Accents

My latest completed novel (read, not written) is Richard D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, a romance set in Exmoor, England, during the late 1600's. I have long been aware of the variety of accents contained in Britain - think Henry Higgins - but I don't believe I have ever read a novel with such untranslatable written accents as Lorna Doone. Fortunately the main characters are not given accents, but for the lesser characters, Blackmore renders their ways of speaking phonetically; and when one of the good men of Exmoor relates a fairly important (and fairly lengthy) story about highwayman Tom Faggus, I could not understand one fourth of what he was saying.

But for all that, I found it to Blackmore's credit that he went to all that trouble to accurately portray the speech of country folk in the regions covered in Lorna Doone. While many people think that a British accent means dropping one's h's in Cockney style, in reality the whole of Britain is covered by different "dialects," which can vary even between two towns in the same county. Some are less noticeable than others, but the interesting thing about watching an excessive amount of British television is that, after awhile, you begin to notice different accents among the actors. These are often masked by voice training; for example, Colin Morgan, who plays Merlin in the BBC series 'Merlin', is Irish, but hides his accent in the series so that it only slips out on rare occasions.

Another book that uses British dialects, but less overwhelmingly, is Burnett's The Secret Garden. Taking place in Yorkshire, Burnett brings in the Broad Yorkshire speech of the working class, which has the two-pronged effect of grounding the reader in the location and portraying the different levels of society. These are even more clearly shown in the 2004 British TV serial "North & South," based on Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South. Whether it was intentional or not, I found it interesting that the change from the rural, slow-moving, peaceful South to the fast and industrial North is reflected in the different ways of speaking between the Hales (who have moved up from the South) and the Thorntons (a very Northern family). Daniela Denby-Ashe, who plays main character Margaret Hale, has a very soft and "round" voice, whereas Richard Armitage, who plays Mr. Thornton, speaks through his nose and with his jaw set, giving him a harsh tone. The series also differentiates between the workers and the masters of the cotton mills, for among the workers, the dialect of the region is much more pronounced than among the higher-class "masters."

Accents must be used with more caution in writing than in film, since phonetically-rendered speech can be cluttered and confusing, rendering the dialogue unintelligible. However, they are exceedingly useful and interesting when done well and deserve at least a passing acquaintance, as some knowledge of the dialects of different regions, whether British or not, bring depth and accuracy to writing.

Jane Eyre vs. The Secret Garden

At first glance, two books like Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden seem to have nothing in common. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is the prototype of a Gothic romance - dark, brooding, and suspenseful - while Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden is a children's story, full of light and vivid colours. And it is true: they have almost nothing in common. The only feature they share is the setting, the haunting, beautiful wilderness of Britain, and yet it could easily be said that that very landscape is a major factor in making the two books such polar opposites.

In the black-and-grey story of Jane Eyre, many of the scenes take place in some level of darkness, either at night or on stormy days. Since the story is set in a secluded part of England where it rains a good part of every season, the wilderness enhances the Gothic feel of the novel and lends it an eerie atmosphere; the dark stone walls and passages of Thornfield Hall would not have been half as sinister without the added effect of the weather and landscape outside. Bronte emphasized in her novel the haunting allure of Britain's moorlands, which set the perfect backdrop for Jane Eyre's story.

"I struck straight into the heath; I held on to a hollow I saw deeply furrowing the brown moorside; I waded knee-deep in its dark growth; I turned with its turnings, and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a hidden angle, I sat down under it. High banks of moor were about me; the crag protected my head: the sky was over that." (Jane Eyre - Chapter 28.)

The Secret Garden, on the other hand, displays the opposite feature of the moors. While the frequent storms and rains do give the landscape a shadowy feel, they also mean that when the sun does shine, the scenery is turned into an amazingly beautiful, otherworldly place. Whereas Charlotte Bronte depicts black moors with stormy grey skies above, Frances Hodgson Burnett shows a rolling landscape of greens, yellows, purples, and whites beneath a clear blue sky. It is this sort of loveliness that characterizes her story and makes it magical, providing not only a background, but a vital part of the story as the beauty of the Yorkshire moors changes the main character altogether.

"'Look at the moor! Look at the moor!'
"The rainstorm had ended and the grey mist and clouds had been swept away in the night by the wind. The wind itself had ceased and a brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland. Never, never had Mary dreamed of a sky so blue. In India skies were hot a blazing; this was a deep cool blue which almost seemed to sparkle like the waters of some lovely bottomless lake, and here and there, high, high in the arched blueness floated small clouds of snow-white fleece. The far-reaching world of the moor itself looked softly blue instead of gloomy purple-black or awful dreary grey." (The Secret Garden - The Key of the Garden.)

While the moors are perhaps one of the most vivid examples of the powers of a landscape, there are few places that do not display this sort of change from one day to another, or from one season to the next. Deserts, for instance, are seen as flat stretches of sand, sand, sand, and more sand, but on that rare day when rain does fall, the entire landscape changes as plants burst into momentary flower. The endless terrain, rock formations, and blue skies of the Badlands of the Midwestern United States have a lonely appeal that goes beyond the dry, monotonous way they are generally seen. (Or so they say; I fail to see it, myself...) These sorts of stereotype-reversals can be interesting to see used in writing, and to use in our own; the depiction of a single landscape can alter drastically, depending merely on whether the story is a Jane Eyre or a Secret Garden.