In this chapter I argue that the linguistic concept of stance can help us to analyse how fictional texts represent attitudes to non-standard language, and invite readers to align themselves with these attitudes. When stance is attended to, the complexities inherent in the ways in which novels engage with non-standard voices begin to become apparent. What also becomes apparent is that, while the dominant tendency of fiction during the past 200 years may be towards endorsing prescriptive attitudes, there is also a significant counter-strand which assigns positive values to non-standard language and presents at least some resistance towards prescriptive attitudes. After outlining my approach to the analysis of stance, I consider two examples from early 19th-century novels, Miriam (1800) and Domestic Scenes (1820), before focusing in more detail on a mid-20th-century novel, Georgette Heyer’s The Unknown Ajax (1959). This novel, I argue, demonstrates quite how complex stance can be in relation to the representation of non-standard language as it purposefully creates space for the Darracott family – and, by extension, the reader – to adopt two entirely different understandings of the Yorkshire accent of its central character. The novel thus constitutes an instructive meta-commentary on the ways in which fiction makes use of non-standard language, and its implications for the circulation of prescriptive attitudes. (103)
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Any representation of non-standard speech is thus an act of stancetaking: the writer has chosen to mark the language as non-standard, and by doing so invites the reader to draw inferences about character, intelligence, education, and so on. (106-107)
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The fact that Hugo’s direct speech is consistently if lightly marked with Yorkshire features underpins the depiction of him as not very bright or well-educated. He uses a number of strongly enregistered Yorkshire features, including the discourse markers ‘ay’ and ‘eh’, the non-standard negative ‘nobbut’, non-standard intensifiers ‘reetly’ and ‘mortal’, the vocabulary item ‘lad’, the generic ‘in clover’ and the slangy ‘frogs’ for ‘French’. These features are not the subject of explicit metalinguistic commentary in the scene, but [...] the author/narrator assumes that the reader will be able to interpret the representation as indicating that his speech is markedly different from that of his newly acquired family. Hugo’s family are expecting to see an ill-educated ‘weaver’s brat’, who is overawed by his unexpected inheritance and willing to dance attendance on the crusty paternal grandfather who holds the family purse-strings. The implicit metalanguage offered by the way in which his speech is represented chimes in with this view.
Some 60 pages later, and after the dinner party, his Uncle Matthew expresses the shared view that ‘he seems to me little better than a dummy!’ (Heyer, 2005: 139). (111)
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Aunt Aurelia, by contrast, singles out Hugo’s ‘atrocious brogue’, situating it as a conscious response to the hostile attitudes expressed towards him by his family. (112)
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There are in fact two audiences for Hugo’s misleading accent, because just as Hugo attempts to trick his family into misreading him, so too, I would argue, does Heyer attempt to trick her readers, first inviting them to align with the Darracotts in adopting a stance of prescriptive sociability, and then inviting them to switch allegiances to Hugo and adopt a stance of dialect-endorsing sociability. I suspect that the point at which the reader becomes aware of quite how different Hugo is from the initial presentation of the character will differ for different readers. Personally, I was aware from early on that the conventions of the romance genre, of which Hugo was clearly set up to be the male lead, demanded that there must be more to him than initially met the eye. (113)
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In many ways [...] Heyer’s novel is an exercise in thinking through how characters are created on the page, and the role that non-standard language plays as a part of that. (116)
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I would argue against reading the novel as a radical statement of linguistic solidarity with the working classes. Studies in perceptual dialectology have long established that people typically assign positive qualities of warmth and trustworthiness to speakers of non-standard Englishes, even as they also assign positive qualities of intelligence and competence to speakers of Standard English (see, for example, Zahn & Hopper, 1985). The Unknown Ajax arguably unsettles this a little by presenting Hugo – an authentic speaker of both Yorkshire English and Standard English – as capable of being simultaneously warm, trustworthy, intelligent and competent, but the novel does not fundamentally undercut the prestige of Standard English. (117)
From the introduction to the essay:
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