How do novels hang together? Characterization as registerial meta-stability
AbstractHow does a novel like Middlemarch cohere, since it is made up of at least two very different kinds of text, narrative on the one hand and dialogue on the other? In this paper, we look to two authorities: to literature, where authors seem to agree that it is consistency in voice that holds both narrators and characters together, and to linguistics, where a computerized corpus allows us to measure variation between and within characters. Where previous researchers found unsystematic variations, we find meta-stability: characters remain true to themselves only through variation. The way in which Dorothea addresses her future husband differs from the way she addresses her little sister in Chapter Five of Middlemarch but this is in turn a special case of differences between the way in which Dorothea addresses men and the way in which she addresses women. Such a difference serves to symbolically articulate a key theme of Eliot’s novel – the middle ground that every woman must occupy in the march from the world of our forefathers through that of our husbands to that of our children.