“Double consciousness” and “dual-voice”: Ambivalence and free indirect style in novels and film

This project compares and analyzes five novels and three films: Jane Austen’s Emma, Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment and Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s. I describe a link between the uses of free indirect style, a “dual-voiced” narrative mode that combines two distinct perspectives into one instance of discourse: that of a narrator and that of a character, and psychological ambivalence, the back and forth wavering of a fictional character. I focus on novels and narrative fiction films that center on one character, and I show the ways in which these works call attention to a character’s ambivalence and hesitations while relying on free indirect style, a formally ambivalent narrative mode, to expose and, at times, to create ambivalence in the mind of the reader or viewer. As an interdisciplinary project, this dissertation locates free indirect style in prose and cinematic narration, and it also explores the implications of analyzing a traditionally linguistic and literary mode within cinema.