Letters are a significant mode of transferring information in Austen\u2019s novels.\u00a0 Although characters more often gossip through face-to-face speech, letters allow them to correspond with people in other locations as well as with those in Highbury.\u00a0 Some letters arrive in Highbury from outside, bringing news from faraway places, such as the actions and wellbeing of Frank Churchill or Jane Fairfax.\u00a0 Others are more insular, bringing important news to members of the community, like Mr. Martin\u2019s proposal to Harriet Smith.\u00a0 The delivery of a letter draws attention to its contents in a way that speech does not allow, and a letter allows the writer to provide a more thorough explanation of their thoughts than they could aloud.\u00a0 Additionally, letters introduce a physical network to our understanding of gossip in the form of the postal service.\u00a0 Although barely visible in the novels, the delivery of letters relies on a postal system to move letters from the source to the destination.\u00a0 This hidden physical network is essential to the delivery of letters, even if we do not see it explicitly in the book.\u00a0 Without the postal system, the circulation of information within and to Highbury as we see it would be impossible.<\/p>\n
Although apparently a physical medium, letters often blur the lines between physical and oral.\u00a0 Although one might generally assume that one person writes a letter and sends it to another, characters often share the contents of letters with one another, even reading their letters aloud.\u00a0 For example, Miss Bates delights in sharing the contents of her letters from Jane Fairfax with the whole of Highbury.\u00a0 Jane\u2019s letters, though addressed to Miss Bates, surely are not only meant for her eyes.\u00a0 We may suppose that Jane knows the extent to which her aunt likes to gossip and ensures that the contents of her letters are such that having them shared would be no great embarrassment.\u00a0 Further, the contents of a letter may make it unclear exactly for whom it is intended.\u00a0 When Mr. Elton delivers his written \u201ccharade\u201d to Hartfield, he intends to direct it to Emma.\u00a0 However, she believes that he is courting her friend Harriet Smith and delivers the charade to her instead.\u00a0 Because the charade, which we might think of as a type of letter, is addressed only to the ambiguous \u201cMiss \u2013 \u201d, Emma is left to interpret it as she chooses, and she does so incorrectly.<\/p>\n
Further, characters often share information they gain through letters aloud, mixing communication through letter with verbal communication.\u00a0 Some letters we receive in their entirety, like Mr. Elton\u2019s charade.\u00a0 Others we receive exclusively through speech or description.\u00a0 Mr. Churchill\u2019s letters home, for instance, never appear in the text, but Mr. and Mrs. Weston are more than happy to share the general messages within them.\u00a0 In fact, for a large part of their lives, the only way that Highbury hears about Jane Fairfax or Frank Churchill is through letters.\u00a0 Letters, then, are intrinsically linked to speech.\u00a0 The written words of one character end up in the hands of another and percolate throughout the town through conversation. In one particular occasion, Emma, the Westons, and the Knightleys discuss the quality of Mr. Churchill\u2019s handwriting, but Mrs. Weston is unable to produce a sample as she does not have one of his letters with her.\u00a0 In this case, the contents of the letter are far less important than its physical aspects.\u00a0 The characters have presumably seen and read at least one of Mr. Churchill\u2019s letters, but the physicality is more notable than any news it may contain.<\/p>\n
Early in the project, I intended to much more closely consider the role of letters in Emma<\/em>.\u00a0 I hoped to incorporate them in the graph in some way and study the role of physical communication in the network of the novel as a whole.\u00a0 However, I eventually abandoned this idea due to time constraints and the richness of information available in the dialogue-based graphs.\u00a0 Letters certainly play a significant role in the gossip of Highbury, as discussed above, and this would be a promising avenue of study for future work.\u00a0 Although I did not examine the role of letters as explicitly as I had hoped, they are relevant to both of the individual chapters of focus.<\/p>\n Scholars have previously drawn a connection between gossip and free indirect discourse, and I initially intended to draw such a connection in my own project.\u00a0 As Finch and Bowen write:<\/p>\n \u201cThe very force of free indirect style is the force of gossip. Both function as forms par excellence of surveillance, and both serve ultimately to locate the subject \u2013 characterological or political \u2013 within a seemingly benign but ultimately coercive narrative or social matrix. It is no coincidence that the first great novelist of gossip should also be the first great technician of the free indirect style.\u201d (Finch, 3-4)<\/p>\n According to Finch and Bowen, free indirect discourse is parallel to gossip in that it makes the private public.\u00a0 Just as gossip displaces its authority throughout the community, so does free indirect discourse conceal its source.\u00a0 Austen uses free indirect discourse to make the private known, to share with us the interiority of her characters.\u00a0 Additionally, because of gossip, \u201cthere is nothing, however seemingly private, that is not somehow already illuminated by the normalizing light of public scrutiny,\u201d (Finch, 2).\u00a0 Free indirect discourse simultaneously shares with us the minds of the characters while also obscuring the truth.\u00a0 For much of the novel, we are too entrenched in Emma\u2019s perspective to fully see what is happening around her.\u00a0 Just as Emma is blind to the desires of her friends, so are we.\u00a0 For instance, Austen hints at the hidden relationship between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, but we are too entrenched in Emma\u2019s perspective to see those signs.\u00a0 Free indirect discourse, then, is intrinsically linked with gossip in its ability to simultaneously share the truth and obscure it.\u00a0 When the study of free indirect discourse was a more prominent part of my project, I found the project Austen Said<\/a>, which visualizes the occurrences of free indirect discourse in Austen\u2019s novels by certainty.\u00a0 Although I did not end up working with free indirect discourse, I did use their XML documentation of Emma<\/em> as the basis for my own work with the novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Letters Letters are a significant mode of transferring information in Austen\u2019s novels.\u00a0 Although characters more often gossip through face-to-face speech, letters allow them to correspond with people in other locations as well as with those in Highbury.\u00a0 Some letters arrive in Highbury from outside, bringing news from faraway places, such as the actions and wellbeing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":712,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-digital-computational-studies","category-jane-austen","tag-jane-austen-project","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/digital-computational-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Free Indirect Discourse<\/h4>\n