George Eliot's Dialogue

This chapter describes how George Eliot’s fiction exhibits what we might call ‘free direct discourse’. If direct discourse is quoted speech, attributed to a speaking character, and free indirect discourse is the mediation of a character’s interiority through the narrator’s unacknowledged arrogation of the character’s inner voice and style of speech, then free direct discourse describes the tendency of Eliot’s characters to slide freely from direct speech into the voice of the narrator, the authorised voice of general consensus. Inverting free indirect discourse, the most particularly idiomatic, eccentric dialogues in Eliot’s fiction often draw axiomatic conclusions or otherwise render inane banter into august abstractions. Mediating abstraction through the dialect and idiomatic speech of secondary characters affords Eliot’s narrative a double authority; the most ancillary characters get to use the narrator’s voice. Identifying free direct discourse shows how the novel ascribes knowledge to the dialogic frisson between people rather than to an abstract third person.