IF GEORGE i8^os when eliot she did began not writing have access novels, to sound she was recording nevertheless technologies a key in i8^o when she began writing n vels, she as nevert less a key vo e in a culture that had begun to theorize aural experience in anticipation of mechanical recording, reproduction, and commodification of sound in late nineteenth century. As John Picker notes in Victorian Soundscapes, recognized advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of capacity for (83). Nineteenth-century research on physiology of hearing, often filtered through a Romantic privileging of audition as supreme mode of knowing, informed invention of a range of sound machines that could amplify and reproduce sound in ways that made people rethink everyday communication. Such shifts began long before first phonographs hit market. Scholars working in periods before advent of recorded sound have accordingly begun to ask how we might approach histories of sound, voice, and audition in and through print archive. To do so requires an expansion of our definition of sonic media beyond machines and their functions, to relations between people, practices, and technologies that were available in a given time and place for experiencing sound (Sterne 223). In Victorian literary studies, we may thus look to novels as sound technologies that foreshadowed later ones, such as telephone, as Picker has shown in his reading of Daniel Deronda. Yet even one of Eliot's earliest novels, Adam Bede, was already doing cultural work of articulating desire for a sound recording device that could faithfully or accurately represent sound of human voice. By listening to her characters and their sonic environments with such care, by staging aural experience with such precision, and by exploring the lingering presence of human voice (Picker 12) in a culture increasingly organized by silent reading of print, Eliot and her reading /listening audiences helped invent desire for a sonic realism, one that seemed to find its fulfillment in sound-recording machines several decades later. More precisely, as I will argue through this reading of Adam Bede, Eliot's novel repeatedly dramatizes a disconnection between language and sound and does so in a way that occasionally privileges sound of speech over its verbal content.1 For Eliot, everyday sound, especially vocal sound, is meaning itself, rather than a passive conduit of speech. Adam Bede, like all of Eliot's novels, imagines everyday life in sonic register, yet this feature of Eliot's first full-length novel has rarely been discussed.2
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