Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel

He loved her; ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years after the event? That would depend on whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness. (153)

Both of these passages are apparently in free indirect style. Though there is no "s/he thought" explicitly stated, there are phrases that seem almost certainly taken verbatim from the characters' minds and transformed into indirect style ("He marry me!" and "Dare I to marry her?" for instance). In both passages, moreover, the characters' own words seem to be mingled with words and phrases from a complex narrative idiom ("unusual in the circumstances," "unaccountable," and "germs of staunch comradeship," "substratum of everlastingness") that includes a form of English more formal than either of the characters' own "spoken" standard English.

In this novel, Hardy's representation of an exchange of language styles from standard to dialect and dialect to standard and his assertion of a fictolinguistic realm in which the central figures (Tess, Angel, and the narrator) all cross language boundaries are consistent with his lifelong resistance to the strict division of British language styles into standard and dialect. In his personal papers, Hardy writes, with scornful reference to standard English, that dialect is "intrinsically as genuine, grammatical, and worthy of the royal title as is the all-prevailing competitor which bears it" (qtd. in Taylor 160). Dennis Taylor argues, moreover, that, "while also developing its expressiveness," Hardy uses the English language in his novels and poetry "to challenge the standard language from within." While Taylor suggests that this resistance accounts for the "awkward" style of the narrative language in Hardy's novels, it also can be seen in Tess's ficto-linguistic system, a system that includes Tess's dialect, but that, like all ficto-linguistic systems, is only coherent and recognizable when the languages of the other characters and the narrator are considered as well.

Abandoning the initial project of identifying dialect speech with emotionality and the historical past, Hardy revised Tess of the d'Urbervilles to project through its ficto-linguistics the possibility that various styles of speaking can persist, that dialect as well as standard vocabulary can be learned, and that there is reason to question the Victorian assumption that standard English will supersede dialect. Existing alongside real sociolinguistic systems, the ficto-linguistic system of the novel subtly critiques conventional expectations and distinctions. Even in the revision of the narrative explanation for Tess's variable language, Hardy provides evidence of his developing conception of the meaning of the dialect in his novel. When Hardy changed the explanation of Tess's use of dialect and standard English from an emotional to a social one, he also changed the description of her mother's speech from "Mrs. Durbeyfield still habitually spoke the dialect," to "Mrs. Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect" - a small but significant change away from "still," with its implication that the shift to standard English is inevitable, to the suggestion that Mrs. Durbeyfield simply speaks the dialect, and its implication that she and others might continue indefinitely to speak it. While a reading of Tess's language alone might suggest that this novel presents a typical narrative of standard English supplanting dialect, a wider reading of the presentation of language in the novel reveals a subtle but persistent attack on the dominance of standard English through a fictolinguistic patterning of speech.