Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes.
Michaelson considers women’s reading and speaking practices to examine gendered representations of conversational interaction, as well as the linguistic construction of identity, in the early nineteenth century. While Michaelson does devote a chapter to historically-specific (and yet frustratingly familiar) stereotypes of women’s speech, her project is, for the most part, celebratory. She, for example, focuses less on women’s exclusion from public oral performance and than she does recuperate silence and domestic, private conversation. Through talking in the home, women “developed strategies that enabled them both to achieve their local goals within the conversation and construct identities that went beyond the stereotype” (9). She divides her study into two parts. The first is devoted to individual case studies (those of Quaker Amelia Opie and actress Sarah Siddons), showcasing women’s complex and various constructions of linguistic identities. She moves, in her second part, to a discussion of the relation between speech and reading in the “age of Austen.” She uses the reading practices of Frances Burney’s family to examine how “oral performance of literature could function in bourgeois domestic life” (138). Her book culminates in a chapter on the representation of speech in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, books that provide the foundation for her argument that novels took the place of conversation manuals, both tools for developing skills in speech and conversation.
While Speaking Volumes is one of the very few pieces of scholarship (Andrew Elfenbein’s and Phillip Collins’s being two others) that examines reading aloud in the nineteenth-century, I am ultimately unimpressed by the project in its monograph form. The book reads as distinct essays that, in some way or another, relate to speech and women. Yet, the chapters fail to cohere around one argument. She purports to use her chapters to build up to the claim that novels took the place of conversation manuals, a claim I find unconvincing. She grounds this argument in close reading of conversation in Austen novels, yet she provides no evidence that readers actually used Austen novels in this way. She also tends to use individual case studies (Jane Austen, the Burney family, Sarah Siddons, and Amelia Opie) to make wide-sweeping claims about women, speech, and oral performance by claiming that each example is “representative” in some way. Yet I think she makes some suspect leaps in her move from particularities to generalities. This results in a study of women and speech that seems insufficiently substantiated and, as she herself admits, limited to an urban, upper-middle class demographic.
