. We hear of John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, "all the rest of his conversation, or rather talk, began and ended with himself and his own concerns" (66). "Conversation," properly so called, doesn't go in circles, beginning and ending with the self; rather, by pointed and civil exchange, it advances a subject, and so confirms community. The speakers in Austen's conversations typically alternate gracefully between the general proposition and the personal position, so that the participants gain in knowledge not only of the subject under discussion but also of each other. The "'best'" company, as we know from Persuasion, is that of "'clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation'" (150).

Which exchange in this novel does qualify as conversation? I suggest an exchange between Edward and the Dashwood sisters. It begins tritely enough, with Margaret's wishing "'that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece'" (92). This exclamation leads to an exchange on what each would do with such a windfall. Edward ventures to predict the choices of the others, and so to characterize them. Elinor, who loves art, would buy the best prints; Marianne would binge on the best books and sheet music. "'I know her greatness of soul,'" Edward comments playfully. Then be speculates, "'Perhaps then you would bestow [the money] as a reward on that person who wrote the ablest defence of your favorite maxim, that no one can ever be in love more than once in their life--for your opinion on that point is unchanged, I presume?'" (93). For all his playful tone, Edward is here not just teasing Marianne, but secretly pleading his own case; we know that he himself has been "in love more than once": he has just come from a painful visit to the woman he has ceased to love, and is in the presence of Elinor, the woman he loves now. For the second-time reader, his words are resonant with his own personal pain.

Marianne responds that her opinion is unchanged, and Elinor moves on to claim that Marianne herself is "'not at all altered.'" Because of his established intimacy, Edward is quite ready to move to the personal: "'She is only grown a little more grave than she was,'" he notes.

"Nay, Edward," said Marianne, "'you need not reproach me. You are not very gay yourself."

"Why should you think so!" replied he, with a sigh. (93) His sigh acknowledges his pain. Perhaps to shield Edward from Marianne's very personal comment, and to steer him away from Marianne's melancholy, Elinor moves the conversation to a more general topic: one can often be under a "'total misapprehension,'" she notes, in setting a person down as "'gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid'" (98). Determinedly returning to the personal, Marianne voices her own "total misapprehension" of Elinor's principles: "'But I thought it was right, Elinor,' said Marianne, 'to be guided wholly by the opinion of other people. I thought our judgments were given us merely to be subservient to those of our neighbours. This has always been your doctrine, I am sure'" (93-94). Elinor has her cue to defend herself, and to make a crucial distinction: "'No, Marianne, never. My doctrine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding. All I have ever attempted to influence has been the behaviour'" (94). The conversation has brought us to one of the nubs of the "sense and sensibility" debate. Marianne believes that to subordinate feeling to social requirements is to annihilate individual freedom. Elinor insists that body and tongue may conform to social forms, but the mind stays free.

This oral exchange has evolved from commonplaces through personal opinions and secret self-reference, to large issues of principle that define the characters for each other and for the reader. This is what conversation, properly so called, can achieve.

But in Sense and Sensibility we have some salient examples of what I shall call the "unconversation," or "fatuous filler." Two of them involve children. At the dinner at the John Dashwoods' house in London, when Elinor and Marianne meet the formidable Mrs. Ferrars, there is a fine display of riches. "[N]o poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared--but there, the deficiency was considerable" (233). The guests are as bad as the hosts, for "almost all laboured under one or other of these disqualifications for being agreeable--Want of sense, either natural or improved--want of elegance--want of spirits--or want of temper" (233). The talk that results from this disastrous mixture is as painfully poverty-stricken as the other appointments are rich: "one subject only engaged the ladies till coffee came in, which was the comparative heights of Harry Dashwood, and Lady Middleton's second son William, who were nearly of the same age" (233). Since only Harry is present, the matter can't be settled by measurement. Hence the yawning silence can be filled by "conjectural assertion on both sides, and every body had a right to be equally positive in their opinion, and to repeat it over and over again as often as they liked" (234).

   The parties stood thus:

   The two mothers, though each really convinced that her own son was
   the tallest, politely decided in favour of the other.

   The two grandmothers, with not less partiality, but more sincerity,
   were equally earnest in support of their own descendant.

   Lucy, who was hardly less anxious to please one parent than the
   other, thought the boys were both remarkably tall for their age
   .... and Miss Steele, with yet greater address gave it, as fast as
   she could, in favour of each. (234)

Only Jane Austen could make so much out of so little! The subject of this awful "fatuous filler" is perfect for the occasion, since it allows for endless assertion on a matter no one can verify. And although each participant speaks as though from intense conviction, nobody really cares about the truth of the matter. The doubtful issue of which boy is taller simply affords an opportunity for advancing one's own agenda by buttering up one side or the other. "On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party," the narrator remarks drily, "by way of provision for discourse" (31). If this is all the "provision" available, characters like Elinor and Marianne would rather go without.

Having supplied examples of the best discourse--"conversation"--and the worst--"unconversation"--, I proceed to outline some other genres of speech in Sense and Sensibility, particularly those where the speakers' most strenuous energies are used for anything but conveying ideas or establishing reality.

The delectable first exchange of the novel may be called the "specious argument." When John and Fanny Dashwood discuss his intention to give a thousand pounds to each of his sisters, neither acknowledges the basic truth of the situation: that a substantial gilt would be no more than justice. John Dashwood has promised his father to look after his sisters, he has two ample estates, and the three thousand pounds would be less than a year's income from one of them. But simply through her forms of speech and the manipulation of her rhetoric, Fanny Dashwood can uncreate that reality.

Let me analyze one sentence that is delivered as indirect speech. "How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?" she asks him (8). [2] Of course that "How could you ..." is not a genuine question requiring an answer, but merely an expression of indignation. Whatever follows "How could you.. 7 is already damned as outrageous. "How could you give your sisters 8000 pounds," would be accurate, but still too tame. But "How could you rob your child," though simply a fiction, sounds the right note of outrage. "What you give your sisters now will be removed from your son's inheritance hereafter," if ungenerous, would at least be reasonable persuasion. But Fanny prefers the outrageous notion of robbing the child. And "his only child too," she adds,--as though the fact that he has only one child were an aggravation of the offence, although logically the single offspring against the three daughters of his stepmother should make him more generous.

Fanny brilliantly uses the forms of language itself, rather than the reality of the situation, to make her argument for her. Why give big money to sisters "related to him only by half blood, which she considered as no relationship at all"? Thus she serenely nullifies biology. "[W]hy was he to ruin himself, and their poor little Harry, by giving away all his money ... ?'" In the space of a couple of sentences, Harry has become poor and little, and "so large a sum" has grown to "all [John Dashwood's] money" (8). If she had said, "Three thousand is your whole future inheritance," her husband would have had to dispute the statement. But flamed as it is by all the other assumptions, he's ready to swallow the possibility of "ruin" along with the rest. Mind you, he wants to! We know that Fanny has a very willing listener.

By the end of the exchange, of course, not only has a gift of three thousand pounds diminished to nothing, but a widow with three daughters and an income of five hundred pounds is proved to be better off than a man with one child and an income of about eight thousand. "'They will be much more able to give you something,'" Fanny concludes triumphantly (12).

To borrow Henry Higgins's phrase, Fanny Dashwood is one "who uses the science of speech / More to blackmail and swindle than teach." It is part of Jane Austen's own wonderful command of language that she knows how to dramatize those like the talented Lady Susan, who is so skilled a speaker that she can "make Black appear White" (Minor Works 251). In manifold ways, though not usually with the same skill, the characters in Sense and Sensibility are engaged in the same enterprise.

John Dashwood, well schooled by that early exchange with Fanny, develops the "Poor me, lucky you" mode to a fine art. Meeting Elinor in Gray's jewelry store, he is briefly haunted by the thought that he ought to buy "a pair of ear-rings for each of his sisters" (226), but he now needs no coaching to drop the idea: his sisters, he persuades Elinor to tell him, are very properly taken care of by the Middletons. "'[S]o it ought to be; they are people of large fortune, they are related to you, and every civility, and accommodation that can serve to make your situation pleasant, might be reasonably expected'" (222). He doesn't say that all those reasons apply even more to him, a much nearer relation. Moreover, he quickly settles it that Colonel Brandon, with "'two thousand a-year,'" must be planning to marry Elinor. "'Two thousand a-year' [he repeats]; and then working himself up to a pitch of enthusiastic generosity, he added, 'Elinor, I wish, with all my heart, it were twice as much, for your sake'" (223). He loves being generous with other people's money. He himself, however, seems to be as close to ruin as ever. In buying up a property adjoining his, he shudders at the thought that "'if I had not happened to have the necessary sum in my banker's hands, I must have sold out [some stocks] to very great loss'" (225).

The "stock" that the Steele sisters have is their talent for shameless flattery: that is the best "use" they put speech to. "They came from Exeter," we hear, "well provided with admiration for the use of Sir John Middleton, his family, and all his relations, and no niggardly proportion was now dealt out to his fair cousins, whom they declared to be the most beautiful, elegant, accomplished and agreeable girls they had ever beheld" (124). Jane Austen deploys the language of commerce with devastating effect. "Well provided with admiration" suggests a currency as viable as cash, and they deal it out accordingly. We remember flattery as a mode of Mr. Collins too, but he at least puts some thought into his delicate compliments, and discriminates among those he flatters, whereas Nancy and Lucy splatter theirs out by the pailful, to all and sundry, and are at no pains to adapt the flattery to the flatteree. Again, truth and sincerity don't get a look in. "'Never was there such a quiet little thing!'" as "'sweet little Annamaria,'" gushes Nancy. And "quiet" little Annamaria promptly launches into "violent screams." But the thickly lavished praise pays off none the less with Lady Middleton, because, as the narrator remarks, "a fond mother ... will swallow any thing" (120-21).

Mrs. Jennings has two characteristic modes of speech: I call them "anecdotage" and "romantic conjecture." The anecdote is a form beloved by Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park, whose talk is full of "entertaining stor[ies] about 'my friend such a one'" (52). It has some authority as a representation of what has indeed happened; but as with John Thorpe talking endlessly of his own concerns, it precludes the civil exchange that can rise to conversation. There is a certain verbal gluttony about Mrs. Jennings's anecdotes. In relating the unexpected arrival of the Palmers, she "talked on as loud as she could, and continued her account ... without ceasing till every tiling was told" (107). Such talk tends to promote what I have called "fatuous filler" rather than conversation: "every body agreed, two or three times over, that it had been quite an agreeable surprise" (107). It's almost as good as having a child in the company. Later in the novel we get an anecdote at full length: "You shall hear it all," she promises (257). We do, and it takes three pages. But like Miss Bates's speeches in Emma, it's very much worth listening to:

   "'Lord!' says I [to the medical attendant who can't resist passing
   on some juicy gossip], 'is Mrs. Dashwood ill?' So then it all came
   out; and the long and the short of the matter, by all I can learn,
   seems to be this .... Mr. Edward Ferrars, it seems, has been
   engaged above this twelvemonth to my cousin Lucy!--There's for you,
   my dear!--And not a creature knowing a syllable of the matter
   except Nancy!--Could you have believed such a thing possible?"
   (258)

Although Elinor and Marianne disapprove of the ways Mrs. Jennings obtains and spreads information, to the reader who has been thirsting for the revelation of this painful secret, her outburst is a tremendous relief. Now, so to speak, the waters of communication have broken, and there is a veritable flood. Nancy leaks it, Mr. Donavan spurts it, Mrs. Jennings gushes it. Now Elinor can speak freely to Marianne. Now Marianne can sympathize with Elinor's pain, instead of dwelling exclusively on her own. Even Mrs. Jennings's homely idiom--"the long and the short of the matter," "There's for you, my dear!"--is part of the general relief from prolonged formality, propriety, and buttoned lips. The Miss Bateses and Mrs. Jenningses of the world may be a trial to the Emmas and Mariannes, but we can't do without them. Blessed are the sharers of gossip, for theirs is communion and community!

"Romantic conjecture" is a taste Mrs. Jennings shares with her son-inlaw Sir John, and others too. Their cheerful teasing about romantic attachments is highly embarrassing to Elinor and Marianne, but very acceptable to Nancy Steele, who loves to be teased about "the Doctor," or any other "beau." Truth doesn't have much to do with these conjectures; but sometimes, and per accidens, Mrs. Jennings gets it right, as with her conclusion that Colonel Brandon must be in love with Marianne.

"Conjecture," romantic or otherwise, is one of the novel's defined and recurring genres of speech, and indeed of belief. "[What Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next-- ... with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect" (21). From conjectures they build fictions, and from fictions, fact. Marianne, like Emma, is an imaginist. And it is characteristic of both heroines that Emma's constructed romances end happily, Marianne's tragically. When Colonel Brandon hints at an unhappy past, Elinor scrupulously refrains from questioning him. But, we hear, "Marianne, in her place, would not have done so little. The whole story would have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love" (57). And yet she thinks scorn of Mrs. Jennings's romantic conjectures.

Mrs. Jennings's down-to-earth utterances are a far cry from a number of modes of speech that, though more refined, are much less honest. Several otherwise intelligent speakers succumb to the temptation of romanticizing. When Mrs. Dashwood, now a convert to Colonel Brandon as the right husband for Marianne, claims romantically; "'He has loved her, my Elinor, ever since the first moment of seeing her,'" Elinor silently recognizes "not the language, not the professions of Colonel Brandon, but the natural embellishments of her mother's active fancy; which fashioned every thing delightful to her, as it chose" (336). Mrs. Dashwood makes reality after her own wishes: as when she projects the elaborate renovation of Barton Cottage, to be paid for out of the non-existent savings from her straitened income.

The cottage, indeed, provides another kind of discourse, the "fake pastoral." This is Willoughby: "'To me Barton Cottage] is faultless. Nay, more, I consider it as the only form of building in which happiness is attainable, and were I rich enough, I would instantly pull Combe down, and build it up again in the exact plan of this cottage'" (72). "'With dark narrow stairs, and a kitchen that smokes, I suppose,'" responds Elinor drily, providing the "reality check" that the claim calls for. [3] Robert Ferrars too rhapsodizes over cottages. "'I am excessively fond of a cottage,'" he boasts. "'I protest, if I had any money to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself.... I advise every body who is going to build, to build a cottage'" (251). For him, however, a "cottage" includes a drawing room, a saloon, and a dining-room spacious enough to accommodate eighteen couples.

Why should the subject of cottages promote such absurdities? It seems that a cottage represents the current version of a fantasy of the simple life, for people anything but simple. Rich people picture living contentedly in cottages in the same way that a society belle talks about entering a convent, or Marie Antoinette imagined herself a shepherdess. We hear the same affectation from Lucy, when Edward, now disinherited, offers to release her from the engagement. As Nancy reports the exchange, "'[S]he had not the least mind in the world to be off, for she could live with him upon a trifle'" (274). That is her "love in a cottage" speech. And its falsity is proved twice over, first when Lucy delivers the lie claiming that she was the one who generously offered to end the engagement, and next when she drops Edward like a hotcake when his richer brother becomes available.

In such a context, even Marianne's sincere passion for the picturesque, her cultivated sensibility for scenery, begins to sound like affectation. In the 1790s, when Jane Austen was a teenager, knowing your Gilpin on the picturesque was a proof of being up with the latest discourse, and bright young people like Henry and Eleanor Tilney and the Austen of Love and Freindship) would toss off references to Gilpin because he was the latest intellectual fad. Marianne is showing off a little when she refers, without naming him, to "'him who first defined what picturesque beauty was'" (97). But one wonders if she has a right to blame everyone but herself when she complains that the language of appreciation has become "'worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning'" (97). Perhaps it is not the language that is worn and hackneyed, but the sentiment. Marianne feels by the book, and it's not surprising that she should talk by the book too. Listen, for instance, to her farewell to Norland:

   "Dear, dear Norland!... when shall I cease to regret you!--when
   learn to feel a home elsewhere!--Oh! happy house, could you know
   what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence
   perhaps I may view you no more!--And you, ye well-known trees! ...
   who will remain to enjoy you?" (27)

She has clearly snapped into a poetic mode, borrowed from such authors as Thomson and Ann Radcliffe: note the poetic figures of apostrophe and personification, the rhetorical questions, and the archaic "ye" and "whence." The mode is lyric and exclamatory: I count six exclamation marks here. And there are ample literary precedents for that elegiac "last" time, "no more" sentiment. To show that the mode is an established one, here is the farewell speech of Emily St. Aubert of The Mysteries of Udolpho, when she leaves the home of her youth:

   How delightful is the sweet breath of these groves.... This lovely
   scene!--how often shall I remember and regret it, when I am far
   away. Alas! what events may occur before I see it again! O,
   peaceful, happy shades!.., now lost to me for ever!--Why must I
   leave ye!" (114)

Again, six exclamation marks.

Unlike the intentional deceivers Lucy and Willoughby, Marianne scorns tactful pretence, and means to be honest. Yet she too inevitably slides into the same hackneyed phrases that she condemns, and from her very forthrightness becomes a misrepresenter, like most of the other speakers. "'[T]hirty-five has nothing to do with matrimony;'" she says definitively, of the man she will eventually marry (87). All her strongly expressed convictions have to be revised by the end of the novel.

Even Elinor, who characteristically tries "to explain the real state of the case," slips into fiction and misrepresentation. In fact she slips into the opposite extreme from Marianne's, understating and denying attachments, whereas Marianne is far more likely to overstate. "'[H]ave you really, Ma'am, talked yourself into a persuasion of my sister's being engaged to Mr. Willoughby?'" she asks, disingenuously. Mrs. Jennings is not to be bamboozled, and reproaches Elinor as she deserves: "'For shame, for shame, Miss Dashwood! how can you talk so! ... Because you are so sly about it yourself, you think nobody else has any senses'" (181-82). For all her efforts to tell it like it is, Elinor deserves this reproach. She is sly.

We know that Elinor takes on the duty of speaking all the polite falsehoods in company, because Marianne won't deign to do her share. Experienced as most of us readers are in telling white lies, we're ready to forgive her. People like Mrs. Jennings and Miss Bates deserve courtesy and a little shielding from brutal truths. But how much lying can we tolerate?

Of all the characters except perhaps Lucy; Elinor is the most accomplished double-talker. Her exchange with Lucy about the secret engagement to Edward is ringing with this kind of conscious irony. When Lucy says she's afraid she has offended Elinor by her confession, Elinor responds, "'Offended me! How could you suppose so? Believe me,' and Elinor spoke it with the truest sincerity, 'nothing could be farther from my intention, than to give you such an idea'" (146). At the very moment she is supposedly speaking "with the truest sincerity," she is deliberately deceiving. How far is this skill in insincerity forgivable? I confess that I can't help feeling Elinor is tainted by entering into a war of words with Lucy.

Of course their verbal duel makes fascinating reading. [4] Lucy, knowing of Edward's straying affections, is determined to warn Elinor off, and to triumph over her. Elinor, largely from a motive of pride, is determined to convince Lucy she cares nothing for Edward. Neither succeeds. Here's the exchange I find most revealing. Lucy insists, ungrammatically of course,

   "[I]f you was to say to me, 'I advise you by all means to put an
   end to your engagement with Edward Ferrars.... 'I should resolve
   upon doing it immediately." Elinor blushed for the insincerity of
   Edward's future wife, and replied, "this compliment ... raises my
   influence much too high; the power of dividing two people so
   tenderly attached is too much for an indifferent person." (150)

Listen to her lies! She knows these two people are not tenderly attached, just as she knows she herself is far from "an indifferent person." And consider the narrator's irony at her expense: "Elinor blushed for the insincerity of Edward's future wife." No doubt Elinor blushes for Lucy's insincerity. But which of them is actually Edward's future wife? Right, it's Elinor, and she should be blushing! Even our heroine and principal model is briefly dethroned because of her acrobatic skill in manipulating language. Nobody's perfect!

A focus on speech in Sense and Sensibility, and what it reveals and conceals, brings us to the intricate issue of how much should be avowed, how much should properly remain unspoken. "'[Y]ou communicate, and ... I conceal nothing,'" Marianne memorably reproaches Elinor (170). Should one be open, sincere, and declarative, as Marianne means to be, or repressed, reticent, in denial, like Elinor? Austen modulates the wide span between full revelation and total concealment by supplying a continuum of examples, from the most taciturn character to the most open, so as to provide matter for debate.

To begin with we have Edward Ferrars, reticent by nature, but also gagged by his secret engagement. [5] He admits to being shy, which is a concession towards opening up, but when Marianne calls him "'reserved,'" he shuts down altogether (95). Lady Middleton is also "reserved"--not, like Edward, because she is keeping back a secret, but because she "had nothing to say for herself beyond the most common-place inquiry or remark" (3 1). Mrs. Ferrars likewise is a woman of as few words as ideas. Colonel Brandon can occasionally open up to the right sympathetic listener, but he again has a painful past experience that has reduced him to "'forlorn and cheerless gravity'" (205). Elinor is willing to take on the burden of polite small-talk in company, but she has a preference in principle for reticence in matters of the heart--so that Lucy's extracted promise that she won't communicate the secret engagement is actually a convenience to her. It saves her from doing what she didn't want to do anyway. With these characters, silence and repression prevail.

At the other end of the scale are the effusive speakers. Marianne is open and above-board, and shares her feelings so fully as to be a burden to those who sympathize. And where Elinor takes immense pains to save face and cover up her unrequited love, Marianne bravely admits, "'[M]isery such as mine has no pride. I care not who knows that I am wretched'" (189). Sir John Middleton has a mindless preference for company and talk, regardless of their quality. Robert Ferrars loves to talk for effect. Charlotte Palmer goes in for garrulous good humor in the teeth of her husband's surliness, and she always finds plenty to say since she regularly comes down on both sides of any declaration: Colonel Brandon "'is such a charming man, that it is quite a pity he should be so grave and so dull'" is a characteristic self-contradiction (115). [6] There is Mrs. Jennings, the determined and inveterate talker, who makes a point of saying it all; and finally the most committed communicator of all, Nancy Steele the bean-spiller, who "'does not know how to hold her tongue'" (133).

Lucy Steele and Willoughby are special cases, since each makes a show of being open and frank, while simultaneously following secret agendas of their own.

It is notable of course, in this novel of antitheses, how many pairs--of spouses and siblings--land on different sides of this scale. Elinor and Marianne provide the principal contrast, but there is also one reticent and one garrulous member of each pair of siblings--the Steele sisters, the Jennings sisters, and the Ferrars brothers; and in each pair of spouses--the Middletons, the Palmers, and finally the Brandons. It makes sense that the partners in a pair should specialize, one retreating towards silence the more the other fills the air with expression.

Only Elinor and Edward clearly both come from the reticent side of the scale. And here it is a comfort to hear that once all their difficulties are over, and their reasons for repression dispersed, they can both be fully and lovingly communicative, spending irrational hours "in the hard labour of incessant talking.... Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over" (363-64).

Are we to approve reticence or open communication? That issue is of course as complex as whether we are to side with Elinor's sense or Marianne's sensibility, and by that choice we each define our selves. Even the narrator hedges. Although Elinor's careful management of her grief, and her refraining from sharing it, seem largely approved, yet once Marianne has learned this lesson, even Elinor has reason to regret it: Marianne's "brooding over her sorrows in silence, gave more pain to her sister than could have been communicated by the most open and most frequent confession of them" (212). It sometimes seems that Elinor, and the narrator too, are hard to please! Certainly there are moments in the novel when the license to say what you feel comes like a breath of fresh air to a stuffy cellar. Soon after John Dashwood delivers his outrageous speeches on Edward's disinheritance, for instance, "Marianne's indignation burst forth as soon as he quitted the room; and as her vehemence made reserve impossible in Elinor, and unnecessary in Mrs. Jennings, they all joined in a very spirited critique upon the party" (269). Hooray! And about time too, one is inclined to feel.

In addressing the "genres" of speech I have tried to focus on recognizable modes which may be used by more characters than one, and which Jane Austen often employs in later novels too. What constitutes real "conversation" is a continuing concern in all the novels. The "unconversation" likewise crops up recognizably [7] as a pointless exchange that advances nothing, and that gathers the exasperation of an author who values the best that can be said. The "romantic conjecture" comes into its own in Emma: the secret language of "double talk" is developed as an accomplishment of the trained athletes of speech.

Jane Austen is certainly not the first nor the last author to focus on what Sterne called "the unsteady uses of words," whether spoken or written. But her generous supply of dialogue and her vividly imagined characters with their multiplicity of speech practices provide rich matter for the examination of the relation of word to truth. She had her keen ear for the multiple ways in which even the most well-intentioned speech can deteriorate into evasion or pretension. In this early novel she pondered deeply on the many-faceted fictions that go to make up that complex art form that we call talk.

WORKS CITED

Austen, James. The Loiterer 2 (1789).

Austen, Jane. The Works of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1933--69.

Babb, Howard. Jane Austen's Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1967.

McMaster, Juliet. "Clothing the Thought in the Word: The Speakers in Northanger Abbey." Persuasions 20 (1998): 207-21.

--."Mrs. Elton and Other Verbal Aggressors." The Talk in Jane Austen. Ed. Lynn Weinlos Gregg and Bruce Stovel. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 200'2.78-89.

--."The Secret Languages of Emma." Jane Austen the Novelist. London: Macmillan, 1996.90--105.

--."The Talkers and Listeners of Mansfield Park." Persuasions 17 (1995): 73-89.

--."Talking about Talk in Pride and Prejudice." Jane Austen's Business. Ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel. London: Macmillan, 1996. 81-94.

Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford: SUP, 2002.

Page, Norman. The Language of Jane Austen. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Dobree. 1966. Oxford: OUP, 2008.

Smith, Lesley Willis. "'Hands off my man!' or 'Don't you wish you had one? Some Subtexts of Conversational Combat in Jane Austen.'" The Talk in Jane Austen. Ed. Lynn Weinlos Gregg and Bruce Stovel. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 9002.91-102.

NOTES

[1.] See my essay "The Secret Languages of" Emma" (91). The present essay is one of a series on speech in Austen's fiction. See also "The Talkers and Listeners of Mansfield Park," "Talking about Talk in Pride and Prejudice," "Clothing the Thought in the Word: The Speakers in Northanger Abbey," "Mrs. Elton and Other Verbal Aggressors." In addition, I presented "Greazy Tresses, Base Miscreants, and Horrid Wretches: Teenage Jane Does Dialogue" at the Madison Jane Austen Festival (2001) and as the Holmes Lecture at Pomona College (2002), and "The Sounds of Silence: Anne Elliot among the Talkers" at JASNA's 2005 AGM.

[2.] Norman Page cites this combination of indirect speech with the emotional coloring of direct speech as an early example of"the free mixture of different modes of speech-presentation ... very characteristic of this novelist" (123).

[3.] Howard Babb, in his early and impressive study of Austen's dialogue, shows how Willoughby is courting Marianne by making the perfect cottage a metaphor for her (67).

[4.] For a close analysis of the verbal sparring between Elinor and Lucy, see Lesley Willis Smith (92-98).

[5.] Patricia Howell Michaelson explores the cultural tendency to silence women and inhibit their speech, but it is notable that Austen presents a number of men--Edward, Brandon, Darcy--who have their own impediments in self expression (93-30).

[6.] Immediate self contradiction is a recurring mode for unapproved characters: see Mary Stanhope in "The Three Sisters": "'I wont have him I declare. He said he should come again tomorrow & take my final answer, so I believe I must get him while I can'" (MW58); and Mrs. Bennet: "'I told you in the library, you know; that I should never speak to you again'" (PP 118).

[7.] See, for instance, the exchanges in The Watsons on whom Emma resembles (324), and whether a dark complexion is better than a fair one (MW324, :157).

JULIET McMASTER

Juliet McMaster of the University of Alberta has entertained and (she hopes) enlightened JASNA audiences in many places over many years. The present essay, one of a series on talk in Austen's fiction, was first delivered at the Chicago Gala, and then at New York.