SOURCE: Neumann, Anne Waldron. “Characterization and Comment in Pride and Prejudice: Free Indirect Discourse and ‘Double-voiced’ Verbs of Speaking, Thinking, and Feeling.” Style 20, no. 3 (fall 1986): 364-94.

[In the following essay, Neumann studies the speech and thought of Pride and Prejudice, calling attention to Austen's use of “double-voiced verbs,” or verbs that “conflate narration with reported discourse.”]

I. INTRODUCTION

Since so much of an Austen novel is apparently “shown” or dramatized rather than “told” or narrated, it becomes of particular interest not just to trace how Austen reports the speech and thought of her characters but also to consider when and how judgments on the characters' consciousnesses are implied as well as stated. The following study uses Pride and Prejudice to illustrate one aspect of how Austen creates consciousnesses for her characters by rendering and describing their speech and thought in what Mikhail Bakhtin, in his “Discourse Typology in Prose,” calls “double-voiced utterances”—that is, sentences which combine a character's reported voice with the narrator's reporting voice, sentences in which the narrator can both render, and comment on, the utterance reported (181). This study offers an improved taxonomy of reported discourse, applicable to other English novelists, and, in applying this taxonomy to Austen, it suggests a reading of her fiction.

Bakhtin's philosophy of language justifies close study of reported discourse because this study allows us to see how consciousnesses are formed and influenced: “What we have in the forms of reported speech,” Bakhtin asserts, “is precisely an objective document” of the active, evaluative reception by one mind of the discourse of another (Marxism 117).¹ Austen's characters choose from the same modes of quotation and comment as are available to her narrator. Seeing what her characters remember and quote from what Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey calls “social and literary intercourse” (NA 197), we learn how they assimilate that discourse and why they quote it—to satirize, moralize, or romanticize. How language expresses but also shapes judgment in Austen's view suggests how she believes consciousnesses are informed and—ideally—improved by social and literary discourse.

The assurance with which Austen's explicit narratorial comment employs Johnsonian abstract nouns for moral qualities is readily remarked. Much of Austen's characterization and comment is also implied by her telling choice of verbs of speaking and verbs of thinking or feeling, however. These verbs of communication, and of articulated and sometimes nonarticulated consciousness, are worth studying whenever they occur in Austen's narratives, but it is also significant where they occur—whether they originate in the actual discourse of a character, whether they form the narrator's introduction to quoted speech or thought, or whether they may seem to belong to narrator's and character's discourse simultaneously.

The special topic of the following study is such “double-voiced” verbs as these last, which conflate narration with reported discourse to combine concision with liveliness but sometimes also to confuse—intentionally—a character's subjective speech with the narrator's objective account of that character's thoughts or feelings. Ann Banfield claims that a “common assumption” of the “dual voice” view of indirectly reported discourse (which she attempts to refute) is that the inquit or parenthetical—the “he said” or “she thought” that may accompany and identify sentences of reported discourse—is the paradigmatic example of the narrator's contribution to a double-voiced utterance (189). I claim more for the “dual voice” position. I argue below that sometimes—in the “double-voiced” case—the inquit is itself an instance of double-voicedness.²

Since sentences with double-voiced verbs constitute, I suggest, a variation on free indirect discourse, identifying such verbs allows us better to recognize free indirect discourse in Austen's novels. And, because free indirect discourse interweaves what could be a character's words into the narrator's discourse, but without explicitly attributing those words to the character in question, on the correct identification of free indirect discourse depends both who sees and who speaks in a given passage, the factors determining point of view in fiction. I shall suggest that Austen uses double-voiced verbs to distinguish characters whose point of view the narrator cooperates in reporting but also to identify characters who are left to speak their thoughts and feelings for themselves. That is, by means of this single device, Austen's narrator can not only share with her heroines the responsibility for articulating their reflections at the level of thought but can also satirize lesser characters who attribute thoughts and feelings to themselves in their speech—who moralize or romanticize, for example—without the narrator's cooperation and endorsement.

II. FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE

In a recent reconsideration of free indirect discourse, Michael Peled Ginsburg notes that discussions of this narrative mode typically begin by presenting and refuting “definitions of FID offered by critics in the past” (133). Since, in analyzing verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling in Pride and Prejudice, I also discuss what I identify as a variant of free indirect discourse, I too shall begin by briefly describing my model of how free indirect discourse reports speech and thought in Austen's novels.

Austen usually enlivens the description of instances of speech or thought by including words we feel might well partly render them. Free indirect discourse, I suggest, is that mode of indirectly reported speech or thought which quotes what we feel could be at least some of the words of a character's actual utterance or thought but which offers those words interwoven with the narrator's language (though not syntactically subordinated to it) without explicitly attributing them to the character in question (an interweaving that may necessitate certain grammatical transpositions described below). Ginsburg contests “the view that FID is simply the representation of the speech or thought of the characters. Even when the bivocality of the utterance in FID is acknowledged, its ambiguity is usually dismissed” (139). I define free indirect discourse as any sentence (or clause) containing words which (with the necessary grammatical transpositions) could plausibly be attributed to a character by the reader but which are not explicitly attributed to that character by the narrator. (For consistency, I define a sentence or clause without explicit attribution as free indirect discourse even when neighboring sentences contain the inquit which would imply that attribution.) Free indirect discourse in fiction is not necessarily the narrator quoting a character, according to my definition (indeed, in a novel, we could seldom “know” this for certain). It need only read as though it could be quotation. My suggested definition thus welcomes ambiguity but also allows that not every instance of free indirect discourse is equally ambiguous.³

The usual sort of example can demonstrate typical differences between free direct and indirect speech or thought and tagged direct and indirect speech or thought:

(Tagged) direct speech: He asked, “Shall I come here to see you tomorrow?”

Free direct speech: Shall I come here to see you tomorrow?

(Tagged) indirect speech: He asked if he should go there to see her the next day.

Free indirect speech: Should he come here to see her tomorrow?

(Tagged) direct thought: He asked himself, “Shall I come here to see her tomorrow?”

Free direct thought: Shall I come here to see her tomorrow?

(Tagged) indirect thought: He asked himself if he should go there to see her the next day.

Free indirect thought: Should he come here to see her tomorrow?

“Tagged” (to mean “attributed”—quotation with a tag or inquit) is part of Seymour Chatman's terminology in “The Structure of Narrative Transmission” (230): “direct tagged speech,” “direct free thought,” “indirect free speech,” “indirect tagged thought,” and so on.⁴ I retain the more familiar word order, omit tagged when possible, and use the general term discourse to refer to both “speech” and “thought.” (Thus free indirect discourse, for example, includes free indirect speech and free indirect thought.)

By convention, direct discourse, tagged or free, preserves every word of the actual utterance reported—“actual,” in the case of fiction. Tagged indirect discourse often (but not always) preserves some of them. Free indirect discourse, I suggest, in practice usually includes some of what could be, in Graham Hough's words, “the actual mode of expression, the ipsissima verba of a fictional character” (205)—with, perhaps, certain grammatical transpositions. If free indirect discourse did not preserve potential ipsissima verba, it would be the narrator's single-voiced utterance rather than quotation.⁵ But determining which words may be quoted in a sentence interpreted as free indirect discourse is no harder than in a sentence of tagged indirect discourse, which may summarize or reorder or paraphrase or merely describe an utterance, as well as select from and in part quote it directly (compare Pascal 26). Again, if a sentence or clause can, in my opinion, plausibly be read as containing indirect quotation without attribution, I identify it as free indirect discourse. Readers may question the plausibility and reject the identification in specific instances. The category of free indirect discourse thus defined remains available, however, whether or not readers agree on particular instances of it.

Direct discourse does not assimilate and subordinate the reported clause to the reporting or attributing clause, if any—the “he said” or “she thought” or, as in the above example, “he asked.” And, except for any reporting clause, this mode of reported discourse is single-voiced, a character's rather than the narrator's voice. In tagged or free indirect discourse, in contrast, one voice quotes and frames another, typically shifting any verbs or first- and second-person pronouns in what may be quotation to the narrative past and to the third person, as in the above examples.⁶

Tagged direct and indirect discourse explicitly identify the character who authored the utterance by means of the inquit (and tagged direct discourse also identifies exactly which words are quoted by means of quotation marks). Free indirect discourse, on the other hand, omits the inquit which announces quotation.⁷ Because free indirect discourse lacks attribution, how do we recognize it as possibly reported discourse? That is, how does a novelist foreground the subjective language and viewpoint of a particular character against the usually more objective narratorial background? Or how does one character signal quotation of another character without being explicit? Like any form of irony—and free indirect discourse is often ironic—free indirect discourse must announce itself by some implicit means. We must be able to recognize that such sentences could be read as unattributed quotation of a character by the narrator, or of one character by another. At least, the undecidability of whether to interpret free indirect discourse as quotation should be recognizable.

The example displays the most explicit possible indicators of free indirect discourse. First, free indirect discourse usually preserves (as tagged indirect discourse typically does not) any deictic indicators of the here and now of the speaker's spatial and temporal perspective.⁸ Second, tagged indirect discourse embeds a character's utterance as a subordinate clause—with subordinate-clause word order—in the narrator's utterance. But free indirect discourse—when it quotes a whole sentence—preserves (as does direct discourse) the word order and sentence form of the original utterance, most noticeably exclamations and questions (Pascal 9). Note, however, that when neither deictic indicators nor verbs and pronouns occur in a reported utterance—when, for example, only a fragment of a character's speech or thought is interwoven without attribution in, say, the narrator's language—we may not find any linguistically definable markers of quoted discourse. Paradoxically, in such a case, all quoted words would be unshifted from the character's “actual” words: we might equally well be reading free direct discourse.⁹

The most important markers of free indirect discourse are the most difficult to specify: we recognize content and often also diction and syntax particularly appropriate to a character, or particularly inappropriate to the narrator. Such discrepancies are especially apparent in Austen's satiric (rather than sympathetic) free indirect discourse (usually rendering speech in Austen's novels rather than thought) where the reporting and the reported voices seem to clash rather than cooperate.¹⁰ Foregrounding what deviates in a character's speech from the narrator's normative background, satiric free indirect discourse in Austen's novels balances between morality and satire, between instruction and delight.

The study of reported speech and thought in fiction may necessitate reconstructing, or hypothesizing, what was “actually” uttered from what is reported. The fabula, as originally conceived by Russian Formalist critics like Boris Tomashevsky, is primarily a reconstruction by the reader of the events of a fiction in their “actual chronological and causal order” (Tomashevsky 67), in contrast to the order in which they may be recounted by the narrator in the sjužet. More generally, “the story [or fabula] is ‘the action itself,’ the plot [or sjužet], ‘how the reader learns of the action,’” according to Tomashevsky (67n).¹¹ Thus the fabula can include reconstructions by the reader of the utterances of a fiction as they “actually” occurred—to whatever extent such reconstruction is possible—without the omissions, grammatical transpositions, or paraphrases with which utterances may be reported by the narrator in the sjužet. Double-voiced utterances are sentences in the sjužet. Interwoven in double-voiced utterances, however, are words “uttered” in the fabula. We may imagine that the narrator creates the sjužet (including the report of the characters' discourse) while Wayne Booth's “implied author” creates both fabula (including the imagined “actual” discourse of the characters) and narrator. This distinction, however artificial, is useful for talking about choices authors make in reporting discourse because it permits us to speak as though other choices were possible. “Narrator” and “implied author” are entities readers abstract from fictional texts; their abstract and necessarily artificial nature does not disqualify them—nor fabula and sjužet—from use by critics. This study freely hypothesizes what readers, if they paused to do so, could infer was said or thought in the fabula from what is written in the sjužet.

This reconstruction is particularly problematic—intentionally so—in the case of free indirect discourse, of course. As Austen wrote her sister after reading the page proofs of Pride and Prejudice, “a ‘said he,’ or a ‘said she,’ would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear,” perhaps referring to her practice of omitting the inquit in free indirect discourse. “[B]ut,” she continued, paraphrasing Marmion,

I do not write for such dull elves
As have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.

(Letters 297-98)

To read a sentence as free indirect discourse, we must indeed use our ingenuity. We must infer who is quoted and which words of the sentence are quotation. And we are left to guess whether those words in the sjužet were uttered at the corresponding moment in the fabula, and even whether those words were spoken or thought. Nevertheless, we can often, if unconsciously, postulate answers to these questions. Clearly, more of who and which and when and how are defined by the context in some sentences of free indirect discourse. The first examples of free indirect discourse I shall cite from Pride and Prejudice are of this most “definite” type. And my very first example is—perhaps surprisingly—free indirect quotation by a character rather than by the narrator.

Mr. Bennet is one of those characters in Pride and Prejudice who is as capable of satire, including ironic quotation, as Austen's narrator. Mr. Bennet “would not give up Mr. Collins's correspondence for any consideration,” for example, because its absurdities are so invaluable to quote and laugh at (364). When Mr. Bennet tells Elizabeth that the conclusion of a letter from Mr. Collins “is only about his dear Charlotte's situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch” (364), we know Mr. Bennet is mimicking Mr. Collins. That is, the direct speech in which his remark to Elizabeth is reported contains Mr. Bennet's free indirect discourse: in describing Mr. Collins's letter, Mr. Bennet also quotes him. “Dear Charlotte” must be quoted from Mr. Collins's latest letter: Mr. Collins's bride was his “amiable Charlotte” in an earlier letter (128), and Mr. Bennet would not normally address her by her first name. The “young olive-branch,” who will succeed Mr. Collins as heir to Mr. Bennet's entailed estate, is of course not described in these words in Mr. Collins's latest letter. But “olive-branch” quotes Mr. Collins's first letter to Mr. Bennet, transcribed earlier by the narrator, in which (Mr. Bennet evidently recalls) Mr. Collins offered himself as a matrimonial “olive branch” to make “every possible amends” to one of Mr. Bennet's daughters for inheriting Longbourn (63).¹²

Like Mr. Bennet, Austen's narrator too is skilled at the kind of free indirect discourse that makes words a character has previously said a vehicle for satire.¹³ After Mr. Darcy's marriage to Elizabeth, the narrator tells us, Lady Catherine “condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received” (388). This sentence is a triple-voiced utterance, genuinely polyphonic rather than merely dialogic. “Pollution” is not the narrator's opinion, of course; it quotes Lady Catherine “condescending” to visit Elizabeth to express in person her objections to a match between Elizabeth and her nephew: “Heaven and earth!—of what are you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” (357). “Condescend,” in an amusing interweaving of points of view, is the verb Mr. Collins uses again and again to describe Lady Catherine. For example, in another of his letters to Mr. Bennet, Mr. Collins writes:

“After mentioning the likelihood of [a marriage between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy] to her ladyship last night, she immediately, with her usual condescension, expressed what she felt on the occasion; when it became apparent, that … she would never give her consent to what she termed so disgraceful a match.”

(363, and compare an earlier letter, 297)¹⁴

By Lady Catherine's “usual condescension,” Mr. Collins—a sycophantic toady—thinks he means something like “graciousness” or “affability to one's inferiors”; we understand by it that Lady Catherine is displaying her usual abusive frankness and patronizing officiousness. Mr. Collins intends “condescension” in a positive sense; the narrator co-opts Mr. Collins's word to suggest its pejorative connotations.

Our first two examples of free indirect discourse quote words or phrases we have previously seen used by the characters in question—Mr. Collins's “olive branch,” Lady Catherine's “pollution.” We can answer whose words, which words, and when and how they were uttered (whether in speech or in thought) because we received all this information the first time the words were quoted. This is one extreme of free indirect discourse, which I call “definite” to reflect our certainty that it quotes “actual” utterances.¹⁵

If the contrast between the narrator's and a character's idiom and viewpoint is marked enough, however, we can readily identify what may be quotation without first having “heard” it, so to speak, from the character's own lips. We recognize mimicry without having experienced precisely what is mimicked. The devices by which Austen's narrator signals quotation of this type can be quite explicit. Sometimes we “know” by some means that there was an utterance by a particular character in the fabula, and a sentence at the appropriate point in the sjužet strikes us as translating back into the sort of thing that character would typically say in that situation. I call this kind of free indirect discourse, much the most common kind, “almost definite” free indirect discourse. My final introductory examples are of this not completely but very highly defined variety: that is, we have little doubt who uttered which words when and how (an “indefinite” type of free indirect discourse is discussed below). I do not imply that “almost definite” free indirect discourse is always immediately recognizable as possible quotation (though this is often the case) but merely that an argument for reading it as quotation can be very strongly made. The following examples suggest that, even when highly defined, free indirect discourse still retains a quality of distance and ambiguity.

In Pride and Prejudice, free indirect discourse is used very deftly to render conventional politeness, sometimes underlining how characters fail to say everything we suppose them to think and especially amusing when the characters speaking are at some level conscious of their own indirectness, when we see them attempting by indirections to find directions out. Free indirect discourse, which typically hovers between direct and indirect discourse in its linguistic characteristics, and adds a dimension of indirectness all its own by not being attributed, is a particularly appropriate medium to convey such coyness. We get an example of this kind of social fencing when Mrs. Bennet, “amid very complaisant smiles and general encouragement,” cautions Mr. Collins against fixing his hopes of finding a mistress for his humble abode in Jane:

—“As to her younger daughters, she could not take upon her to say—she could not positively answer—but she did not know of any prepossession;—her eldest daughter, she must just mention—she felt it incumbent on her to hint, was likely to be very soon engaged.”

(71)

The quotation marks in this passage—Austen did not know that free indirect discourse is supposed to omit them—ensure that we are reading Mrs. Bennet's “actual” reply to Mr. Collins (with the usual grammatical transformations): “As to my younger daughters, I cannot take upon me to say—I cannot positively answer,” and so on. The syntax—coy hesitations and repetitions quickening toward her evident note of triumph at the end—reproduces Mrs. Bennet's imitation of elegant delicacy as she sets a trap for a second suitor without upsetting the snare in which she hopes an earlier suitor is about to become engaged.

Something the plot demonstrates Mrs. Bennet does well, after all, is to secure husbands for her daughters whether or not the gentlemen are “in want of a wife” (3). One of the novel's vindications of Mrs. Bennet is a scene in which Mr. Bingley, freed to resume his courtship of Jane by Mr. Darcy's tacit approval—and by Mr. Darcy's temporary absence—cooperates with Mrs. Bennet in her maneuvers to invite him to dinner. Mr. Bingley's complicity is also conveyed in almost definite free indirect discourse (but this time without quotation marks):

Mr. Bingley called again, and alone. His friend had left him that morning for London, but was to return home in ten days' time. He sat with them above an hour, and was in remarkably good spirits. Mrs. Bennet invited him to dine with them; but, with many expressions of concern, he confessed himself engaged elsewhere.

“Next time you call,” said she, “I hope we shall be more lucky.”

He should be particularly happy at any time, &c. &c.; and if she would give him leave, would take an early opportunity of waiting on them.

“Can you come to-morrow?”

Yes, he had no engagement at all for to-morrow; and her invitation was accepted with alacrity.

(344)

In this passage (the second sentence of which, incidentally, is also free indirect discourse), Mrs. Bennet understands that Mr. Bingley is near the point and that strategy no longer requires indirection; her share of the dialogue is in direct discourse. It is Mr. Bingley—still viewing with “half-laughing alarm” (340) Mr. Darcy's “concurrence” in his wooing (346)—who contrives with Mrs. Bennet for an invitation in that combination of directness and conscious indirection so deftly rendered—in the third paragraph of the passage quoted and in the first clause of its final sentence—in free indirect discourse.¹⁶

In both these last examples of free indirect discourse, whole sentences (or clauses) of the narrator's report coincide with whole sentences of the character's presumed utterance (except for the “&c. &c.” summarizing Mr. Bingley's polite formulae). In our first two examples only a few words attributable to a character were interwoven in the narratorial background. The free indirect discourse which highlights selected words or phrases, and which usually reports speech in Austen's novels, is nearly always satiric because the contrast between the fragments of quoted language and the narratorial background (in particular, the rest of the words in the sentence)—and thus the implied discrepancy between narrator's and character's points of view—is especially marked. What we might call the free indirect discourse of whole sentences, on the other hand, often intersects with sympathetic rather than satiric free indirect discourse. Elizabeth's thought is typically reported in the free indirect discourse of whole sentences, frequently in language indistinguishable from the narrator's idiom, so that any “functional contrast” between narrator's and heroine's viewpoint is minimized.¹⁷ But, in comic situations, whole sentences of a character's idiom stand out against the implied norm of the larger narratorial background. The free indirect discourse of whole sentences can be used to report speech satirically with little danger that readers will long confuse such sentences with narration.¹⁸

III. DOUBLE-VOICED VERBS OF SPEAKING, THINKING, AND FEELING

The verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling which introduce and identify sentences of tagged direct or indirect discourse originate with the narrator. But characters may also employ such verbs in their speech or thought (in Mrs. Bennet's speech to Mr. Collins quoted above, for example, “say,” “answer,” “know,” “mention,” “felt,” and “hint”). Some verbs of speaking that seem to belong equally well to narrator or character occur near the end of Pride and Prejudice. Here, after Jane and Mr. Bingley are finally engaged, what earlier seemed Mrs. Bennet's “schemes” and “invention” and “ill-judged officiousness” (345-46) have become, in Jane's words, “affectionate solicitude” (347). Now Austen demonstrates that even her favorite heroine—and even her stateliest hero—are not above similar happy contrivances, despite Mr. Darcy's earlier assertion that, especially in courtship, “‘Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable'” (40). Here Mr. Darcy, after he has proposed to Elizabeth for the second time and been accepted, cooperates in free indirect discourse—like Mr. Bingley—with Mrs. Bennet's newest scheme. To leave Jane and Mr. Bingley alone together, Mrs. Bennet suggests Elizabeth and Kitty show Darcy Oakham Mount because “‘It is a nice long walk, and Mr. Darcy has never seen the view.’” Elizabeth, who has not yet told her mother of her engagement, can “hardly help laughing at so convenient a proposal” (374) and “silently consent[s]” (375):

Kitty owned that she had rather stay at home. Darcy professed a great curiosity to see the view from the Mount.

(374-75)

The self-consciousness of Mr. Darcy “profess[ing] a great curiosity to see the view” is heightened by a device which, once we remark it, we see constantly recurring in Austen's novels. I have suggested that Mr. Darcy's reply is free indirect speech although it may initially appear to be tagged. For instance, one could argue that Mr. Darcy's reply might have looked like this, rendered in tagged direct speech: “I have a great curiosity to see the view,” Darcy professed. A rendering in tagged indirect speech might then have looked like this: Darcy professed that he had a great curiosity to see the view. Or, since indirect discourse can summarize any part of the reported clause as well as omit “that”: Darcy professed a great curiosity to see the view. This is exactly the wording of the novel. Since to profess can mean to make a pretense of, we might infer that Mr. Darcy's duplicity is being announced by the narrator's choice of inquit. But to profess is also to declare publicly, and we might suppose that what Mr. Darcy “actually” said (in some fabula we may hypothesize behind Austen's sjužet) was, intending to profess in the sense of avowal: “I profess—or, I profess that I have—a great curiosity to see the view.” The wording in the novel would then be free indirect discourse, but there is in fact no way to tell for certain whether we have before us an example of free or tagged indirect speech. (Similarly, in the fabula we hypothesize behind Austen's sjužet, perhaps Kitty owned, “I had rather stay at home.” But Kitty may equally well have said, “I own that I had rather stay at home.”) Mr. Darcy's “profess” seems deliberately chosen to tease us into wondering how far his “anxious circumspection” (347) has bent in taking advantage of Mrs. Bennet's scheme for leaving Jane and Mr. Bingley alone together to contrive some privacy for Elizabeth and himself.

Such a verb as Mr. Darcy's “profess” or Kitty's “own,” which might either be part of the narrator's inquit introducing tagged indirect discourse (that is, it originates with the narrator, in the sjužet) but which could equally well render part of the character's “actual” discourse (that is, it originates with a character, in the fabula), I call a “double-voiced verb of speaking.” And I call the mode of discourse that results from using such verbs, though it may seem equidistant between tagged and free indirect discourse, “free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs of speaking.”

I classify sentences with double-voiced verbs as free rather than tagged because the double-voiced verb leaves it ambiguous whether narrator or character is responsible for the sentence. We cannot tell, that is, whether the above example is the narrator's summary of Mr. Darcy's statement, with all the objective endorsement—or perhaps the satiric coloration—this may imply, or whether it constitutes Mr. Darcy's own words, which, we presume, are neither so objective nor so satiric. Although a strong argument can often be made for reading sentences of free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs as character's utterance, such an interpretation is not always immediate. Moreover, I shall suggest in a moment, with an example of Mr. Collins's discourse, that double-voiced verbs occur with differing degrees of probability of belonging to character or narrator: some double-voiced verbs are almost certainly the character's but just possibly the narrator's, some seem evenly balanced between the two possibilities, and some seem far more likely to belong to narrator than character. Thus the sentences such verbs introduce hover variously between narrator's and character's account, which justifies calling them “free” although they contain what looks like an inquit. Although a double-voiced verb is a kind of attribution, it only associates a sentence with a particular character but does not tell us whether to attribute it to him or her. Such ambiguity typifies free indirect discourse. Classifying these sentences as variations on free indirect discourse means that a simpler initial definition of free indirect discourse suffices.

Having once identified this device in Austen's novels, we see not only how often she uses it but also how much more “dramatized” her narratives become by the frequent possibility that what looks like narration, that is, an inquit, could instead be reported discourse. Again, such a phrase need not positively be reported discourse, according to my definition; indeed we can never “know” whether a double-voiced verb comes from character and fabula or narrator and sjužet. It need only sound as though it could be quotation.¹⁹ By conflating inquit with possible reported discourse, double-voiced verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling combine concision with liveliness. They also increase the flexibility of Austen's narratives by making transitions between passages of dialogue and narration—that is, between scene and summary—smoother because more gradual.

Because double-voiced verbs are sometimes verbs of thinking or feeling rather than verbs of speaking, sentences which first looked like the narrator's indirect report of a character's thoughts or feelings can seem on closer inspection to be free indirect discourse. (Double-voiced verbs must be either verbs of speaking, thinking, or feeling since they must be readable as the verb in an inquit.) An example of a double-voiced verb of feeling occurs in an exchange between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy during the walk on which Mr. Darcy proposes a second time and is accepted:

“What could [have] become of Mr. Bingley and Jane!” was a wonder which introduced the discussion of their affairs. Mr. Darcy was delighted with their engagement; his friend had given him the earliest information of it.

“I must ask whether you were surprised?” said Elizabeth.

(370; Austen's emphasis)²⁰

The exclamation which begins this passage is another example of free indirect discourse with quotation marks. Although it is not explicitly attributed to her, it must render Elizabeth's speech (Mr. Darcy would have wondered about “Bingley and Miss Bennet”). We understand that what Elizabeth said was, “What can have become … ?” The second sentence could begin as tagged indirect thought, the narrator relating how Mr. Darcy feels about Bingley's engagement and thus implying what Mr. Darcy contributes to the ensuing “discussion.” But it is more likely a free indirect report of Mr. Darcy's actual speech. That is, what resembles internal focalization on Mr. Darcy is more probably externally focalized,²¹ the narrator's report of a speech in which Mr. Darcy partly anticipates Elizabeth's next question by reaffirming his direction of Mr. Bingley's affairs: “I am delighted with their engagement; my friend gave me the earliest information of it.” Here a double-voiced verb phrase—“was delighted”—smooths a transition, from narration (“the discussion of their affairs”) to dialogue. Note, however, that the opening exchanges of this dialogue have apparently already been rendered in free indirect discourse, demonstrating how flexibly Austen uses this narrative mode. I should again emphasize that double-voiced verbs of thinking or feeling can introduce sentences that resemble tagged indirect thought but may render speech—if the character in question is speaking of his or her thoughts or feelings.

The formality of language in Austen's day as compared with our own multiplies the opportunities for free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling because conventional politeness affords a rich choice of potentially double-voiced verbs. In the following passage, for example, the Miss Bennets make an acquaintance:

Mr. Denny addressed them directly, and entreated permission to introduce his friend, Mr. Wickham, who had returned with him the day before from town, and he was happy to say had accepted a commission in their corps. This was exactly as it should be; for the young man wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming.

(72)

The opening sentence of this passage, if we omit “addressed them directly,” is free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs of speaking and feeling (“entreated” and “was happy to say”). It may well reproduce Mr. Denny's ipsissima verba, subject only to the usual transformational rules. Certainly the words of the sentence would be characteristic of Mr. Denny, and his “direct” “address” is reported by them. We cannot be completely certain that what Mr. Denny “really” said was, “I entreat permission to introduce my friend … who … I am happy to say has …,” but this is still an instance of what I called “almost definite” free indirect discourse.

The last sentence of the passage quoted above may also be free indirect discourse, however, or at least narration highly colored by a perspective foreign to the narrator's (and therefore constituting the narrator's ironic comment on that foreign perspective): it represents what the younger Bennet sisters might say to themselves privately, or perhaps do say to each other later—though not, presumably, what even Lydia would be bold enough actually to say to Mr. Wickham's face. That is, though the language and the sentiments are certainly characteristic of Kitty and Lydia, we cannot know whether the sentence renders an actual utterance of theirs or only reports the sort of thing they would say or think. Therefore, I call this narrative mode “indefinite” free indirect discourse because, although we can correctly identify the character to associate it with in the sjužet where it appears, its status as discourse in the fabula is uncertain. We can be almost entirely confident Kitty and Lydia have not exposed themselves by actually speaking this sentence, at least not in this scene. But neither can we be entirely certain that they think it.²²

Indefinite free indirect discourse, which often hovers between speech and thought in this way, resembles in its ambiguity, but in another sense reverses, free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling. Indefinite free indirect discourse possibly quotes a character but may really be the responsibility of the narrator, while a typical example of free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs looks like the narrator's tagged indirect report of a character's speech or thought but is more probably the character's own account of him- or herself.

The free indirect discourse reporting Mr. Denny's speech introducing Wickham is, however, perfectly straightforward: sympathetic rather than satiric. Interpreting this sentence as free indirect discourse (that is, reading its double-voiced verbs as belonging to Mr. Denny) does not clash with interpreting it as tagged indirect discourse (that is, reading the double-voiced verbs as the narrator's). Mr. Denny's politeness, his “entreat[ing] permission” to perform an action and his being “happy” to be able to say something, we accept as plausible language for a character of Austen's day and Mr. Denny's rank. If he strikes a modern reader as wordy and overly formal, there are characters in Pride and Prejudice who are genuinely pompous and verbose—verbose, that is, according to the novel's norms. As with many of the narrative devices in Pride and Prejudice, double-voiced verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling are worth special scrutiny in their satiric mode, where they suggest the origins and workings of both Austen's satire and her didacticism. If formality is a rich source of double-voiced verbs, and wordy formality even richer, we can predict that Mr. Collins's discourse will prove a gold mine of examples.

Mr. Collins's discourse is so larded with verbs of speaking and, especially, thinking, and the verbs selected are so characteristic of his diction rather than the narrator's, that we cannot, however, long mistake his free indirect discourse for tagged indirect speech or thought. The device of double-voiced verbs emphasizes an aspect of his personal style. Here is a brief sample of Mr. Collins's wordy formality when meeting Mrs. Philips:

She received him with her very best politeness, which he returned with as much more, apologizing for his intrusion, without any previous acquaintance with her, which he could not help flattering himself however might be justified by his relationship to the young ladies who introduced him to her notice. Mrs. Philips was quite awed by such an excess of good breeding.

(73)

The verbs of speaking and thinking associated with Mr. Collins in this passage could translate directly, we feel, into his actual discourse: “I apologize, Madame, for my intrusion, without any previous acquaintance with you, which I cannot help flattering myself, however, may be justified by. …” Because The verbs of speaking and thinking associated with Mr. Collins in this passage could translate directly, we feel, into his actual discourse: “I apologize, Madame, for my intrusion, without any previous acquaintance with you, which I cannot help flattering myself, however, may be justified by. …” Because “apologizing for his intrusion” could be tagged rather than free indirect speech, “apologizing” is indeed a double-voiced verb of speaking. But “flattering himself” is double-voiced only on first inspection. It is just barely possible that a sentence beginning “Mr. Collins could not help flattering himself that …” should be read as tagged indirect thought. But I have just suggested that a sentence which looks like Mr. Darcy's thought more probably renders his speech. We may begin to suspect that internal focalization through characters other than the heroine—even the hero—is rarer in Austen's novels than “first impressions” suggest since it so often conflates in this way with reported speech. Moreover, everything we know about Mr. Collins and his usual ecstasies of humility suggests that “flattering himself” is transformed from his actual speech (“actual” in the fabula we postulate). Indeed, Mr. Collins “flatter[s] himself” every time he opens his mouth. Even when he is “apologizing for his intrusion,” or humbly attributing his flattering reception to his relationship with someone else (here the Bennet sisters, usually Lady Catherine de Bourgh, occasionally the Divinity), he gratifies his vanity by drawing attention to his humility.

Mr. Collins's wordiness consistently draws attention to himself, in fact. Another example of his attention-getting speech, demonstrating that verbs can be double-voiced in varying degrees, occurs as Mr. Collins escorts his cousins home from a second visit to Mrs. Philips:

Mr. Collins, in describing the civility of Mr. and Mrs. Philips, protesting that he did not in the least regard his losses at whist, enumerating all the dishes at supper, and repeatedly fearing that he crouded [sic] his cousins, had more to say than he could well manage before the carriage stopped at Longbourn House.

(84)

An amusing implication of this passage is that Mr. Collins sees praising and apologizing and entertaining his cousins as duties to “manage.” But which of the four gerunds describing his duties in this passage might belong to both narrator and character, thus deserving to be called “double-voiced”? “Describing” is clearly not double-voiced at all; it can belong only to the narrator and not to Mr. Collins's discourse. The phrase it introduces is therefore tagged indirect speech, and very indirect at that (note, though, that Mr. Collins needlessly describes something flattering to himself to those who were there to observe it). “Protesting,” on the other hand, might be double-voiced, that is, part of Mr. Collins's discourse (“I protest, my dear Miss Bennet, that I do not in the least regard …”). Though the verb may seem more likely to belong to narrator than character, this phrase is possibly free indirect discourse (Mr. Collins protests too much, however). “Enumerating” is another single-voiced verb: the phrase it introduces is the narrator reporting through the medium of tagged indirect speech that Mr. Collins talked about food (again a perfectly unnecessary “enumeration,” given his audience, but food is another of his obsessions). “Fearing,” finally, is unmistakably part of Mr. Collins's actual discourse (therefore he “repeatedly” fears). “Fearing” is thus near the other end of the double-voiced spectrum, belonging entirely to the character and not at all (or only as her joke) to the narrator.

“Fearing,” however, is typical of Mr. Collins “repeatedly” drawing attention to himself and to how humble he is; that the main clause of his presumed utterance has himself and his mental condition for its topic (“I fear that …”) rather than his cousins' physical condition (“… that I crowd my cousins”) testifies to his self-absorption. To “fear” something is not to exert oneself to avoid it. In particular, though we cannot “know” that Mr. Collins's actual utterance (in the fabula) was “I fear that I crowd my cousins,” an utterance which fails to address his cousins—and the problem—directly, nonetheless, we presume (because free indirect discourse preserves questions) that his original utterance was not a question (“Am I crowding my cousins?” or perhaps, repeatedly, “Am I crowding you?”). A question would have implied a promise to rectify the situation, given an affirmative reply. Mr. Collins's free indirect discourse implies at most a wish to rectify the situation. Mr. Collins is all humility in the wish he expresses, all self-absorption in his actual behavior.

A brief recapitulation may be helpful here. The subject of double-voiced verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling has led us to begin considering how much of Austen's characterization and comment is conveyed by her telling choice of verbs and verbals of speaking, thinking, and feeling, whether such verbs occur in the actual discourse of a character, whether they form the narrator's tag introducing direct or indirect discourse, or whether they are the double-voiced verbs we have been examining in passages of free indirect discourse. I suggested above that absence of attribution is the essential feature of free indirect discourse: that is, we must look for markers other than inquits to be sure we are not reading the narrator's language and viewpoint. It is tempting to speculate that double-voiced verbs are frequent in Austen's novels, that is, that they apparently emerge as a literary device at about the time that free indirect discourse emerges into prominence (especially the free indirect discourse reporting whole sentences), because they continue to supply, though in a more dramatized form, the inquits that free indirect discourse omits.

Free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling has a special dimension of ambiguity and satire, however. This mode of discourse may first resemble the narrator's objective account of a character but may equally appear to be the character's subjective account of himself. The sentence of Mr. Collins's presumptive discourse that we have been examining (“I fear that I crowd my cousins”) is as typical of Austen's method of commenting by means of verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling as it is of Mr. Collins's style. Mr. Collins's discourse is full of such apparently superfluous introductory tags (“I fear that”), which subordinate the ostensible matter of his sentences to his own state of mind and whose verbs are then available to become double-voiced. To convince ourselves how easy it would be to turn Mr. Collins's speech into this sort of free indirect discourse, a narrative mode which might almost have been invented with him in mind, we need only look at an example of his speech which the novel renders in tagged direct discourse. In the following passage—both the first part in free indirect speech (embedded in indirect thought describing Elizabeth's “surprise”)²³ and the second part in direct speech—the verbs and verbals by which Mr. Collins refers to his own speech and thought are underlined:

[Elizabeth] was rather surprised to find that [Mr. Collins] entertained no scruple whatever on that head [accepting Mr. Bingley's invitation to the Netherfield ball], and was very far from dreading a rebuke either from the Archbishop, or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, by venturing to dance.

“I am by no means of opinion, I assure you,” said he, “that a ball of this kind, given by a young man of character, to respectable people, can have any evil tendency; and I am so far from objecting to dancing myself, that I shall hope to be honoured with the hands of all my fair cousins in the course of the evening, and I take this opportunity of soliciting yours, Miss Elizabeth, for the two first dances especially,—a preference which I trust my cousin Jane will attribute to the right cause, and not to any disrespect for her.”

(87)

As in our previous example, where we inferred what Mr. Collins “actually” said from the rendering of his speech in free indirect discourse, in the latter part of this passage too, where we see his speech directly, we find a profusion of superfluous verb phrases purporting to express his precise state of mind. Of the eight clauses of his speech rendered in direct discourse, we note that “I” is the subject of six, including every one of the independent clauses. Other nouns and pronouns are consequently relegated to relatively subordinate syntactic roles: Mr. Collins's “fair cousins” are introduced by the synecdochal “hands,” for example, and “my cousin Jane,” who is actually the subject of her own dependent clause, appears to be the object of Mr. Collins's interpolated “I trust” and must give precedence to his “preference.” We note also Mr. Collins's pedantic penchant for specifying to his listeners what he takes to be the exact degree to which he holds each of his opinions: “by no means of opinion” and “so far from objecting,” for example, and, from the first part of his reply to Elizabeth rendered in free indirect discourse, “no scruple whatever on that head” (with its reminder of sermon-making) and “very far from dreading.” Though such phrases promise information, they convey very little, other than Mr. Collins's endless self-absorption and the suspicion that he entertains no genuine self-examination on any head.

Let us examine one more example of Mr. Collins's direct discourse, again noting the many excuses Mr. Collins finds for referring to himself, but this time taking the liberty of editing his speech to see by one more means how much of his discourse is apparently superfluous:

“If I,” said Mr. Collins, “were so fortunate as to be able to sing [If I were able to sing], I should have great pleasure, I am sure, in obliging the company with an air [I should oblige the company with an air]; for I consider music as [for music is] a very innocent diversion, and perfectly compatible with the profession of a clergyman.—I do not mean however to assert that we can be justified in devoting too much of our time to music [We cannot, however, devote too much of our time to music], for there are certainly other things to be attended to. The rector of a parish has much to do.”

(101)

Since Mr. Collins begins this speech speculating aloud about his hypothetical (“If …”) state of mind (“… I”), a subject which can have little interest for his audience, his entire speech seems superfluous. We may begin to suspect that the purpose of Mr. Collins's discourse is very frequently to pronounce his own opinion, even when he is not asked for it, even when, as here, he was only one among “Others of the party … applied to” to entertain the company at the Netherfield ball (101). Mr. Collins's long and inappropriate homily on music and clerical duties becomes, ironically, his contribution to the entertainment of the assembled party—or at least to that of the satirical Mr. Bennet.

In Mr. Collins's readiness to volunteer his opinion, we see an imitation of Lady Catherine de Bourgh which may be the sincerest form of his flattery for his noble patroness. Not only does he always defer to Lady Catherine's opinions, but, as a snob who himself fills a position of authority, he lays down the law as much as she does, she from the eminence of her social and economic position, he from his clerical one. Mr. Collins's opinions are that clergymen may dance and sing, we have seen, and also that they must marry. Lady Catherine is Mr. Collins's authority on all these questions, especially the last: “Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject” (105). Like his patroness, Mr. Collins not only delights to give his opinion—“unasked too!”—he also, we have seen, habitually announces that he is giving an opinion: “I am by no means of opinion, I assure you …”; “I consider …”; “I do not mean however to assert. …” The effect is to draw attention to the pronouncement rather than to what his opinion is or how it was arrived at. The phrases Mr. Collins uses convey the illusion of someone who weighs his thoughts and arrives at judgments. Perhaps his studies at “one of the universities” (70) have taught him to adopt this tone. But the verbs of speaking and thinking associated with Mr. Collins all originate in his discourse and not with the narrator. Reported discourse always renders Mr. Collins's speech, never his thought. That is, Mr. Collins evidently renders his own thought (such as it is) in his speech, and we quickly learn to question the reliability of his report.

With Mr. Collins, free indirect discourse with double-voiced verbs of thinking consistently masquerades as thought but almost certainly renders speech. However we hypothesize a reader's probable response to such sentences—whether, for example, readers first interpret them as tagged indirect thought and only later as free indirect speech—in whatever order these two interpretations arise, and whatever probability we assign to each, the important points are, first, that the ambiguity remains undecidable, and, second, that the two interpretations clash satirically. In studying the consciousnesses created and the comments made on them in Austen's novels, we must also ask who renders each consciousness. In contrast to Mr. Collins's reporting his own consciousness, the narrator devotes many passages to sharing with Elizabeth the rendition of her thought—blending tagged indirect thought with the free indirect thought of whole sentences, often with double-voiced verbs—and we interpret such passages as sympathetic rather than satiric. The narrator honors Elizabeth, we feel, both by helping to report her thought and by trusting Elizabeth to articulate her own thought in the form of thought.

The verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling used to render Elizabeth's thought suggest active engagement in ongoing reflection, not, as with Mr. Collins, empty talk about thought that never occurred. Mr. Collins's obsession with his own opinions makes him a burlesque, because extreme, version of the efforts at self-knowledge we admire in Elizabeth. Though he has no genuine opinions of his own, his compulsion to express his borrowed opinions suggests a self-absorption and opinionatedness—suggests pride and prejudice, in short, rather than judgment and true self-awareness—which make Mr. Collins also Elizabeth's extreme opposite in the novel, a burlesque because a false version of the corrected judgment Elizabeth comes to represent.

IV. CHARACTERIZATION AND COMMENT BY VERBS OF SPEAKING, THINKING, AND FEELING

I have described in some detail in the case of Mr. Collins how Austen makes comic use of verbs of consciousness to characterize, both verbs from the character's own discourse and verbs chosen by Austen's narrator to report that discourse. To confirm that this kind of implied comment is frequently and deftly employed by Austen, we can briefly examine her treatment of several of the novel's other characters to see what we can learn about the quality of their thought from the verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling associated with them, and from whether those verbs are double-voiced.

We remember that only Mary, of all the Bennet sisters, “might have been prevailed upon to accept” a proposal from Mr. Collins (124). Although she believes he should be “encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as hers,” she nonetheless appreciates his ponderous worth: “there was a solidity in his reflections which often struck her” (124). Her unexpected interest in the prospect of a ball at Netherfield resembles Mr. Collins's unexpected willingness to dance:

[E]ven Mary could assure her family that she had no disinclination for it.

“… I think it no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening engagements. Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for everybody.”

(87)

Like Mr. Collins, Mary “can assure” and “has no disinclination for” (double-voiced verb phrases), “thinks,” “professes herself,” and “considers.” Cohn's two categories of quotation (see Note 9)—quoting satirically and quoting sympathetically—find their extremes in Mr. Bennet as contrasted with Mary and Mr. Collins. Mr. Bennet quotes the novel's other characters satirically. Mary, though we never learn from precisely which “great books” she laboriously “makes extracts” (7), cites her reading approvingly, as Mr. Collins echoes Lady Catherine, in order to moralize. If Mr. Bennet represents delight without instruction—two elements Austen's novels aim to combine—Mary and Mr. Collins represent instruction without delight. Mary's “observations of threadbare morality” (60) provide another burlesque—that is, an extreme (since unmediated by delight) and therefore a false version—of what Hough calls Austen's “language of judgement” (218).²⁴

The verbs associated with Mary's mother, on the other hand, suggest an absence rather than a parody of judgment. Double-voiced verbs of feeling rather than thought are prominent in the report of her discourse. Incapable of rational reflection, Mrs. Bennet indulges in imaginings and fears:

Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted. She could not imagine what business [Mr. Bingley] could have in town so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that he might be always flying about from one place to another, and never settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas quieted her fears a little by starting the idea of his being gone to London only to get a large party for the ball.

(9-10)

Mrs. Bennet's fears are noisy ones, “quieted” by Lady Lucas. The second sentence of this passage, in other words, is not tagged indirect thought but free indirect speech, with double-voiced verbs of feeling and of not-quite-thinking (“fear” and “imagine”). Like Mr. Collins, whose speech implies—unreliably—that he thinks, Mrs. Bennet wrongly attributes to herself genuine hopes and fears. That she is “disconcerted” (perhaps another double-voiced verb) by Mr. Bingley's sudden departure and cannot “imagine” any rational explanation for such odd behavior recalls Stuart Tave's dictum that “Characters in Jane Austen who find things odd are usually simple-minded types” (44). Mrs. Bennet is apparently such a simple-minded character, who speaks—and “imagines” and “fears”—rather than thinks.

Mrs. Bennet's discourse, like Lady Bertram's letters recounting her son Tom's illness in Mansfield Park, is a “medley of trusts, hopes, and fears, all following and producing each other at hap-hazard … a sort of playing at being frightened” (MP 427), a stylistic description whose verbals suggest Austen was fully conscious of using verbs of thinking and feeling in discourse to define character and establish moral worth. As Mr. Collins burlesques Elizabeth's thoughtfulness, Mrs. Bennet's verbs are a moral shorthand contrasting her burlesque and self-attributed romantic susceptibility with Jane's genuine sensibility, and with Jane's steadfast efforts to regulate it.²⁵ However, though Mrs. Bennet lacks Elizabeth's judgment as well as Jane's sensibility, she sometimes has common sense: there is something odd about Mr. Bingley's second and apparently permanent departure from Netherfield, and Mrs. Bennet's comfortable prediction “that Mr. Bingley must be down again in the summer” and her faith in romance and in Jane's good looks are vindicated when Mr. Bingley returns to Netherfield in September.

Examining the verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling associated with Mrs. Bennet, we see that, like Mr. Collins with his ostensible “thought,” it is Mrs. Bennet, not the narrator, who reports her “feelings.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Bennet is not the character in Pride and Prejudice lowest on the scale of true self-awareness. If, in our analysis of verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling, Mrs. Bennet represents lack of judgment, her youngest daughter Lydia suggests a nearly total absence of thought. What characterizes Lydia is “high animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence” (45; emphasis added), a “restless ecstacy” (230) and a “clamorous happiness” (235) that burlesque Elizabeth's sprightliness. And what typifies the narrator's depiction of Lydia is the extreme of external focalization: only her physical behavior and her speech are reported, usually in direct discourse, so, appropriately, double-voiced verbs cannot occur. The verbs that characterize Lydia have in any case nothing to do with judgment or sensibility; they are “talking” and, especially, “laughing”:

Lydia, in a voice rather louder than any other person's, was enumerating the various pleasures of the morning to any body who would hear her.

“Oh, Mary,” said she, “I wish you had gone with us, for we had such fun! … And then when we came away it was such fun! … I was ready to die of laughter. And then we were so merry all the way home! we talked and laughed so loud, that any body might have heard us ten miles off!”

(222)

We might be surprised to stumble upon a sustained internally focalized view of Lydia in the course of the novel, but in fact there is just one. In the following passage, Lydia's anticipation of a visit to Brighton is described by the narrator, but still without double-voiced verbs of thinking or feeling because Lydia never articulates her own inner life:

In Lydia's imagination, a visit to Brighton comprised every possibility of earthly happiness. She saw with the creative eye of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing place covered with officers. She saw herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them at present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp; its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.

(232)

Such are the verbs defining Lydia's inner life: “She saw. … She saw. … She saw … ; and … she saw. …” What Lydia sees are large numbers of indistinguishable objects: a network of streets, tens and scores of officers, lines of tents, crowds of the young and gay in dazzling scarlet—all grouped in constellations radiating outwards from herself. “[B]eauteous uniformity” reminds us that Wickham “wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming” in Kitty's and Lydia's eyes (72). The attraction of uniforms suggests that—like men who when young are “captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give” (236; Colonel Forster and, alas, Mr. Bennet are two examples in the novel)—young women who chase officers are attracted only by what they see and are unlikely to discriminate. Indeed, “never to be without partners” is all Lydia has “yet learnt to care for at a ball” (12), and Wickham is “by no means the only partner who could satisfy” her (87)—for dancing or for marriage.

Lydia's heedlessness, in thought and feeling, contrasts with Elizabeth's growing discrimination. While Lydia is daydreaming of breaking hearts in Brighton, Elizabeth has learned to judge the merits of Mr. Darcy and Lydia's worldly “angel” (291). To appreciate fully the paucity of verbs with which Lydia's inner life is rendered, we can contrast a passage two short paragraphs after Lydia's fantasy of Brighton, in which Elizabeth anticipates meeting Wickham for the last time before his regiment is transferred:

Having been frequently in company with him since her return [from Hunsford], agitation was pretty well over; the agitations of former partiality entirely so. She had even learnt to detect, in the very gentleness which had first delighted her, an affectation and a sameness to disgust and weary. In his present behaviour to herself, moreover, she had a fresh source of displeasure, for the inclination he soon testified of renewing those attentions which had marked the early part of their acquaintance, could only serve, after what had since passed, to provoke her. She lost all concern for him in finding herself thus selected as the object of such idle and frivolous gallantry; and while she steadily repressed it, could not but feel the reproof contained in his believing, that however long, and for whatever cause, his attentions had been withdrawn, her vanity would be gratified and her preference secured at any time by their renewal.

(233)

Contrasting with Lydia's vanity and undiscriminating flirtatiousness two paragraphs earlier is Elizabeth's realization that permitting Wickham's gallantry has deserved “reproof.” Instead of passively daydreaming of attention, here—“in finding herself thus selected as the object of” it—Elizabeth “steadily represse[s] it.” Without analyzing this passage in detail, we can note its rich variety of sentence structures, reflecting a discrimination that can recall gentleness which formerly delighted but now seems “an affectation and sameness” and gallantry which used to gratify but now appears “idle and frivolous.” To make the contrast with Lydia as clear as possible, however, one need only note the many verbs of thinking and feeling either stated or implied in this passage and how many of them connote mental activity rather than passivity: Elizabeth is no longer agitated, no longer partial; she has learned to detect; she is no longer delighted; she is disgusted and wearied and has a fresh source of displeasure; Wickham's behavior testifies to her, and she had earlier marked it; now she is provoked; she loses all concern; she finds herself selected; she steadily represses; she cannot but feel the reproof; she infers what Wickham believes; her vanity is no longer gratified, and her preference not secured. We sense that narrator and character share responsibility for this passage, even though—in fact especially because—it is primarily tagged rather than free indirect discourse and its verbs are primarily single-voiced: the narrator compliments Elizabeth by choosing this rich variety of verbs and sentence structures to report her thought processes.

In an earlier, even more instructive passage, a transition is made to dialogue from Elizabeth's thoughts (rendered by the narrator in a very typical alteration between free and tagged indirect thought):

It was generally evident whenever [Jane and Mr. Bingley] met, that he did admire her; and to her [Elizabeth] it was equally evident that Jane was yielding to the preference which she had begun to entertain for him from the first, and was in a way to be very much in love; but [Elizabeth] considered with pleasure that it was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane united with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and a uniform cheerfulness of manner, which would guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent. She mentioned this to her friend Miss Lucas.

“It may perhaps be pleasant,” replied Charlotte, “to be able to impose on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded.”

(21)

The substance of what Elizabeth “mention[s] … to her friend” is clear to us here because it has already been rendered in the form of Elizabeth's thoughts. But the economy of this transition from summary to scene is worth remarking. Moshe Ron notes that we do not infer that a single act or event is referred to when an instance of “knowing” is recounted in a narrative, though we do hypothesize such a single event for “perceiving” or “becoming known” (Ron 24). The above passage appears to open with a summary of knowledge Elizabeth has gained during several weeks of observing “the world in general” observing Mr. Bingley and Jane: “It was generally evident whenever they met, that. …” The second clause (“to her it was equally evident that …”) may contain a double-voiced verb of thinking (“to me it is evident that …”) and might thus be free indirect discourse (as might even the first clause): this is what a highly articulate character like Elizabeth could well say to herself in some single moment of thinking about Mr. Bingley and Jane. By the middle of the passage, we feel even surer that a specific moment of Elizabeth knowing that she knows is being evoked: although “She considered with pleasure” could describe repeated action (“Whenever she considered it, she felt pleasure”), it more probably describes a single though unspecified moment of reflection. Heroines often pause for such moments of reflection in Austen's novels.

Note, however, that the moment in which Elizabeth communicates those reflections to her friend, though clearly a single moment, is no more specified in time and place than our hypothetical moment of reflection. What interests Austen, in other words, is what Elizabeth thinks and says about Jane's prudence and what Charlotte replies about policy, not whether they think and say these things while walking in the shrubbery after drinking tea, nor whether Charlotte is blonde and Elizabeth brunette. Whatever is not thought or speech is excised from Austen's narrative here. Thus, the moment of thought and the moment of speech are given the same ontological status in this passage—as perhaps thought and speech have nearly the same status for Austen in general. The transition also suggests that thought and speech are nearly equivalent to her heroines. Preoccupied with her thoughts, Elizabeth takes an early opportunity—no further specification of that moment is necessary—to speak them to her friend.

The transition further implies that Elizabeth will articulate her thoughts accurately in speaking them to Charlotte. It guarantees this by its assumption that to articulate Elizabeth's spoken words is unnecessary since the words she thought are already known. The highly articulated rendition of Elizabeth's consciousness—for which Elizabeth and the narrator share responsibility—can stand for Elizabeth's later account of her own thought to Charlotte, an utterance which is described but not otherwise rendered by “She mentioned this to her friend.” Elizabeth's thought is already—at the level of thought—so highly articulated that Elizabeth is able to give the same articulate account of it to Charlotte as she gives to herself and as the narrator gives to us.

We are guaranteed not only that Elizabeth accurately articulates her own thoughts, however: we are also guaranteed that the narrator reports them accurately and sympathetically rather than satirically. We are guaranteed, in other words, that the blend of tagged and free indirect discourse, with double-voiced verbs, in which Elizabeth's thought is reported renders not merely the substance of her thought plus occasional snatches of language floating to the surface of her mind but also reflects how verbal Elizabeth's consciousness is. Chatman (“Narrative Transmission” 238) and Cohn (Transparent Minds 11) suggest that reported thought can seldom seem as mimetic as reported speech since it must often articulate what was originally unarticulated. Austen avoids this problem in the case of her heroines by the kind of thought she assigns them. She clearly views articulated consciousness as the highest form of thought, and she intends the above passage to render Elizabeth's thought as belonging to that highest kind.

At one point in Pride and Prejudice, Austen's narrator divides the circle of characters at Longbourn into “such as did think” and “such as did not” (348). With the above passages describing Elizabeth's thought before us, and with Lydia fresh in our minds as another extreme contrast to Elizabeth, we have a good idea of the range of consciousnesses Austen creates and how she comments on them by means of verbs of speaking, thinking, and feeling. We have also discovered, by close attention to double-voiced verbs, which consciousnesses are articulate and self-aware enough so that narrator and character share responsibility for rendering the character's thought as thought, or whether a character renders, in speaking, his or her own thoughts or feelings without the narrator's cooperation and endorsement.²⁶

Notes

1. For evidence that the product of the Bakhtin circle published as V. N. Volosinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was written substantially by M. M. Bakhtin, see Wehrle ix-xii. Bakhtin's “double-voiced utterances” and my own “double-voiced verbs” are convenient locutions in the context in which I shall use them but are not intended to exclude the possibility of multi-voicedness nor to ignore Bakhtin's interest in polyphony in the novel.

2. Since the following essay adheres to the double-voiced (and sometimes multi-voiced) interpretation of sentences of indirectly reported discourse, it opposes Banfield's “1 EXPRESSION/1 SELF” theory. Banfield insists that all expressive or evaluative elements in a sentence must originate with a single speaker or “SELF”—implying that narrators or characters cannot quote evaluative language and convey their own evaluation in the same sentence. I mention below other points of disagreement with Banfield. Banfield does, however, note that discourse parentheticals (roughly what I call inquits) can form part of represented speech or thought (what I call free indirect discourse) (Banfield 84). In this case, they might contain what I call double-voiced verbs. But Banfield's theory prevents her from reading such parentheticals as belonging potentially to both narrator and character.

3. Ginsburg rightly contends that free indirect discourse is not in general unambiguously attributable to a character. But sometimes, I suggest, free indirect discourse is intended to be read as filling the place of a character's utterance. Ginsburg calls for criticism showing how the “ambiguity and undecidability of FID” raise problems which are “central thematic preoccupations of the text” (146). I argue elsewhere (Neumann 63-78) that the absence of explicit attribution in free indirect discourse is particularly appropriate to a novel like Austen's, one of whose themes is gossip and prejudice. And I discuss below how the undecidability of free indirect discourse calls into question the articulateness and self-awareness of some of Austen's characters.

4. Chatman's terminology implies not only that reported discourse in its free and attributed forms differs only in the absence or presence of a tag, but also what direct as well as indirect discourse occurs free of attribution (Chatman cites examples of the former from Ulysses). He also emphasizes, in his “Structure of Narrative Transmission,” that “discourse features” may “combine in various ways” and that these features should be the subject of study rather than “homogeneous and fixed” categories: “Variety … is thus accounted for in terms of various mixtures of independent features, not by an endless proliferation of categories or a Procrustean reduction of instances into normative types” (233-34). This freedom of features to recombine, independent of rigid categories, is also noted in their criticism of Banfield's theory of reported discourse by Dillon and Kirchoff 432.

   We nevertheless do well, as Chatman recognizes, to analyze the modes of reported discourse into which discourse features frequently coalesce because those modes derive their effect from the constellation of their features, not from the sum of the effects of their features individually. Positing which elements of the set of frequently cohering linguistic features generally identified as free indirect discourse are most characteristic of it, we can describe a paradigm case of free indirect discourse without expecting all sentences close to the paradigm to match it in every feature. Our inability to delimit a concept unambiguously does not mean we cannot usefully employ that concept and identify all but borderline instances of it. If we are aware how borderline cases compare and contrast with the paradigm, and how any ambiguity in them may function thematically, it matters little whether we identify them as instances of the type or not.

5. Such a sentence might, if its content were attributable to a particular character rather than the narrator, be what Hough calls “coloured narrative”: not quoted discourse but narration colored by the point of view of a particular character, which coalesces into free indirect discourse, according to Hough, when it contains ipsissima verba (204-05). That is, in this “colored narration,” as I shall call it, it is a character who “sees”—whose point of view is reported—but the narrator who “speaks”—in whose voice that viewpoint is narrated. In passages of pure narration, the narrator both “sees” and “speaks,” and in directly quoted discourse, the character both “sees” and “speaks.” In free and tagged indirect discourse, on the other hand (the double-voiced modes), character and narrator “see” and “speak”—in concert or disharmony—in the same sentence. In Joyce's Voices, Hugh Kenner's “Uncle Charles principle”—after Stephen Dedalus's Uncle Charles whose actions are narrated in language he might choose if not language he actually uses (17-21)—designates passages in which the narrator's viewpoint is couched in an idiom borrowed from a character. It can thus cover the remaining case, in which the narrator “sees” while a character may be said to “speak.”

   Though in theory distinct, these narrative modes may in practice be indistinguishable. Who sees is not independent of who speaks. In separating style and point of view, we use “point of view” in a narrow sense: determined by content, not by the form in which the content is expressed. But point of view in a wider sense must comprise both what is seen and how it is spoken. In passages with separate sources of voice and viewpoint, the voice may import its own viewpoint and superimpose it on the content representing the first viewpoint. A clash between these two points of view can give rise to a third, authorial viewpoint which (as is usually the case in Joyce, for example) satirizes both the others.

6. By free indirect discourse I usually mean unattributed quotation of a character by a third-person narrator. On free indirect quotation of one character by another, however, see page 369 and note 13. And on free indirect discourse in first-person narration, see Stanzel (218-24). In untagged self-quotation, second-person pronouns—but not first-person pronouns—are shifted to the third person. In untagged quotation of another speaker by a first-person narrator or by a character, second- or third-person pronouns that refer to the quoting speaker are shifted to the first person.

7. As an instance of how discourse features recombine in practice, Austen sometimes uses quotation marks in sentences with every other feature of free indirect discourse: shifted tenses, third-person pronouns, and no inquit. See pages 371 and 375.

8. For many critics, including Pascal (9) and Fowler (102), here-and-now deixis typifies free indirect discourse. But critics disagree whether the absence of an embedding and attributing phrase is essential. Pascal argues that “‘free’ as it was originally used by [Charles] Bally, namely to indicate freedom from conjunctions [for example “that,” as in “He said that …”] and from introductory verb,” does not distinguish the device “in all circumstances and languages” (31). Fowler offers a typical example of free indirect discourse omitting the inquit (102), but a second example in a footnote retains it (102n). Dillon and Kirchoff note that

   Banfield deviates slightly from standard usage by classing stretches subordinate to a verb of saying or consciousness as FIS if the stretches bear the other marks of FIS. Usually FIS is restricted to non-embedded sentences (as for example in Jesperson, Ullmann, Fillmore, and Bronzwaer).

   (431n)

   Thus as Chatman and most others now use the appellation “free,” it means “free of attribution,” “untagged” by an inquit. This seems to me the most useful sense. In particular, only when we define free indirect discourse as indirectly quoted discourse minus any inquit, can we readily recognize that some apparent inquits could equally be quoted discourse rather than narration.

9. “Present-tense” deixis is only one of several means—albeit the most visible—by which free indirect discourse foregrounds quotation so readers can recognize it without other attribution. Thus “free indirect discourse” seems an appropriate name because the “directness” of here-and-now deixis is not an essential feature. On the other hand, because free indirect discourse does apparently retain any here-and-now deixis occurring in the quoted material and also independent-clause word order—and thus seems to lie between direct discourse and indirect discourse on the scale of most direct or mimetic to least—this narrative mode might better be called “free semi-direct discourse.” Matejka and Titunik translate Bakhtin's term for free indirect discourse as “quasi-direct discourse” (Bakhtin, “Discourse Typology” 141 ff.). Leo Spitzer proposed “halbdirekte Rede” (qtd. in Pascal 30). I suggest elsewhere, however, a taxonomy of indirect discourse according to the degree to which the “actual” words of the utterance reported seem either rendered exactly, or merely described, or both (Neumann 124-74). This taxonomy includes not only a variety of tagged indirect discourse which quotes or renders some of the “actual” utterance but also what I call a “highly rendered” variety which preserves much much of a speaker's “actual” or characteristic idiom, even, sometimes, here-and-now deixis. Thus, free indirect discourse could be viewed as a free version of highly rendered indirect discourse: at least, there exists a variety of indirect discourse which, with its inquit deleted, would resemble free indirect discourse. So Chatman seems justified that free and tagged indirect discourse differ theoretically only in the presence of a tag.

10. “Neutral” might be better than “sympathetic,” which is not meant to imply the narrator's endorsement but simply that the two voices do not clash. Cohn identifies as the “two divergent directions open to the narrated monologue” (Cohn's name for free indirect thought) the “lyric” and the “ironic,” “depending on which imitative tendency prevails,” either “fusion with the subject” or “distance from the subject, a mock identification that leads to caricature” (“Narrated Monologue” 111). McHale notes “a failure among stylisticians to push the analysis of irony and empathy in FID beyond merely naming these functions without specifying how FID actually gives rise to and sustains irony and empathy” (“Free Indirect Discourse” 275). I suggest one way free indirect discourse can be a vehicle for both irony and empathy when I show how the single device of the double-voiced verb—which mirrors how free indirect discourse itself functions—may or may not confuse the narrator's tagged indirect report of thought with whole-sentence free indirect speech, enabling the narrator either to share with the heroine in articulating her thought at the level of thought, or to satirize other characters who attribute thoughts and feelings to themselves in their speech without the narrator's cooperation and endorsement.

11. More recent close equivalents to fabula and sjužet include story and discourse (Chatman, Story and Discourse 19-20) and diegesis and narrative (Genette 25-27). Since this study uses the words discourse and narrative so frequently in other contexts, I retain the Russian Formalist terminology. Genette also employs a third term, narrating, to describe the producing narrative action and to answer the question “who speaks?,” and his focalization describes whose point of view orients the narrative perspective, or “who sees?” (Genette 27 and 186ff.). In Mieke Bal's extension of Genette's theory, the narrator presents the words that form the text while the focalizor presents the content of those words. Since “narrating” and “focalization” thus often resolve into questions of reported discourse, and since this study deals explicitly with reported discourse, these terms are also omitted here.

12. A sentence beginning “The rest of his letter is only about …” might, one could argue, be Mr. Bennet's tagged rather than free indirect quotation because Mr. Bennet attributes what follows to Mr. Collins, the referent of “his.” But this sentence has no inquit in the narrow sense, and it quotes without acknowledgment Mr. Collins's first letter, as well as describes his most recent one. So a case can be made that this sentence is indeed free. But should we perhaps view “olive-branch” as an example of Chatman's free direct discourse? Since Mr. Bennet not only mentions but also uses Mr. Collins's earlier locution, “olive-branch” would be assimilated to the grammar of Mr. Bennet's discourse were such assimilation necessary (as Mr. Collins's “my dear Charlotte's situation” has become Mr. Bennet's “his dear Charlotte's situation”). We may therefore conclude that this sentence is closest to free indirect discourse, or we may decide that in practice such distinctions are not only frequently impossible but also unnecessary.

13. The free indirect discourse that re-quotes language previously quoted directly is very common in Richardson, Burney, and Edgeworth, and therefore presumably recurs in other eighteenth-century fiction. Italics often identify this re-quoted material (as today italics distinguish “foreign” locutions). That is, when a character in an eighteenth-century novel quotes another character's previous remarks, italics function like modern quotation marks within quotation marks to identify quoted discourse for the novel's readers—though not, of course, for the novel's other characters who cannot “see” this attribution. We imagine they hear it however: this kind of quotation is typically satiric, and the italics suggest the vocal intonation by which the quoter identifies and distances the quoted material.

    Since satiric quotation is marked as quotation by the intonation of satire, it need not be explicitly attributed in order to be recognizable, suggesting that free indirect discourse—though not always satiric—may have originated in satire. And that characters in these novels quote without attribution in conversation—including the conversations recounted in the letters of Richardson's novels (that is to say, in imitations of communication within imitations of communication)—fully as much as narrators do in narration, strongly suggests that free indirect discourse may also have originated in everyday speech. This contradicts Banfield's central thesis that free indirect discourse is purely literary or written and cannot occur in communication or imitations of communication (239). Moreover, the convention of italics gives us a visible model of how the subjective and evaluative expressions of one character can be interwoven with the subjective and evaluative expressions of another, which supports a “dual-voice” theory as opposed to Banfield's “1 EXPRESSION/1 SELF” model of reported discourse. What Banfield sees as “problematic in the dual voice claim” is that the “second voice of the dual voice position is always the narrator's, never another character's” (188-89). But we do frequently find characters quoting other characters in free indirect speech (see Stanzel 222 for an example from (Clarissa). The way eighteenth-century characters quote without attribution suggests how we ought to read unattributed quotation by eighteenth-century narrators, and how we ought to read free indirect discourse in Austen and later novelists after the convention of italics has begun to disappear. (For an example in Pride and Prejudice retaining the italics of earlier novels, see PP 27 and 46, and Neumann 16-18.)

14. Readers can check DeRose's and McGuire's Austen Concordance for more examples of Lady Catherine's “condescension” in Mr. Collins's eyes (and see page 380 above) as well as to confirm that the only instances of “polluted” and “pollution” in Austen's novels are the two passages cited from Pride and Prejudice, making this latter instance of free indirect discourse even more certain to be quotation than the former.

15. As McHale remarks, context often has such a “disambiguating function.” However, “this is knowledge that [Banfield's] theory cannot capture or reflect” (“Unspeakable Sentences” 32-33). Banfield's failure to take context into account—I would add to McHale's criticism—also means that she cannot permit free indirect discourse to remain ambiguous; for her there must always be linguistic markers which signal it unambiguously to readers. McHale suggests Banfield is “groping” toward a “contextual component” (“Unspeakable Sentences” 34). But in fact her theory again and again forbids such a component, perhaps the strongest argument against it.

16. Pascal notes that “the self-assertive ‘I'” is omitted by this kind of free indirect discourse (51), which partly accounts for its flavor of indirectness.

17. Recall Bronzwaer's “more insightful” view of “the formal indications of FIS” than Banfield's “speaker-coherence model,” according to Dillon and Kirchoff 434. As Dillon and Kirchoff suggest, following Bronzwaer, “the narrator's and character's point of view may not always be in ‘functional contrast'—it is only when they are that it is important for the reader to distinguish them” (434). That is, it may sometimes not matter whether we attribute a given sentence of free indirect discourse to character or narrator. I would only add that it is important to distinguish when and with which characters this “functional contrast” occurs and when not.

18. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Bakhtin distinguishes two fundamental tendencies in indirectly reported discourse. “Referent-analyzing” indirect discourse transmits and comments on the content or reference of an utterance; Bakhtin implies that it usually transmits the whole of the utterance in question. “Textur-analyzing” indirect discourse, on the other hand, “incorporates … words and locutions that characterize the subjective and stylistic physiognomy of the message viewed as expression … in such a way that their specificity, their typicity are distinctly felt” (130-31). In Bakhtin's terms, whole-sentence, lyric free indirect discourse is referent-analyzing, and its markers occur in its reference: we recognize content more likely to belong to a character than to the narrator, or at least equally likely to belong to either. But satiric free indirect discourse is typically texture- no less than referent-analyzing, marked by form (diction or syntax) as well as by content.

19. If a sentence without attribution can plausibly be read as indirectly quoted discourse, then according to my definition it is free indirect discourse. That is, I call it free indirect discourse. I have begun to suggest, however, using Mr. Darcy's “profess,” one function in Austen's novels of the at least temporary ambiguity of free indirect discourse.

20. Adding “have” is the usual emendation of this passage, according to R. W. Chapman (PP 397), but Chapman's suggestion that we instead read this sentence as “What could be come of …” (thus, in the fabula, “What can be come of …”) does not change my reading of it as free indirect discourse.

21. Genette calls a narrative “internally focalized,” or “focalized through” a character, when it is focused through the consciousness of that character (189).

22. Indefinite free indirect discourse resembles how we suppose a narrator might articulate what a character does not articulate, which is also one function of Hough's colored narration (see note 5 above). I distinguish these two modes in theory by insisting that indefinite free indirect discourse is possibly reported discourse because it contains what could be ipsissima verba: it might quote what a character perhaps articulated. Since colored narration, on the other hand—narration about a character's viewpoint but in the usual narrative idiom—is not quoted discourse, it should not contain ipsissima verba. It narrates and therefore articulates what a character perhaps could—but may well not—articulate (compare Chatman's “free indirect perception” [Story and Discourse 204] and Cohn's “psycho-narration” [Transparent Minds 11-12 and 21 ff]). My suggested definition of free indirect discourse as unattributed ipsissima verba thus implies that free indirect discourse cannot report non-reflective consciousness, though the category I call indefinite free indirect discourse contains in practice many ambiguous examples. Note too how closely indefinite free indirect discourse may in practice resemble Kenner's Uncle Charles Principle.

23. Does the narrator quote Elizabeth's thoughts and quote Mr. Collins's speech, or quote Elizabeth who quotes Mr. Collins to herself? These possibilities (see note 17) are not in “functional contrast.”

24. Samuel Johnson, for one, notes in Rambler 14 that authors both “improve” and “delight” their readers (78). Mary's and Mr. Collins's moralizing suggests that quoting—by analogy with John R. Searle's analysis of promising—may be defective or infelicitous if the quoter implicitly endorses what is quoted but does not sincerely intend to act on it. Mr. Bennet satirizes defectively if we assume that satire implies a promise not to act on what one quotes satirically (though satire, unlike moralizing, may imply no such promise). I suggest elsewhere (Neumann 235) that Elizabeth learns to combine delight with instruction by the end of the novel. She not only quotes the novel's other characters to her friends in order to satirize them; she also quotes them to herself to test her memory and judgment.

25. The romance-reading heroine of Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) is “filled with the most extravagant Expectations, … alarmed by every trifling Incident; and kept in a continual Anxiety by a Vicissitude of Hopes, Fears, Wishes, and Disappointments” (1: 6). In 1807, Austen reread this novel with “very high” amusement: “I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it” Letters 173). In Mrs. Bennet's discourse too, the language of “trusts, hopes, and fears” represents what Austen described to one of her novel-writing nieces as “novel slang” (Letters 404): Mrs. Bennet flatters herself by quoting the literary heroines of her youth to attribute their romantic sensibility to herself.

26. I wish to thank Ann Banfield and Seymour Chatman for helpful conversations. And, to Avrom Fleishman and Jerome Christensen, I owe “gratitude and esteem” (PP 279).

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