Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexBell
In the first few lines of the first chapter of The Professor by Charlotte Brontė there is the following passage:
When I had declined my uncles' offers they asked me "What I intended to do?" I said I should reflect. They reminded me that I had no fortune, and no expectation of any, and, after a considerable pause, Lord Tynedale demanded sternly, "Whether I had thoughts of following my father's steps and engaging in trade?"
The words between the quotation marks are obviously not the actual words the speaker said; they are the meaning of what the speaker said. But the words are within quotations marks. I think that Charlotte Brontė used this 'technique' much more often than Elizabeth Gaskell or Harriet Martineau did. If I wanted to test this hypothesis by counting, what would I be counting? Is there a name for putting a speaker's meaning in quotations marks rather than the actual words the speaker would have said?
And why would a writer do it anyway? The words would convey exactly the same meaning if the quotation and question marks were left out.
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for me, this technique invokes a mental image of the storytelling of Micheal Peńa (Luis) in Ant-Man. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. The character is clearly paraphrasing, but the voiceover is accompanied by an image of the original characters speaking the pharaphrased words. So I'd view the Bronte passage as subtly humorous, which I hope was her intent.