THE CONFLICTING INNER VOICES
OF RACHEL CAMERON

Barbara Powell

Rachel Cameron, in Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, is for an appearances frustrated and confused. Plagued by guilt and self-doubt, she struggles to free herself from her sexual, psychological, and linguistic repression. We hear of this struggle in the novel's many interior monologues, an analysis of which shows that she is not only unstable, as other critics have noted, but that she in fact destabilizes herself through her internal linguistic conflict. Rachel is often of two minds, caught between two directions. She has difficulty moving out of her tight and fearful self because her warring interior voices can't agree on what to say to the outside world.

George Bowering was the first to suggest a duality of voices in the novel. He grounded his metaphor of the "voice" of the novel in the external voices of the town of Manawaka, and extended it to the internal voices of Rachel: "Manawaka speaks with two voices, Scots-Canadian and Ukrainian. Rachel speaks with two voices that are unheard except when she speaks in voices, as in the tabernacle, or later in the ecstatic utterances concerning her experience with Nick."¹ This view of the two voices assumes that there is one, strong true inner voice struggling to be heard over the censoring, censuring voice of Rachel that maintains proper appearances. However, both of Rachel's inner voices are authentic. The difference between them is in their social functions, or the reasons why Rachel uses one voice or another.

These functions are realized in markedly different linguistic strategies; a stylistic analysis of passages from Rachel's monologues and conversations shows features of both sides of Rachel's split linguistic character. Laurence has chosen words, phrases, clauses, and patterns within and between sentences to create a distinctive style for each voice. Although the text of A Jest of God as a whole can be seen as written in Laurence's style, Laurence's repeated assertions about her desire to find authentic voices for her characters appear to sanction the examination of Rachel's two voices as both personal and distinct.

Due to their differing world-views, Rachel's voices differ first of all in what they choose to say, or the subject matter of their discourse. Using one voice, Rachel docilely patterns her speech on her mother's when they converse in a rote exchange of semantically empty, but emotionally charged, phrases. Mother speaks with polite conventionality: "I'm not annoyed Rachel--you mustn't think that. A little hurt perhaps. But there. It's probably foolish to feel that way. You have a perfect right to keep anything secret if you want to--."² Rachel replies in the same empty but apologetic mode: "It wasn't a secret. It was--oh, never mind. I'm sorry. I just never thought, I guess. I'm sorry" (78). At another time, Rachel echoes the judgements according to the strict standards of Manawaka we usually hear in Mother's speech as she speaks in Mother's formulae to Calla. When explaining why she didn't confront Willard Siddley about his cruelty in strapping James, Rachel says weakly, "I can't bear scenes. They make me ill" (46); about the color of Sapphire Travis's new pink shoes she carps, "It's a little bright, I agree" (47).

This "nice" voice of Rachel's palters and apologizes as Rachel's mother does. It characterizes Rachel as one of those " very young girls, often so anxious to please that they will tell lies without really knowing they're doing it" (4). This pleasant voice, learned by Rachel at her mother's knee and reinforced by the ladies of Manawaka, features repression and rationalization. It is deferential, and is marked³ by the use of linguistic patterns that question, minimize, judge, and negate. Its function is to maintain, with a self-effacing politeness, Rachel's relationships of her assumed powerlessness. This deferential politeness has been termed " negative politeness" in studies of functional hnguistiCS,⁴ and is a linguistic strategy that maintains distance through the speaker's respect for and unwillingness to impose upon a hearer. This voice criticizes the voice of Rachel's other, more dramatic, reality.

Rachel's other inner voice is often lively and imaginative, but sometimes harsh and sarcastic. It both goads and responds to her hesitant inner self with absolute statements and fierce judgements. Like Laurence's other interior monologuist Hagar, this Rachel offers critical opinions on the world, but is especially critical of her own timid and anxious self. Rachel's strong voice has its own particular linguistic markers, especially intensifiers and absolutes. This voice, too, is polite but not servile or deferential like her nice voice. It exhibits several of the features of "positive politeness," the function of which is to present the speaker in an attractive and sympathetic light (Brown and Levinson 101). Positive politeness presumes social power and self-confidence, however, and these are rare qualities in Rachel, especially early in the novel. Rachel less frequently uses this voice to the outside world, so her positive politeness, which should be used socially to establish a friendly bond, is thwarted and directed towards herself as her only friend.

This strong voice of Rachel shows poetic features of style; with this voice Rachel speaks with the richness of alliteration: "the last dried shell of them painted and prettified for decent burial by mortal men" (2), metaphor: "She bears down, through the noisy shoal of youngsters pushing upstairs like fish compelled upstream" (3), and allusion: "Let the Dionysian women rend themselves on the night hills and consume the god" (36). In this voice Rachel also privately revels in her fantasies, an activity which verbally demonstrates the extent of her education and the spark of her imagination: "They used to have banquets with dozens there. Hundreds. Egyptian girls and Roman soldiers. Oasis melons, dusty grapes brought in the long ships from somewhere" (59). Other times, wit slides into her monologues in brief flashes of imagery: "He looks at me with a sly gopher-idiocy, all innocent nothingness" (52), and "Mother is in the living room, dusting in small feathery strokes as though the duster were a chiffon handkerchief and she were waving it from some castle window" (75). These literary devices, however attractive, are linguistic strategies just as evasive as the apologies and hedgings of Rachel's weak voice. Metaphor and irony are more sophisticated techniques for not really saying what one means, and are often used to indicate that meaning is negotiable (Brown and Levinson 69,222-23). They are realizations of negative politeness even in Rachel's stronger voice.

We first hear both of Rachel's voices in Chapter One and immediately find ourselves immersed in her mental processes. Laurence takes care at the beginning of the novel to establish these two voices, each of which show distinctive patterns of syntax and word choice. The close analysis of key patterns from this introductory chapter will show us just how Rachel forms her linguistic responses to the world. Here, she establishes her characteristic, constant self-obsession. Many of the sentences and subordinate clauses have "I" as the subject, as in "I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember myself skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now" (1). Despite her use of "I" as a frequent subject of her sentences, however, Rachel acts very seldom and does very little in this chapter.

Rachel's passivity is suggested in the choices of transitivity or participant/action relationships of the text of her speech.⁵ These choices are made from the range of available patterns of transitivity, or the "small set of presumably universal categories which characterize different kinds of event and process, different types of participants in these events, and the varying circumstances of place and time within which events occur" (Fowler 156). The system of transitivity, a system of meaning, is encoded in the verbs chosen to represent action or perception. These verbs can be verbs of action, state of being, processes, mental processes, and mental states. Nouns are stylistically important, too, because they designate roles relative to predicates. The fundamental roles are agent and object; subtypes of object are beneficiary and experiencer (157).

Rachel is seldom an agent in her own interior monologues in either voice. Both her inner voices have patterns of transitivity that establish her as an experiencer, and object of actions and emotions. Things happen to her and occur to her, her consistent patterns of transitivity are "I remember," "I've seen," "I wish," "I feel." Her verbs are rarely verbs of action, but frequently verbs of mental processes or of state of being. She does use action verbs in some circumstances, as in her passage of speculation regarding Calla's grooming habits, where Calla "combs," "chops," " wears," "washes," "dries," and "drenches" (3-4). Other times, Rachel uses active verbs to describe certain actions of others, the effects of which she experiences or perceives: "voice sounds," "it snaps," and "Calla hisses." Her constant recording of her own mental processes leads her to presume the knowledge of the mental states or processes of others, as in "he knows," "he cares," "he hates," and "he wants."

Both her voices use frequent reflexive personal pronouns, which reflect back her subjective self-image. Among Rachel's reflexives are: "concern myself," "find myself," "dramatize myself," "see myself," "hear myself," and "surprise myself"; their use indicates Rachel's intense obsession with herself. Helpless in her own mind, Rachel sees herself as the object of various nameable and unnameable forces: "the spring wind is making me shiver" (3), "it often surprises me" (13), and "it never occurred to me" (13). These patterns indicate that Rachel's world is one in which she feels she has little control.

Her sensitivity is reinforced by the patterns of modality apparent in much of her speech, modality being "the degree of assurance or commitment with which a speaker vouches for a proposition" (Fowler 57). Her voices, similar in their patterns of transitivity, differ in their patterns of modality. Rachel's insecure voice has a low degree of certainty in anything she says, and is correspondingly marked by patterns that indicate conditionality. Rachel, speaking tentatively in her "nice" voice, does not stress the truth or certainty of her statements. Instead, she hedges and hesitates, tempering her statements with adverbs and conjunctions, especially "only" and "but," often suggesting an alternative to what she has just stated: "An hour seems to have passed since he spoke but it's only a second" (8), "I'm only imagining things again" (9), "I know it's only that she is concerned, but what business is it of hers?" (10), and "I've known them nearly all their lives. But it doesn't seem so" (12). Sometimes the minimizing "only" shows Rachel to be politely apologetic, even when talking to herself: "It's her only outlet, her only entertainment. I can't begrudge her. Anyone decent would be only too glad" (15). She minimizes the forces of her statement with adverbial phrases: "I'm thrown a little off balance" (7), and hedges after making even a vague assertion: "Now they're about sixteen, I guess" (12). These hedgings and apologies are hallmarks of negative politeness, but they are also features conventionally ascribed to women's language, often seen as a socially less powerful and assertive speech.⁶

Other times within Chapter One Rachel's stronger voice takes over with more assertive patterns of modality in its evaluative adjectives and adverbs. Using this voice, Rachel emphasizes and intensifies 'her opinions with such adverbs as "certainly" (used often), "probably," "extremely," "miraculously," and "marvellously"; such maximizing adjectives as "impossible," "fantastic," "horrible," "moronic," and "ridiculous." Rachel's strong voice speaks about people and events in terms of extremes: "James is the very last inside, as usual" (3), "Sapphire Travis does it all the time" (2), and "I always brush my hair a hundred strokes" (16). These sorts of intensifying modifiers are usually expressed socially to assert positive politeness, but spoken internally can establish a bond of solidarity and enthusiasm only with Rachel herself.

The evaluating words that either minimize or intensify what Rachel says are just one feature of the modality of Rachel's speech.

Clearer patterns of alternating hesitation and fierce determination can be detected in both voices' use of modal auxiliaries, or words such as "must," "can," "might," "should," etc. Fowler explains their importance: "These words signal caution or confidence to various degrees. Something might happen, something will happen, must happen" (131). Rachel's voices, predictably, push and pull her in two directions with modal auxiliaries. Sometimes she demonstrates caution, reproach, or inabihty⁷: "I oughtn't to feel that way" (3), "I shouldn't try to avoid her eyes" (3), and "It frightens me so that I can't even form the words to myself" (6). These modal auxiliaries, "ought," "should," and "can," are representative of Rachel's hesitant self, and have meanings that suggest obligation and ability. All three, however, are expressed as negatives, and two of them collocate with other words with negative connotations: "avoid" and "frighten."

When her stronger voice takes over, Rachel often uses the modal auxiliary "must"; she constantly exhorts her hesitant self to cast off the restrictions of social and linguistic propriety. She speaks with confident authority: "I must simply turn it off and think of something else" (2), "the knowledge of [skipping songs] must be passed from child to child" (1), and "I should change the furniture" (16). She still implies obligation in many of these modal auxiliaries, but her strong voice less frequently turns the phrases to negatives.

The predominant stylistic feature of Chapter One, in which Rachel introduces herself and her instability, is in fact its negativity, another realization of the text's modality. With both of her voices, Rachel knocks at her own strengths and supports through her constant negation of her feelings, her ideas, her self. The negation is both explicit, in the forms of "no," "not," "never," and "nothing" that pepper every page of the chapter, and implicit, in the words that have negative connotations: "postponed," "died," "shame," "worn down," and "malicious." Incidentally, since many of these cited words come from a passage in which Rachel describes Manawaka as she walks home from school, the negativity of the description reinforces her sense of entrapment. She escapes from the death trap only in her fantasies, which rarely contain negatives.

Patterns of modality are also encoded in sentences that deviate from narrativity. If we assume the primary purpose of a novel is to tell a story, sentences in the narrator's voice that do not narrate in declarative sentences have an evaluative function; that is, they express the narrator's opinion regarding the events (or in Rachel's case the thoughts) being told to the reader. We hear Rachel's sensible evaluation in the commands she addresses to her sexually repressed self on the verge of a fantasy: "Stop. Stop it, Rachel. Steady. Get a grip on yourself, now. Relax. Sleep. Try" (17). Imperatives such as these do not narrate or elucidate thoughts. Instead, these commands indicate Rachel's embarrassment at her lascivious feelings. Other, similar commands show her utter frustration with her train of thought and the events going on around her. Linguistically these non-narrative sentences fulfill a performative function, usually to keep Rachel's anger and sexuality from spilling over into her placid-seeming everyday life.

Rachel also evaluates her narrative by questioning her own thoughts and actions. She challenges both her motives and her unstable identity: "Why didn't I put my coat on, to come out?" (3), "Why did I have to ask him who?" (8), and "How weird am I already?" (17). To Rachel, much of life is a puzzle. Other people's faces, like her own, hide another reality, which Rachel attempts to uncover through questions to herself, such as "How do they endure it?" (3) and "Does she imagine that I'm that much in need?" (10). Although her questions show that Rachel can be sarcastic: "Does she think someone cares if she's sixty or ninety?" (15), they more often show her to be hesitant and unsure of her very thoughts and actions. Her two voices also argue in questions, in one case alternately encouraging and discouraging her from taking sleeping pills. "Why on earth don't I" (17) is countered with "What if one became addicted?" (17). The theme of the novel is ultimately implied in her questions, one serious, the other anxiously self-conscious: "Am I unbalanced? Or only laughable?" (19).

Rachel's personal problems are encoded in her fragmented, hesitant, questioning linguistic patterns. Her linguistic problems stem in turn from long-standing mother-daughter difficulties; Helen Buss rightly criticizes those who "fail to take into consideration the degree to which May Cameron affects her daughters and the connection between the inability to articulate and that very basic relationship, the mother-daughter bond."⁸ This bond is the source of Rachel's linguistic confusion. Like most children, Rachel has learned to speak from her mother. The language she learned there is marked by its concern over what is "nice" to say. Rachel's hesitation and her worries over speaking aloud are features of this "nice" speech, the stereotypical women's speech. Other markers of women's speech, which are also the insecure and deferential realizations of negative politeness, are, according to Robin Lakoff:

1. "Question intonations, where we might expect declaratives: for instance tag questions . . ." (53);
2. "The uses of hedges of various kinds" (53), for example "Well" as a conversational opener;
3. "superpolite forms" (56); and
4. Endearments, which in Rachel's case enforce the mother's superiority over her daughter (see Lakoff 79-80).

We hear this polite but powerless women's speech in Rachel's stiff, stilted conversations with her mother, one of which occurs in Chapter One. Mother's speech, which insecure Rachel has adopted as one of her own voices, is rife with evaluations, usually negative. Mother asks the question: "Aren't you rather late tonight?" when she means that she is angry because Rachel is late. She frequently addresses Rachel as "dear," and expresses indignation with only a mild exclamation, soft-pedaling it with the minimizing tag question after her statement: "But mercy, you didn't bestow their brains on them, did you?" (14). Mother's tone is consistently saccharine, with the hidden threat lurking just under the surface of the pleasant vocabulary. Rachel isn't fooled, though she does play the lady-talk game in a polite exchange. When asked how she feels, Rachel covers up her true misery with the stock reply: "I'm fine. A little tired tonight, perhaps, but that's normal" (14). Their conversation finishes with Mother's final deferential challenge and Rachel's cynical interior evaluation: "'I don't mind, dear,--whatever you like,'she [Mother] says, believing she means it" (15).

Mother's voice may fool Mother into believing her benevolent motives, but Rachel has grown up and has come to expect more than tedious conversational formulae. A mother's voice that speaks only deferentially in negative politeness and expects the same in return stultifies, Rachel, who yearns for the adult friendliness and mutuality a relationship of positive politeness would give her. Frustrated, she talks to her mother, whose speech is marked as stereotypically feminine by tag questions: "You haven't got an upset stomach, have you?", endearments: "Yes, you be sure to do that, dear," and statements beginning with "Well," a marker of conversational hesitation: "Well, I will then, dear" (57). Rachel realizes that her talk with her mother presumes a perennially unequal power relationship. She is trapped in her mother's view of her as the eternal child, and Rachel linguistically obliges, adopting the features of her mother's speech. She reflects on this typical conversation with her mother, drawing attention to her own linguistic split: "She speaks as though I were twelve. What a strangely pendulum life I have, fluctuating in age between extremes, hardly knowing myself whether I am too young or too old" (58).

The pattern of stress and contention between the two voices surfaces whenever an emotional crisis arises and Rachel is unsure about how to react. She generally responds to the outside in her nice voice, while her stronger voice mocks herself sarcastically from within. Embarrassed at the duplicity within herself, nice Rachel then reprimands her more spirited self. Sometimes her two voices converse in an uneasy truce, with only an undercurrent of conflict: "He does not shift himself in the movie seat to be even six inches closer. Well, why should he? Who would want to? We have discussed this a long time ago, you and I Rachel. Haven't you seen it yet?" (71). Most telling is Rachel's own acknowledgement of her two interior voices, and her resultant shaky sense of self: "If you think you contain two realities, perhaps you contain none" (133).

The result of this confusion is that Rachel picks the wrong voice to speak to Nick the first time she meets him. In her flustered excitement, the voice of Mother's twelve-year old takes over, while the stronger voice of the clever schoolteacher fumes internally, noting perceptively: "It's as though I've thought in Mother's voice" (64). Rachel's side of her conversation with Nick is marked by her hesitation.She reaches for words, states the obvious, and misses the jokes. Her lack of social and linguistic confidence is most apparent in the negation and hesitation in her answers to Nick's friendly questions:

"What is there to do here in the summer?" Nick asks.
"I don't--well, not a great deal, I guess."
"Would you like to come to a movie on Friday night,
Rachel?"
"Oh. Well--I guess--well, thanks. I--yes, I'd like to." (64)

On Rachel's return home she asserts herself in conversation with her mother. When her mother asks how Nick, the son of a Ukrainian milkman from the wrong side of town, managed to get a teaching job in the city, Rachel snaps sarcastically: "I couldn't say. Some miracle, I suppose. Divine intervention, maybe" (65). Her mother's criticism is quick, and quite to the linguistic point she has been inculcating into Rachel her whole life long: "There's no need for you to speak to me like that. If you please" (65).

As the events in her life come to a crisis, Rachel's internal arguments come to a head of fury as she waits in Dr. Raven's office for her appointment to discuss her presumed pregnancy. She hears a "stout-skirted mother bidding a spectacled five-year-old to behave himself and hush" (176), but only a moment later she bids herself the same: "Rachel shut up. Shut up inside your skull. Yes, I am, that's it. Oh, stop this nonsense" (176). The strong voice tries to maintain physical and emotional control through the use of the performative commands. Her strong voice can also joke, as this side of her sees the visual humor and pathos in her physical aspect. The jokes can't placate the side of her that sees she needs comfort, however. Her weak voice takes over the mother role, speaking words of comfort as Rachel enters Dr. Raven's examining room:

And I've drawn together my tallness and loped through the waiting room, sidestepping chairs and outstretched feet, an ostrich walking with extreme care through some formal garden. Rachel, hush. Hush, child. Steady. It's all right. It's going to be all right. (177)

It is not all right, however, and Rachel descends into her torment of regret and relief during her physical and emotional recovery, the experience of which is narrated after the fact, thus becoming the only passage in the novel written in the past tense. The voice that tells of her operation for the tumor in her womb is her strong voice. As Rachel realizes that she is the mother now, she suppresses the insecurities of her weak Mother-tongue. She begins, as she emerges from the anesthetic, metaphorically imagining her operation as "one of those late-night spook features repeated with eerie boredom on the inner TV" (182), speaking almost intimately with us, as though we know "those" features. This is a suggestion of positive politeness, but Rachel still has only herself and her imagined audience with whom to form a bond. The strong voice, recovering, also regards her situation with humor, imagining that Nick would divorce his wife so Rachel could marry him "after a decent interval of thirty seconds" (182). On further thoughts of Nick, however, the weakened Rachel slips into a familiar despairing negativity, imagining her powerlessness at the end of their relationship.

As she regains her physical strength, her psychological and verbal strengths increase too. Her verbal low point of "No way in, not there, not any more. Visa cancelled" (183) is transcended by her reasoning and assertive assessment: "How he must have laughed at how easy it was, at how easy I was, both to pick up and to put down again. God damn him, now and forever" (189). Chapter Eleven ends on a note of questioning and negativity. But Rachel's final statement is one that negates not herself and her feelings, but her childlike fantasies of Nick: "As for what was happening with him and to him this summer, I couldn't say what it really was, not whether it had anything to do with me or not" (190). In this, Rachel is subverting her own wishful, insecure voice, clearing the way for the more confident assertions of her strong voice in Chapter Twelve, the novel's concluding chapter.

Rachel, in the end, decides to leave Manawaka, taking her mother with her. She counters her mother's fearful questions and polite objections with a firm confidence. The sound of her strong voice is foreign to her mother, who has heard mostly echoes of herself in their previous conversations. Mother objects to Rachel's assertive tone, saying "Rachel, you're not yourself. You're not talking a bit sensibly, dear" (191-2), questioning, "Why do you keep on refusing to talk reasonably, Rachel?" (193), and protesting, "Rachel, you're talking so peculiarly" (195).

Rachel knows why she sounds so different to her mother, and reaffirms calmly to herself"I am the mother now" (196). As the mother, she controls the subject matter and the tone of the conversation, and in her concluding conversation with her mother the questions, negatives, exaggerating adjectives and conditional modal auxiliaries of powerlessness appear mainly in Mother's speech: "All my friends are here Rachel. I can't leave. I wouldn't know a single solitary soul. No one" (192). Rachel speaks in reply with some modal auxiliaries and some negatives, this time directed at her mother: "Mother, try to realize. I've been accepted for the job in Vancouver, the one I applied for. We're moving at the end of the month" (192). In her interior monologue Rachel still questions herself, "I'm afraid to use the [harsh words]. Afraid of what?" (194), and the two voices have a final quarrel, this time about the wisdom of wanting to see Nick. The weak side of Rachel begs, the strong sets the limits; the weak voice acquiesces, and Rachel comforts herself in her new-found internal harmony: "If I could see him only for half an hour. No, Rachel, you can't. Yes, I know. It will go away after a while" (195).

Rachel's final verbal congruence in the novel does not require the subjugation of her nice voice. She does not cruelly tell Willard Siddley exactly what she thinks of him on leaving Manawaka; instead she is decently polite as she explains, "I've just lived here long enough, that's all. It's got nothing to do with the school" (197). Her statement contains negatives and apologies, but these are appropriate in the circumstances; negatively polite speech has its uses, as Rachel has discovered. She takes leave of Willard without insulting him, saving both his face and her own. Rachel no longer reaches for absolutes, but realizes that her message to Willard, "like everything else, is both true and false" (197). Rachel has final conversations with Calla and with Hector, too, and in each case she is deferential without self-effacement, polite without falsity. Her strong voice expresses its opinions, tempered by the useful consideration learned from her other, Mother's voice.

Her final monologue shows a strong stylistic contrast with those of Chapter One. She begins in her familiar, self-argumentative mode, negating statements and alternating them with the oppositional conjunction "but." She thinks about the future: "And have my children in time. Or maybe not. Most of the chances are against it. But not, I think, quite all. What will happen?" (201). In imagining what will happen, Rachel's modality indicates futurity, not conditionality or obligation. Her strong voice is tentative not because it is timid and fearful, but simply because Rachel knows that the future is uncertain, and that she must nevertheless take a chance there. Her final paragraph begins tentatively, "I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time" (201), but then moves to the strength of her predictions with each sentence stating "I will." Coupled with this modal auxiliary are the active verbs "push," "pull," "find," "walk," "look," "grow," and "rage," among others. Rachel's patterns of transitivity have shifted, so that in future, she will be the agent of her fate, not just the passive experiencer. Her language has changed its function: she predicts and hopes; she no longer questions and apologizes.

The conflict between Rachel's two inner voices has subsided because Rachel has confronted her fears. Language creates Rachel's reality; since she has taken control of her language she has discovered some control over her life. By abandoning her powerless, self-effacing strategies of negative politeness and the hedgings and hesitations of her mother's stereotypical women's speech, Rachel has found herself able to act, to predict, to leave home, to do something with words. Rachel retains her questions and some of her linguistic hesitation, but now with a sense of possibility rather than with the restrictions of propriety.

NOTES

¹ George Bowering, "That Fool of Fear: Notes on A Jest of God," Canadian Literature 50 (Autumn 1971):41.

² Margaret Laurence, A Jest of God (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart NCL, 1974) 78. All subsequent references will be to this edition.

³ "Marked" is a term used in linguistics to denote usages which are overtly distinctive. The term's strictest sense is that in which the plural is the form of the English noun that is marked for number. I use the term here in a more general sense to include what I consider to be the striking linguistic features that characterize Rachel's voices. M. A. K Halliday in Explorations in the Functions of Language (London: Arnold, 1973) 113-21 uses "prominence" and "foregrounding" to describe the same types of stylistic patterns.

⁴ See Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1978,1987) for a discussion of both positive and negative forms of politeness and their linguistic manifestations in English: "Positive politeness utterances are used as a kind of metaphorical extension of intimacy, to imply common ground or sharing of wants to a limited extent even between strangers who perceive themselves, for the purposes of the interactions, as somehow similar" (103). Negative politeness, however, "is the heart of respect behaviour, just as positive politeness is the kernel of 'familiar' and 'joking' behaviour" (129). Negative politeness is the behaviour described in etiquette books, and is appropriate whenever a speaker wants to maintain distance and deference. Brown and Levinson call negative politeness a kind of "social brake" (130).

⁵ Transitivity is explained by Roger Fowler in Linguistic Criticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 156 ff. For a study of patterns of transitivity and their stylistic importance, see Halliday in Explorations in the Functions of Language, Chapter 5, "Linguistic Function and Literary Style."

⁶ For the first, controversial, treatment of women's speech see Robin Lakoff, Language and Women's Place (New York: Octagon Books, 1976). Although dated and in some cases erroneous, this book is still a useful starting point for determining the features of women's use of language.

⁷ For the meanings of these and other modal auxiliaries, see Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, A Grammar of Contemporary English (London: Longman, 1972) 97-102.

⁸ Helen Buss, Mother and Daughter Relationships in the Manawaka Works of Margaret Laurence. English Literary Studies No. 34. (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1985) 32.