Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel

While the representation of different voices in Bleak House apparently follows some rule other than the traditional one of standard for higher and non-standard for lower classes, it is clear both that different ways of speaking play a crucial part in the novel and that in this novel, as in Wuthering Heights, there is an intentional fixing of the characters' speech styles into a fictolinguistic pattern. The establishment and maintenance of distinct styles of speaking in this novel appear to accomplish two narrative tasks: first, practically speaking, the persistence of the voices in the long and complicated double narratives helps to make the novel a unified whole. Secondly, in Bleak House, as in Wuthering Heights, the different voices trace the important divisions among the characters. But where Bronte minimizes language differences among central characters, Dickens emphasizes them. The speech styles in Bleak House construct and reinforce boundaries between characters that are also established by their different situations in life. The importance of this establishing and maintaining of visible distinctions among the characters becomes clear when we recognize that the plot moves to reveal connections among characters who are presumably unaware they have anything in common. While plot draws characters together, so does narration; the frequent use of an indirect style of narrating speech, a style that makes the narration a point of intersection for the characters' various language styles, provides a symbolic site of connection.

In Bleak House, as in Wuthering Heights, we see consistency in the representation of characters' dialects in different narrators' accounts. Jo, for instance, speaks of knowing "nothink" in both Esther's narration and that of the third-person narrator (cf. 204, 251). The representation of Sir Leicester Dedlock's speech also remains constant, and artificially so, it seems, when, in the final chapters, an illness renders him almost unable to speak at all. When he does insist on speaking, the narrator explains that he speaks "[i]n a thick crowd of sounds, but still intelligibly enough to be understood" - and then quotes his speech in absolutely standard English: "'Why did you not tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?'" (736). The precision of Sir Leicester's speech even when he is incapacitated contrasts strongly with the consistently slurred speech of his healthy but indolent cousin, and suggests that the function of dialect in Bleak House is not simply to present realistically the various sounds of different ways of speaking, but to establish characters in a metanarrative system.

While the characters' stable and distinct styles of speaking establish their differences and distances from one another, the language of the narrator becomes a central point of incorporation, an incorporation that echoes the connecting of characters through the plot. Dickens's liberal use of narrated or indirect speech brings the languages of the different characters together. The indirect representation of speech occurs when the narrator tells the reader what has been or is being said, and involves a shift in verb tense and pronouns and elimination of quotation marks (She said that she was going is the indirect form of She said, "I am going"). The following scene, from Esther's narrative, shows how this technique works: