Introduction
A(n-N)ode on the Voice
My junior year of high school, I was cast as Hildy in Northfield High’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town. Hildy is a crass New York taxi driver who steals a cab in order to seduce a visiting sailor—an unusual role for me. As a young thespian, I had most frequently found myself in the role of “Nurse” or some innocent, caring ingénue, like Fern from Charlotte’s Web. All were far cries from a forward, tomboyish cabbie who can “cook, too, on top of the rest.” My director cast me in this role because of my singing voice—not because my voice was particularly good, but rather because it was particularly low and fit Hildy’s alto voice part. Unfortunately, shortly after rehearsals began, my voice stopped working. My vocal range was significantly reduced, and the notes I could sing came out raspy and weak. I had a node on my voice or, rather, on my vocal cords. Vocal nodes are benign growths that form on the larynx due to vocal abuse, little callouses that have ended or paused the careers of singers like Adele, Sam Smith, and Julie Andrews. In an effort to preserve my own vocal career, I had to attend voice therapy twice a week and go on complete voice rest for a month. This meant maintaining total silence; I had to carry a Magna Doodle in order to write responses to others’ questions.I came to think about and appreciate the voice in new ways: my node on the voice became an ode on the voice. I spent hours in voice therapy thinking about how to speak with a raised soft palate, how breath influenced utterance, and how adjusting my mouth and neck affected my speech. After frustrated efforts to confine my communication to the limits of a Magna Doodle, voice-to-voice conversation seemed a very special occasion. My voice recovered enough for me to stop my voice rest, perform in the musical, and sing in choir for many years afterwards. My nodes, however, never fully disappeared. Still, I cannot sing much above a Treble C, and a couple of times a year, I will wake up with no voice, none at all. I no longer have my Magna Doodle, so I carry around a notebook and write, mouth, or gesture my responses. People wince and look at me sympathetically, telling me to go home and drink some tea. Losing one’s voice seems a pitiful thing—painful to watch, as well as to experience.
But I’ve learned a lot from my sans-voice days, a lot about what it means to actually listen. I am, after all, a student of Victorian literature and have the bad habit of reading my own life like I would a realist novel. I would ask myself, what is the metaphorical significance of my vocal troubles? Surely my nodes must be some symbolic punishment, some manifestation of my own just deserts? I am a talker, and I began to see my bouts of laryngitis as reminders to shut up and genuinely listen. For me, this means following another’s thoughts without thinking about my own response, attending with curiosity and respect, and resisting the temptation to always compare and collapse another’s experience with my own. I began noticing the prevalence and consequences of bad listening around me as well. I probably need not mention the most egregious example, this year’s election season and, more specifically, the presidential and vice presidential debates, during which candidates talked over each other for minutes at a time. Perhaps a day with the Magna Doodle should be a required exercise.
I brought to my graduate education, then, a reduced vocal range and an increased interest in listening and the voice. Through Dr. Judith Pascoe’s “Theatre Voices” coursework and a seminar paper on elocution and orchestration in stage melodrama, I began to consider the nineteenth-century’s unique concerns surrounding sound and the voice. I became particularly interested in Victorian reading aloud, and I wrote papers on Shakespeare and nineteenth-century elocution, orality and Lancashire dialect poetry, and verse recitation in Anne of Green Gables. I tried to read about and take coursework in sound studies, an interdisciplinary field that has grown tremendously over the past fifteen or so years. The field has only been formally institutionalized in the past five, with Jonathan Sterne’s publication of The Sound Studies Reader (2012) and the December 2015 launch of the peer-reviewed Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. The adjective “interdisciplinary” in this periodical’s subtitle brings attention to sound studies’ explicit self-definition as a field, not a discipline or methodology. Sound studies incorporates, as Sterne articulates in the introduction to his Reader, any scholarship that “takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (2), and the field prides itself on its methodological and disciplinary diversity. My special interest area reading list reflects this hybridity and incorporates scholars using psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical race theory, and many other theoretical approaches.
I hope to join literary critics like John Picker and Ivan Kreilkamp in employing an historicist approach to sound and voice in the nineteenth century, an approach aiming to blend cultural studies and media theory with close, careful literary analysis. That being said, one of the challenges and opportunities of my interest in reading aloud is its relevance to so many diverse critical conversations. A consideration of reading aloud in the nineteenth century invites many crucial questions pertaining to power and identity: who reads to whom? What do they read and what do they censor out? Who has to pay attention and who can afford not to? How does one’s race, class, gender, religion and sexuality relate to how one can (or must) inhabit roles of reader and listener? As I discuss in my review essay, I hope to pursue a dissertation on listening to reading aloud as an attempt to turn attention toward Victorian readers not necessarily provided with the authority, resources, and/or literacy to obtain, select, navigate and decipher reading material. Through such a dissertation, I hope to recuperate the position of the listener as generative and interpretive, seeing the listener not a passive receptacle, but rather as an active participant in a text’s meaning-making.
I see my preparation for this Comprehensive Examination as like my periods of vocal recovery. If we follow the metaphor of scholarship as conversation, these months have been an opportunity for me to shut up and really listen to the discussion, to others’ thoughts, opinions, ideas, and theories. I have tried to be a good listener. I aimed to attend critically, but with intellectual humility. I hoped to reflect on texts’ relation to my own work, but also consider each work on its own terms. This exercise has been a privilege and is, I believe, a good in and of itself. Even without the end goal of a dissertation, I would have found the process worthwhile. That being said, when I do get a chance to contribute to the conversation, I hope this period of scholarly voice rest will help me be an informed, generous, and compelling conversationalist.
I crafted my historical list, for example, as a compilation of texts that will enable me to speak confidently to the complexities of cultural and literary trends as an informed teacher and scholar of nineteenth-century British literature. Comprised of works written by British authors between approximately 1800 and 1900, the list includes both canonical and lesser-known works from four different genres: fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction. I took my historical questions and my historical syllabus as opportunities to consider connections and conversations between both expected and unexpected interlocutors. My historical area syllabus, for example, titled “Victorian Storage: How to Keep Things in Victorian Literature,” traces what Jonathan Sterne has identified as the nineteenth century’s “ethos of preservation” through conversations surrounding education, class, empire, gender, religion, and death in Victorian literature and culture. The course asks students to consider how, say, the corpse in Swinburne’s “The Leper,” the phonograph diary in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the attic in Jane Eyre speak to Victorian concerns surrounding storage and preservation.
I have chosen to begin my historical area with the onset of the nineteenth century, not with the reign of Queen Victoria in 1837, because of my interests in sound, listening, and reading aloud. Because many sound historians take interest in both Britain and the United States, the nineteenth century has become a popular historical scope for transatlantic sociocultural histories of sound and voice (see, for example, Sterne and Robson). Even as a student focusing primarily on British literature, I have found the early decades of the nineteenth century, and even the latter half of the eighteenth, indispensable in my attempts to better understand post-1837 attitudes toward sound and the voice. As I implicitly argue through my special interest area syllabus, “Lit Out Loud: Speaking and Hearing Literature from the Romantics to the Victorians,” Great Britain witnessed a rise in the widespread practice of elocution, verse recitation, and oral reading, a rise accelerating in the second half of the eighteenth century and waning in the first half of the twentieth.[2] I see the late-eighteenth-century elocution movement, the early-nineteenth-century invention of the stethoscope, and works like Wordsworth’s “On the Power of Sound” (1828) and Charles Lamb’s “A Chapter on Ears” (1831) as indications of the Romantics’ fascination with and, at times, reverence for sound. As scholars like Jonathan Sterne, John Picker, and Leigh Eric Schmidt have argued, the mid- and late-nineteenth century saw great change in attitudes toward and understandings of sound. Most frequently, scholars characterize the nineteenth century as the period of sound’s secularization, rationalization, and commodification, due to inventions like the telephone and phonograph, as well as Helmholtzian auditory science. Yet, as critics like John Picker point out, many early and late Victorians still found much to wonder and revere in the voice and sound more generally.
My article on the telephone and telegraph in Virginia Woolf takes as its point of departure not the prequel but the sequel to Victorian sound history. Titled “Wave Breaks: (Dis) Connective Media in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,” this essay sees Woolf’s paradigmatically modernist, experimental novel as challenging the connective power of the voice and communication more generally. I trace Woolf’s depictions of what David Trotter has called “connective media”—media that seek to establish instantaneous person-to-person communication. I counter scholarship arguing that Woolf employs connective media to figure interpersonal connection, claiming instead that Woolf uses technologies like the telegraph and telephone to figure the faulty receptions, the problems and misunderstandings, in all conversation. While this may seem a rather bleak conclusion, I do not think Woolf meant it to be. As she writes in On Being Ill, “always to be accompanied, always to be understood, would be intolerable” (14). Complete and comprehensive understanding of the other is neither possible nor desirable. Gaps in understanding, The Waves seems to suggest, are less communication’s problem than its point.
This conclusion is yet another reason why I am interested in depictions of listening: such portrayals tend to foreground how messages are distorted, misinterpreted, or changed by their intended (or unintended) receivers. Listeners in literary scenes of reading aloud are, in a way, illustrations of how readers experience, interpret, affect, and are affected by texts. Victorian literature is riddled with scenes of reading aloud: the Clare family reading Biblical passages on pure women in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Robert Moore reading to Caroline from Coriolanus in Brontë’s Shirley, and the Caldwells reading Dickens in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book, to name only a few. My special interest annotations and my review essay, “Aurality and Literacy: Listening to Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain” aim to lay the critical, theoretical, and historical groundwork for a dissertation on depictions of listening to reading aloud in Victorian literature.
As I discuss in my review essay, I hope that this dissertation can include a cultural history of reading aloud in the Victorian home, as well as a study of how this practice is portrayed and employed in the Victorian novel. I hope to build on an archive of primary documents including letters, correspondence, memoirs, reading manuals, books on home education, etc., as well as existing cultural histories on Victorian reading practices, circulating libraries, serial publication, and other forms of oral reading. I aim to consider how literary depictions of reading aloud differ from typical Victorian domestic reading practices, as well as how these differences speak to issues of textual authority, education, and literacy. I look forward to my comprehensive exam as an opportunity to discuss the challenges and possibilities of such a dissertation, and I eagerly anticipate feedback, concerns, ideas, and suggestions.
Preparing this portfolio has been challenging, but also exciting and rewarding—and that is, in large part, thanks to the support of my committee members. I feel very fortunate to have five mentors who all generously attend to my work and ideas while prompting me to read and think in ways I hadn’t previously considered. I will close, then, in appreciation for your time and attention. Thank you for listening.
Works Cited
Sterne, Jonathan, Ed. The Sound Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
Woolf, Virginia. On Being Ill. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002. Print.
[1] This “transegmental drift” is a reference to Dr. Stewart’s Reading Voices (see p. ) and indicates that my title can be read as “A Node on the Voice” or “An Ode on the Voice.”
[2] In her history of verse memorization and recitation in British and American education, Heart Beats, Catherine Robson covers a similar timeline: 1770-1940.
