Metaphor and Memory by Cynthia Ozick

Author:Cynthia Ozick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

In 1905, to drop the r was to drop, for the cultivated ear, a principle of taste; but for our democratic noblewomen four decades on, exactly the reverse was true. James’s New York/Boston expectations, reinforced by southern England, assumed that Eastern American speech, tied as it was to the cultural reign of London, had a right to rule and to rule out. The history and sociolinguistics governing this reversal is less pressing to examine than the question of “standard speech” itself. James thought that “the voice plus the way it is employed” determined “positively the history of the national character, almost the history of the people.” His views on all this, his alarms and anxieties, he compressed into a fluid little talk (“The Question of Our Speech”) he gave at the Bryn Mawr College commencement of June 8, 1905—exactly one year and two days before my mother, nine years old, having passed through Castle Garden, stood on the corner of Battery Park, waiting to board the horsecar for Madison Street on the Lower East Side.

James was in great fear of the child waiting for the horsecar. “Keep in sight,” he warned, “the so interesting historical truth that no language, so far back as our acquaintance with history goes, has known any such ordeal, any such stress or strain, as was to await the English in this huge new community it was to help, at first, to father and mother. It came over, as the phrase is, came over originally without fear and without guile—but to find itself transplanted to spaces it had never dreamed, in its comparative humility, of covering, to conditions it had never dreamed, in its comparative innocence, of meeting.” He spoke of English as an “unfriended heroine,” “our transported medium, our unrescued Andromeda, our medium of utterance, . . . disjoined from all the associations, the other presences, that had attended her, that had watched for her and with her, that had helped to form her manners and her voice, her taste and her genius.”

And if English, orphaned as it was and cut off from its “ancestral circle,” did not have enough to contend with in its own immigrant situation, arriving “without fear and without guile” only to be ambushed by “a social and political order that was both without previous precedent and example and incalculably expansive,” including also the expansiveness of a diligent public school network and “the mighty maniac” of journalism—if all this was not threatening enough, there was the special danger my nine-year-old mother posed. She represented an unstable new ingredient. She represented violation, a kind of linguistic Armageddon. She stood for disorder and promiscuity. “I am perfectly aware,” James said at Bryn Mawr,

that the common school and the newspaper are influences that shall often have been named to you, exactly, as favorable, as positively and actively contributive, to the prosperity of our idiom; the answer to which is that the matter depends, distinctively, on what is meant by prosperity. It is prosperity, of

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