Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

9.4 Language and social structure in the novel
Unit 9 Language and society
Section 2 Language variation

The novel is a literary genre that is more overtly ’social’ than poetry (or even drama). This is partly to do with its form, because it includes a range of different voices rather than the single consciousness often present in poetry. The social status of the novel is also partly to do with the themes it was used to treat in the nineteenth century, typically the tensions between different classes. Also it is partly to do with its origins as a means of representing the rising middle classes in the eighteenth century.

The nineteenth-century ’realist’ novel in Britain often dramatizes the (usually fraught) relations between three classes - the upper class, the middle class and the working class. These distinctions and struggles are typically registered through a sociology of language as well as in themes, characters and plots. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1), for example, explores these issues through having a character (the narrator Pip) cross the boundaries of social class. Pip is brought up in a working-class household by his sister and her husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith with whom he develops strong ties in the first third of the novel. Through the support of a mysterious benefactor, however, Pip becomes a ’gentleman’, takes rooms in London, and begins to regard his humble past as an embarrassment. Thus when he receives word that Joe intends to visit him in London, Pip anticipates meeting his old friend ’with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity’:

As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but . . . presently I heard Joe on the staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of coming up-stairs - his state boots being always too big for him - and by the time it took him to read the names on the other floors in the course of his ascent. When at last he stopped outside our door, I could hear his finger tracing over the painted letters of my name . . . Finally he gave a faint single rap, and Pepper . . . announced ’Mr Gargery!’ I thought he never would have done wiping his feet . . . but at last he came in.

’Joe, how are you, Joe?’

’Pip, how AIR you, Pip?’ ...

’I am glad to see you, Joe. Give me your hat.’

But Joe . . . wouldn’t hear of parting with that piece of property, and persisted in standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.

’Which you have that growed,’ said Joe, ’and that swelled, and that gentle-folked’; Joe considered a little before he discovered this word; ’as to be sure you are a honour to your king and country.’

’And you, Joe, look wonderfully well.’

(Chapter 27)

Dickens uses a number of devices here to indicate the social distance that has arisen between these characters. He registers Joe’s uneasiness through the way he wipes his feet and holds his hat, and also registers Pip’s equally revealing attention to these details; but the social difference between Pip and Joe is also indicated by their language: not only their different kinds of language but also their different relations to language. Joe’s difficulty with the written language is foregrounded through Pip’s acute consciousness of his ponderous attempts to read the names on the doors, but more to the point here is the way Joe speaks. While Pip conceals his unease behind the register (see Unit 7) of polite affability, Joe precisely reveals his sense of awkwardness in echoing Pip. In attempting to imitate his young friend’s speech, Joe hypercorrects his own accent by revealingly overdoing the ’proper’ pronunciation of ’are’ (as ’AIR’). Joe quickly ’forgets himself’ by ’lapsing’ into his normal accent in what we may take as a flood of genuine feeling and admiration. Pip, by contrast, continues in a polite register, which signals his inability to respond to his old friend and maintains the social stratification through language that this passage dramatizes.

In the twentieth-century novel, such sociolinguistic stratifications are often challenged or undermined. D.H. Lawrence’s fiction typically attempts to reverse the kind of hierarchy set up in the Dickens passage above. This can be seen in several places in Lady Chatterley’s Lover(1928), including the following exchange between Lady Chatterley and her lover (who is a gamekeeper on her estate):

’Tha mun come one naight ter th’cottage, afore tha goos; sholl ter?’ he asked, lifting his eyebrows as he looked at her, his hands dangling between his knees.

’Sholl ter?’ she echoed, teasing.

He smiled.

’Ay, sholl ter?’ he repeated.

’Ay!’ she said, imitating the dialect sound.

...

’’Appen Sunday,’ she said.

’’Appen a’ Sunday! Ay!’

He laughed at her quickly.

’Nay, tha canna,’ he protested.

’Why canna I?’ she said.

He laughed. Her attempts at the dialect were so ludicrous, somehow.

(Chapter 12)

On one level, this presents a tender scene between the two lovers in which the social difference in their ways of speaking becomes material for a lovers’ game. At the same time, however, the social significance of this difference cannot be overlooked. At several points in the novel, Mellors, the gamekeeper, uses the fact that he can move at will between one way of speaking and the other as a weapon in a class war against the upper-class family that employs him. Lady Chatterley’s attempt to imitate the dialect of a ’lower’ social class (which reverses the situation in Great Expectations examined above) can be read as a bid to escape from the restrictions of her own class. This is reinforced by the fact that the gamekeeper’s dialect is treated throughout the novel as if it were the authentic expression of desire in contrast to the coldly mental, sexless language of the upper classes. In this respect, Lady Chatterley’s imitation of her gamekeeper’s dialect - which is an amusing failure in Mellors’s eyes - becomes symptomatic of a wider failure in the novel’s terms to achieve an authentic modality for the enactment of desire across the divide of social class. (For a fuller discussion of accent and dialect, see Unit 6, Language and place.)