Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of the Will in Two Novels by William Godwin

In his discussion of emma (1815) in jane austen; or, the secret of Style, D. A. Miller draws our attention to an essential quality of free indirect discourse. By focusing on a single sentence repeated before and after the chapter break of volume 2, chapters 2 and 3—“She could not forgive her”¹—Miller observes that the repetition of this sentence allows us to see the two ways in which it may be read: as “the indirect and impersonal performance of Emma’s consciousness” and as “the mere matter-of-fact notation of that thought.”² It is able to “perform” what Emma would think about Jane Fairfax, in the sense that she might say “I cannot forgive her,” and is also able to denote a fact about Emma’s state of mind as part of a third-person omniscient narrative. This is possible because the sentence emulates the character’s “direct speech” without leaving the perspective of the narrator, and so it can also be read as the narrator’s simple description of the character’s mind or plain “indirect speech.”³ Miller’s observation draws from standard accounts of narrative perspective in Emma; as Wayne C. Booth has written, there is a “double vision that operates throughout the book: our inside view of Emma’s worth and our objective view of her great faults.”⁴ In its “double vision,” or what Roy Pascal later called “the dual voice,”⁵ free indirect discourse then stands out as a privileged strategy in allowing us momentarily to embody the protagonist’s consciousness as well as stand apart from it and judge it.

However, there is an added dimension to this sentence from Emma that has received less attention in standard accounts of free indirect discourse. This becomes apparent when we focus in closer detail on the words “She could not,” and the difference in meaning they convey when considered from an “inside” and from an “outside” perspective. These words attract our attention because they express something peculiar about Emma’s volition and her capacity to exert herself: when we read them as vocalized by Emma herself on the one hand and as third-person matter-of-fact notation on the other, we simultaneously register two very different conceptions of the will.

This becomes clearer when we consider a separate but similar example from Emma. Here, immediately before Emma lets loose her infamous unkind remark to Miss Bates in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Weston, Mr. and Mrs. Elton, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, and Mr. Knightley, we are given a paragraph break comprising a single sentence: “Emma could not resist.”⁶ Unlike the previous example, this sentence is not delivered in the midst of a narrator’s discussion of Emma’s train of thought, but rather in an extended quoted conversation. For this reason, we are not likely to read it as free indirect discourse, but strictly as a notation of Emma’s mind. Yet if we pause over the sentence, we can recognize that it can also be read, like “She could not forgive her,” in two different ways: as a “performance of Emma’s consciousness” and as a “matter-of-fact notation of the thought,” and the difference is significant. If we read the sentence as a mere notation, we understand Emma as being sincerely unable to act any differently, taking the words “could not” literally: it was not within the range of available possibilities for her mental capacity at that point and time. Alternatively, when we read the sentence as a “performance of her consciousness,” we discover quite the opposite: if “I cannot resist” were a sentence spoken privately in Emma’s mind, we would understand instantly that Emma can resist. It is as though one were to say in passing, “I cannot resist having one more chocolate,” meaning something more like “it is very hard for me to resist”: the implication would be exactly that “I can resist,” with the added qualifier that I say I cannot resist so as to...