Linguistic divergence and convergence

In Elizabeth George's recent novel The Punishment She Deserves, there's a passage where someone uses a sociolinguistic choice to communicate her attitude towards an interaction. This reminded me of another fictional example of the same thing, and I'm sure that readers will come up with more.

A key theme of The Punishment She Deserves is the damage done by mothers' attempts to monitor and control their children. Yasmina Lomax, a pediatrician, is upset because her daughter Missa has dropped out of college and is planning to marry a Justin, a friend since childhood who is now working as a blacksmith and trying to set up a business building small houses. After other interventions fail, Yasmina goes to visit Justin's mother.

It was minutes from the closing hour, and there were only three vehicles in the car park. Yasmina went inside and asked the ticket seller for Linda Goodayle, since Justin’s mum, as Yasmina well knew, was the director of the museum. She also knew that it was a source of pride to the Goodayle clan that Linda had begun as a ticket seller years earlier, when the museum was a mere shadow of the impressive educational facility it was today. She’d risen through the ranks exactly as her husband had done at Blists Hill Victorian Town. Despite their lack of university degrees or even any form of college, they were doers, movers, and shakers, the Goodayles.

After some interactions with receptionists and the like, she goes outside to wait, and Linda Goodayle comes out to speak with her.

“Dr. Lomax . . . ?”

Yasmina turned. She recognised Linda Goodayle, of course, as they’d known each other for years. She also recognised what it meant that Linda had not used her given name. She said, “Please. Yasmina. May I speak with you, Linda? It’s urgent.”

Linda observed her with an expression that seemed devoid of all sentiment. She said, “Yeah. I expect it is. Your lot don’t much like su’prises.”

Yasmina wasn’t fool enough to think there was nothing behind Linda’s choice of distinct accent. She was using it as an implication from which Yasmina was meant to infer, Our backgrounds are different and don’t I know how you feel about mine.

Yasmina felt her teeth dig into her lips. This wasn’t how they were meant to begin. Somehow, Linda Goodayle had quickly managed to get the upper hand.

“But there’s always su’prises in life, innit?” Linda dug round in her bag and brought out a packet of chewing gum. It was, Yasmina saw, a nicotine gum of the sort people used when they were trying to give up smoking. She realised that she hadn’t known Linda smoked in the first place, and she wondered if this lack of knowledge on her part marked her as a social snob.

“So this speaking you want to do, Yasmina. It’s ’bout my Justin, innit?” Linda popped a piece of the gum into her mouth and shoved its wrapper into the pocket of the hip-length cardigan she was wearing. “What I mean, ’course, is my Justin and your Missa. Tha’s why you’ve stopped to have a little word with me.”

Please oh please stop speaking like that, was what Yasmina wanted to say, because of the disadvantage Linda was causing her. But she knew that going in that direction would result in a conversation about class and any social differences that existed between their respective children and to whatever Linda believed that Yasmina thought about those differences.

This reminded me of the much more central role that English dialect differences play in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which despite its reputation has more in it about linguistic ideology than about sex.

When Connie (Lady Chatterly) is first introduced to Mellors (the gamekeeper who will become her lover),

He gave another slight bow, turned, put his hat on, and strode to take hold of the chair. His voice on the last words had fallen into the heavy broad drag of the dialect…perhaps also in mockery, because there had been no trace of dialect before. He might almost be a gentleman.

The vernacular appears again in their early interactions, perhaps hinting at intimacy rather than mockery:

'Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill…I hope it wasn't heavy for you,' said Connie, looking back at the keeper outside the door.

His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of her.

'Oh no, not heavy!' he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into the broad sound of the vernacular: 'Good mornin' to your Ladyship!'

We learn a bit more about Mellors' dialect choices in this passage, as Lord Clifford explains:

'You know he had a wife he didn't get on with, so he joined up in 1915 and was sent to India, I believe. Anyhow he was blacksmith to the cavalry in Egypt for a time; always was connected with horses, a clever fellow that way. Then some Indian colonel took a fancy to him, and he was made a lieutenant. Yes, they gave him a commission. I believe he went back to India with his colonel, and up to the north-west frontier. He was ill; he was a pension. He didn't come out of the army till last year, I believe, and then, naturally, it isn't easy for a man like that to get back to his own level. He's bound to flounder. But he does his duty all right, as far as I'm concerned. Only I'm not having any of the Lieutenant Mellors touch.'

'How could they make him an officer when he speaks broad Derbyshire?'

'He doesn't…except by fits and starts. He can speak perfectly well, for him. I suppose he has an idea if he's come down to the ranks again, he'd better speak as the ranks speak.'

And it's made clear that Mellors sometimes uses "good English" to distance himself:

'Are you sad today?' she asked him.

He turned his blue eyes quickly, and gazed direct on her.

'Sad! no, bored! I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I caught, and, oh well, I don't like people.'

He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice.

At first, Connie finds his dialect unpleasant and even disgusting:

She wept bitterly, sobbing. 'But I want to love you, and I can't. It only seems horrid.'

He laughed a little, half bitter, half amused.

'It isna horrid,' he said, 'even if tha thinks it is. An' tha canna ma'e it horrid. Dunna fret thysen about lovin' me. Tha'lt niver force thysen to 't. There's sure to be a bad nut in a basketful. Tha mun ta'e th' rough wi' th' smooth.'

He took his hand away from her breast, not touching her. And now she was untouched she took an almost perverse satisfaction in it. She hated the dialect: the thee and the tha and the thysen.

Until she doesn't:

When he came back she was still lying there, glowing like a gipsy. He sat on the stool by her.

'Tha mun come one naight ter th' cottage, afore tha goos; sholl ter?' he asked, lifting his eyebrows as he looked at her, his hands dangling between his knees.

'Sholl ter?' she echoed, teasing.

He smiled. 'Ay, sholl ter?' he repeated.

'Ay!' she said, imitating the dialect sound.

'Yi!' he said.

'Yi!' she repeated.

'An' slaip wi' me,' he said. 'It needs that. When sholt come?'

'When sholl I?' she said.

'Nay,' he said, 'tha canna do't. When sholt come then?'

"Appen Sunday,' she said.

"Appen a' Sunday! Ay!'

And the narrative description reflects the change in her attitudes:

He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves and the globe-fullness.

'Tha's got such a nice tail on thee,' he said, in the throaty caressive dialect. 'Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is! An' ivery bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha'rt not one o' them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha's got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in 'is guts. It's a bottom as could hold the world up, it is!'

Mellors can be seen as the original MPDB, the Derbyshire body to Connie's RP mind. Certainly that's the implication of Susan Sontag's complaint (in "Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death", 1961) that

Lawrence’s ideas on sex are seriously marred by his class-romanticism, by his mystique of male separateness, by his puritanical insistence on genital sexuality.

But in any case, it's important to the plot that Mellors is bidialectal, and the book ends with a letter from him to Connie that's in "good English" but hardly cold:

Well, so many words, because I can't touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle. We could be chaste together just as we can fuck together. But we have to be separate for a while, and I suppose it is really the wiser way. If only one were sure.

Never mind, never mind, we won't get worked up. We really trust in the little flame, and in the unnamed god that shields it from being blown out. There's so much of you here with me, really, that it's a pity you aren't all here.

Never mind about Sir Clifford. If you don't hear anything from him, never mind. He can't really do anything to you. Wait, he will want to get rid of you at last, to cast you out. And if he doesn't, we'll manage to keep clear of him. But he will. In the end he will want to spew you out as the abominable thing.

Now I can't even leave off writing to you.

But a great deal of us is together, and we can but abide by it, and steer our courses to meet soon. John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.