Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk by Amy R. Wong (review)

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• Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk by Amy R. Wong
• Parama Roy

WONG, AMY R. Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. xii+228 pages. $70.00 hardcover.

Amy R. Wong’s ambition in Refiguring Speech is an expansive one. She seeks, through an examination of late-Victorian fictions of empire, to effect a reconsideration of commonly held assumptions about the place of speech and communication in the novel in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Such a reconsideration is meant to function as a template for counter-intuitive readings of linguistic fluency and political possibility in Victorian fiction. Four novels—R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors (1891), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors (1901)—make up her archive. These, she suggests, are rich with intimations of the surprising political possibilities of imperial fictions. There is much to be commended in readings that engage imperial fictions as complex rather than ideologically transparent productions. All too often, when it comes to narratives of empire or of race, we read as if our default critical positions must be diagnostic—that they must involve either deprecation or admiration, rather than anything more open-ended. Wong, then, deserves praise for seeking to disabuse us of the foregone (and, I should add, almost invariably censorious) [End Page 214] conclusions to which we often take recourse when we read fictions of empire, especially by those of European origin.

Wong begins by demarcating certain distinctions between modes of utterance and communication that she identifies, it must be said somewhat idiosyncratically, as “speech” and “talk.” Speech, she avers, is what names “a certain proprietary fantasy in the Anglo-American imagination that prizes a perfect tethering of expression to intent” (1). Speech in this schematic is the property of the sovereign and self-possessed individual, and it emerges in distinction to racial and animal others. Nineteenth-century manuals on the art of conversation, along with the centrality of fluent speech in novels from Austen to James, are adduced as instances of the “quasi-magical, capital-generating” qualities of speech (5). In contrast to the putative racial and colonial logics of speech, talk in the novels functions under the sign of failure, being wayward, inarticulate, and sometimes plethoric in its excess. But can speech as defined in this monograph really be set apart from talk? For one thing, manuals of conversation (or conduct) have always been understood as prescriptive rather than descriptive; whatever ideal of self-possessed and seamless speech they might summon up is a conceptual fiction rather than anything manifested in practice. And as is evident from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and other works by Freud, miscues, forgetfulness, confusion, faltering, and parapraxes—what Wong identifies as the “stuttering, gibberish, murmurs, spasms, and the like” of the beleaguered Englishmen of The Inheritors (127)—are inescapable dimensions of all speaking rather than the signature of the categorically infelicitous utterance.

In addition, Wong’s gloss on speech and talk seems at different times both unnecessarily constricted and too promiscuously expansive. There is only glancing consideration, for instance, of the gendered dimension of what is identified as talk. This is a perplexing limitation given how often talking is seen in the novel as something like a vocation for women—Austen’s Lady Susan for one identifies her eloquence as her most formidable asset—even as women’s speech is also commonly associated with intellectual inferiority, triviality, and mischief-making. Yet, even as women’s utterances are largely occluded from consideration, speech expands enormously elsewhere in the monograph, especially in the chapter on Meredith, to accommodate not just the utterances of fictional characters, but also characterology, bodily gestures, cognitive processes, questions of genre, and the material environment. Such a dilation of the meaning of speech makes it an increasingly elusive category of analysis, multiplying the difficulties of settling upon just what novelistic speech is—or is not.

Of the four chapters devoted to concerns with language in late Victorian novels, the one devoted to...