Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma

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Jane Austen is generally acknowledged to be the first English novelist to make sustained use of free indirect discourse in the representation of figurai speech and thought.1 Unfortunately, however, the theory of free indirect discourse (FID) in Eng lish has not been congenial to Austen's work, often obscuring the way the technique functions in her novels.2 Two theoretical tendencies, in particular, have contributed to this confusion. First, the most influential accounts of FID in English have tended to stress the autonomy of FID representations of speech and thought and to contrast them with authoritative narrative commentary: FID is, on this account, the preemi nent technique of objective narration, in which the narrator supposedly withdraws or disappears in favor of impersonal figurai representation.3 Second, FID has often been characterized as innately disruptive and destabilizing?a technique that allows other voices to compete with and so undermine the monologic authority of the nar rator or the implied author.4 Whatever their relevance to later fiction, these character izations of FID are inadequate and misleading when applied to Austen's novels, which deploy FID in conjunction with a trustworthy, authoritative narrative voice and which repeatedly intertwine FID with narratorial commentary, sometimes inside of a single sentence. Indeed, much of the aesthetic pleasure in Austen's FID passages comes from subtle modulations among narrative registers, as the prose moves in and out of a complex array of voices, including that of the narrator herself. In this essay, I will examine Austen's use of FID in a series of passages from Emma, emphasizing the narrator's role in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of Austen's practice than has been available in criticism influenced by the prevailing theoretical accounts. In Emma, I will argue, FID is best seen not as a representation of autonomous figurai discourse but as a kind of narratorial mimicry, analogous to the flexible imitations of