Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure

Abstract

Literature is full of voices. This is clearest in those kinds of writing – plays, monologues, and the like – that present nothing but the speaking voice. But even a narrator can be thought of as speaking in a voice; indeed, everything we read can be attributed to some sort of person, can be thought of as spoken by a character. When we pick up a love sonnet we wonder about the character who speaks its words. We have no way of telling if the voice is that of a real or an imaginary lover; and knowing that the sonnet is by a particular author will only help if we are happy to identify the person presented by the poem with the person of the author. A familiarity with rhetoric will teach us to be cautious, to think about the poem as an exercise in creating a lifelike speaking voice. We may still choose to think that this voice is that of the author, but rhetorical theory will remind us that such self-representation is no different from the representation of another, real or imagined, that even when we speak for ourselves we are wearing a mask, though of our own making. There is something intrinsically literary – fictive – about the creation of speaking voices. In The Defence of Poesy , Philip Sidney argues that poetry is better at teaching moral lessons than either philosophy or history.

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