‘From their point of view’: voice and speech in George Moore’s Esther Waters

Abstract

George Moore’s Esther Waters 1983 [1894] has been praised by critics for the sustained manner in which Esther serves as the controlling consciousness of her own story. This article explores the possibility of using stylistic accounts of some of the distinctive linguistic features of the text to offer an explanation of this. As an illiterate servant girl as well as an unrepentant ‘fallen woman’, Esther is an unlikely and, at the time of first publication, controversial heroine, let alone central consciousness. The narrative of the novel is considered in terms of Uspensky’s (1973) notion of ‘point of view’, and various later developments of this, in order to assess how Esther acts as ‘characterfocalizer’ for her own story. The manner in which Esther gives ‘voice’ to that story is examined with reference to Leech and Short’s (1981) ‘cline of speech presentation’. Further, it is argued that Esther’s ‘voice’ is not only heard when her speech is represented, but permeates the narration of her story. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of ‘voice-images’ is used to explore this idea. Throughout the discussion of these themes, comparisons are drawn with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel very close to Esther Waters in date and theme, but in which some significantly different linguistic choices are made. It is argued that these differences can, in part, account for the different viewpoints, or ideological stances, of the two texts.¹