My portion of the novel presentation on Emma today will focus on Austen's narrative technique. What I love about this novel is that we seem to get a lot of opinions - there is no one person we turn to for all of our information. I see the marked difference in the narrative style from say, Richardson or Fielding. So, why is that? What made Austen different?
I discovered the answer through the course of my research for my presentation, where I came across a familiar term - free indirect style. I am familiar with the term from my many literature classes, as it is a style that frequently appears. However, one article in particular connected free indirect style to our current studies particularly well. The essay, written by Casey Finch and Peter Bowen (it is on my works cited page that you'll receive tonight, for those of you who are interested), discusses the idea of gossip as a narrative technique in Emma. What is most interesting, and helpful, I think, is their discussion of how Austen and her style fit into Watt's definitions of narrators. If you think about it, from the works that we've read thus far, there are two types: 1) Author is formall absent and there is a focus on the psychological condition of the subject (as seen in Defoe and Richardson) and 2) Realistic, external approach, where there is an intrusive, omnicient narrator (Fielding). Austen does not cleanly fit into either of these. Rather, she combines elements of both to incorporate the free indirect style. As a result, we, as her readers, get not only the psychological closeness to the subjective world, but we also have editorial comment as well. The best of both worlds? Regardless, I think this is a perfect example for what we've been trying to do all along this semester --- that is, trace the development of the novel. Here, Austen plays with the two narrative techniques that were frequently present in the eighteenth-century and creates a unique form that is used beyond her day. It can be seen throughout Emma that she used her predecessors' techniques, but made them her own. That, in and of itself, is what makes literature (and tracing its development) so fascinating!
Monday, April 30, 2007
The Narrator's Importance
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Excellent post, Laura! I'm glad you used your presentation as a foundation for this post, especially because your interest in the narrative style is something that we definitely needed to talk about with Austen. Grace, some comments past, also mentioned the narrator's "presence" in the novel, describing the novel as a whole as something that feels more "modern" to contemporary readers. While I do think that the narrator gives us some hints as to how we're to see the world of Highbury, I don't think the narrator explicitly tells us--we might fruitfully read our ability to read and interpret the narrator's voice as itself a function of the modern novel, with telling implications for our development as readers (in a very large sense). It's difficult to pin down free indirect style, but somehow we do--or think we do. Yet, it seems so "natural," so "normal" that we often don't stop to consider the nuances of the narrator's actual words and voice. Might this be a commentary on Austen's cultural authority? How might Austen have responded, based on what we've got before us--Emma?
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