Voice

Literature depends a great deal on the manner in which the identity of the author, narrator, or speaker is perceived by the reader. Voice is the literary term for this presence. Sometimes the author speaks without pretense as the author; sometimes he or she adopts a persona—that is, a mask of some kind. Sometimes he or she creates a narrator who has a distinctive voice of his or her own separate from the author; sometimes the narrator is simply a mouthpiece for the author. Sometimes there is apparently no narrator or authorial presence at all.

The voice of a work may be difficult to perceive because often it lies behind the story itself. However, it may be inferred through tone and mood. Tone measures the author's attitude toward the reader; mood measures the author's attitude toward the subject matter. As an example, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is quite outspoken in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is earnest in tone as she reveals the evils of slavery to her audience and argues for its abolition; her mood is a combination of bitter sarcasm and sympathy: She is sarcastic toward those who profit from slavery or compromise with it, and she is sympathetic toward the slaves.

There have been several famous misappraisals of voice that have led to misinterpretation of intentions and even punishment for authors. Daniel Defoe's The Shortest Way With the Dissenters was an ironic mockery of the intolerance of Anglicans toward dissenting Protestants that landed him in jail for sedition, neither side in the controversy having much patience with the subtleties of voice in his work. The letters of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther so inspired young men to suicide pacts that Goethe was asked to preface the second edition of the work (ostensibly in the voice of Werther himself) with a warning for young men not to follow his path to suicide.

A master of using voice was Frederick Douglass, who used two voices for rhetorical advantage in his famous Fourth of July speech. He began in a conciliatory tone searching for common ground between him and his audience, then abruptly changed course and, emphasizing the vast distance between him—a slave—and the audience—free men and women—denounced the present generation of Americans for their sloth in not fighting for freedom as their ancestors once had.

The use of voice in fiction and poetry is multi-faceted. Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction categorizes the many forms that the author's voice can take in novels and stories. In one of the earliest novels, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, the author is a reliable commentator who speaks boldly in his own voice to provide facts, describe scenes, or summarize action. He is reliable in that the reader can trust that his words are truthful. Such commentators can be used to mold beliefs as well. Jane Austen establishes moral norms in her novels and then, usually in an ironic mood, shows characters stumbling over them. A later author, Kate Chopin, establishes an unconventional moral norm in “The Storm,” one in which extramarital affairs need not have any more consequence than a thunderstorm that cools and freshens the summer air.

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