Louise K. Barnett

Authority and Speech: Language, Society, and Self in the American Novel

University of Georgia Press, 1993

This book examines speech in the American novel as an arena of struggle between individual expression and social authority. Discussing the full range of mainstream American novels, Professor Louise K. Barnett shows how the confident verbalism of the mid-nineteenth-century novel gives way to an increasing skepticism about language and its capacity to articulate experience and communicate. Her study is grounded in two related theoretical bases: speech-act theory, which seeks to assess the authority of utterances by determining their relationship to constitutive rules, and sociolinguistics, which approaches the same issue of authority from the perspective of social requirements. Proceeding chronologically, the author begins with the major antebellum romantic writers - Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe - whose characters can express themselves as individuals and make successful use of "public language," that is, the type of language that functions prescriptively to maintain the values and attitudes of society at large. According to Professor Barnett, the works of Herman Melville are transitional in terms of speech because they move from the verbal confidence of his early writings to various forms of linguistic withdrawal in his late novels: the corruption of the word in The Confidence-Man, the tragic failure of communication in Billy Budd. Melville's striking modernity, however, was neither fully realized nor assimilated by other writers of his time. Rather, the key figure in confronting the problematic issues of speech and authority was Mark Twain, whose Huckleberry Finn (1884) offered a powerful critique of a falsifying public language that contaminated all discourses. Twain's novel also set the stage for a verbal skepticism that came to characterize many important modern texts, including The Ambassadors, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Hamlet and Their Eyes Were Watching God.