Amy R. Wong, Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023) xii+228 pp. $70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503635173
Amy R. Wong’s Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk is a provocative and ambitious intervention in Victorian studies, postcolonial theory, and literary criticism. Wong interrogates the ideological stakes of speech and talk in late Victorian fiction, proposing that speech—defined as a ‘proprietary fantasy’ (1) of perfect self-expression —anchors colonialist subjectivity, while talk, as an unstable and ‘insurgent force’ (18), disrupts and disarticulates imperial logic. She suggests that late Victorian fiction wrestles with the implications of speech’s breakdown, revealing anxieties about colonial authority and racialised bodies. This juxtaposition of speech’s aesthetic ideal with talk’s precariousness forms the core of her analysis.
The monograph is structured into four chapters, each dedicated to a Victorian novel: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerers (1891), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors (1901). Through incisive readings of these canonical and lesser-known texts, Wong reconfigures our understanding of speech as an aesthetic and political construct intertwined with empire, race, and personhood.
Wong’s expansive approach is timely, engaging contemporary debates about linguistic ownership, accent discrimination, and the racialisation of fluency. However, Refiguring Speech is not without its limitations, particularly as it pertains to the scope of the argument it attempts to encompass. For instance, Wong’s Introduction is as wide-ranging as it is fragmented. Her topics of discussion in this section alone include ‘Speech, The Coloniality of Being, and Race-Thinking’, ‘The Poetics of Talk’, ‘Victorian Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Anticolonial Poeisis’ and ‘Speech, Media, and Territorial Expansion’. This ambitious contextual survey of the era rather muddies than clarifies her core concepts. Additionally, her terminology can be difficult to pinpoint. As she argues that ‘Talk, rather, is an insurgent force that hovers primarily outside these late Victorian fictions of empire, forming a counterpoetics that circulates in a surround that these fictions are incapable of imagining’ (18), one wonders whether talk becomes so nebulous as to evade useful definition altogether.
In Chapter One, Wong discusses the anti-colonial potential of eavesdropping and parroting as forms of non-proprietary speech in Treasure Island. Drawing on John Locke’s concept of mimicry, she argues that the pirates’ talk threatens colonial personhood and ownership. While this chapter is conceptually rich, it is marred by a logical fallacy: Wong suggests that pirates are racialised as ‘differently white’ (47), yet in doing so, she risks conflating the racialised devaluation of nonwhite speech with any form of speech degradation. Just because nonwhite people were considered inarticulate does not mean that every inarticulate speaker is being coded as non-white. Similarly,Wong highlights the exclusion of Long John Silver’s African wife from the text, but her attempt to redress this by arbitrarily reading his parrot as a racialised and gendered voice is a provocative but underdeveloped argument.
In Chapter Two, Wong analyses multilingualism in Dracula, making a compelling case for how monolingualism operates as a unifying, hegemonic force in the novel. The Eastern European villagers’ bodies become broken machines incapable of storing multiple language systems, in contrast to Jonathan Harker who retains his self-possession through controlled, disembodied translation. Wong’s assertion that ‘multilingual bodies are always already racialized bodies’ (82) is thought-provoking and generates a fruitful dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s concept of the chaos-monde. Wong presents Van Helsing as the potential source of resistance against both the force of monolingualism and the breakdown of multilingualism, as he is the only multilingual character to circumvent the desire for ‘perfect’ language acquisition, instead retaining his Dutch accent and ‘improper’ grammar.
Chapters Three and Four are the most mutually engaged as Wong examines the Profuse Inarticulacy of George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerers and the Dysfluency of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors. Together, these chapters contrast the concepts of saying too much versus saying too little. These authors were criticised for their prose upon the texts’ first reception, but it is for those same reasons that Wong praises them as ‘illuminating figure[s] for understanding the fragility of articulacy in colonialist world-making’ (94). Her discussion here highlights how these texts’ representations of speech’s collapse signal a crisis not only of empire but of novelistic form itself. Meredith’s interest in disarticulation is directly linked to his perception of England’s decline in the late-nineteenth century and similarly, the dysfluent Englishmen in The Inheritors undergo an apparently pejorative process of racialisation and feminisation, due to the proliferation of new media. Ultimately, Wong uses these texts to argue that ‘a different orientation ‘beyond’ coloniality […] is already occurring— and has always occurred’ (128) in border spaces such as the gaps of The Inheritors’ speech.
In her conclusion, Wong powerfully asserts that the ‘perfect fluency of speech is just a fever dream of imperialists’ (158). This final pronouncement encapsulates the book’s most compelling intervention: a challenge to the colonialist fantasy of linguistic mastery and self-possession. However, while Wong’s book is ambitious, timely, and rich in theoretical insight, its argumentation occasionally falters under the weight of its own complexity and lack of compelling textual evidence. Several of her concluding arguments for these chapters state that these texts ‘stop short of according [talk] anticolonial potential’ (41), due to genre limitations or other less well-defined reasons. Yet this absence does not necessarily indicate suppressed anticolonialism and Wong’s attempts to counterbalance their ‘stopping short’ often lead to the risk of ascribing too much anticolonial potential where there is minimal evidence for it. She hedgingly suggests that these authors ‘might not have been entirely against such an anticolonial repurposing of [their] work’ (123). But, she argues, even if they were against it, since she is not their ideal intended reader but a liberal, Asian American, twenty-first-century reader, she should be allowed to eavesdrop on these texts and ‘mediate the text with [her] presence and to let it mediate [her]’ (62). Wong clearly anticipates the primary criticism of Refiguring Speech and her counter-argument that ‘to remain stuck with ambivalence as the final pronouncement […] is to remain within terms set by coloniality’(62) is certainly thought-provoking, and perhaps justifies the admirable lengths she goes to locate anticolonial potential in talk.
Ultimately, Refiguring Speech is a bold and necessary contribution to Victorian studies and postcolonial critique. It challenges us to rethink the politics of language in empire’s fictions, even as it raises questions about the limits of theory-driven literary analysis. While Wong does not always provide definitive answers, her work offers a crucial provocation: who owns speech, and what possibilities emerge when speech unravels? Wong does not always provide definitive answers, but in inviting us to rethink the politics of language in empire’s fictions, she opens up new avenues for future scholarship. Her most urgent reminder is that ‘Late Victorian tropes on degraded speakers circulate, still, as our own’ (17)—a call to interrogate not just historical texts but the inherited linguistic biases of today.
Reo Lewis, University of Exeter
