TEXT 11
First-person singular (I) as well as first-person plural (everybody): ‘everybody had’, ‘I had’
TEXT 12
First-person plural (we) with varying exclusions or inclusions depending on the speaker as detailed below
ATTRIBUTION Text 10 Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure, p. 73.
Text 11 Gordon Burn, Alma Cogan, pp. 114–15. Text 12 John Masters, Bhowani Junction, p. 24.
Verdict
The first-person plural pronoun need not necessarily be plural in referent. Further, it may or may not include the speaker and/or reader: it can be exclusive in referent as well as inclusive.
TEXT 10
In Text 10 the teacher is using the kind of language adults use to children when she says to the child ‘we mustn’t cry’ and ‘we must be brave’. The first-person plural pronoun actually has a singular referent, the child. The child is, in fact, rather too old to be addressed in this way and so the teacher’s clumsy attempts at comforting are perceived as patronising rather than pacifying.
TEXT 11
Text 11 has only one instance of we, ‘Starting from the feet we had:’, yet it sets the ironical, mocking tone of the passage. The fictionalised narrator is Alma Cogan, a British pop singer from the 1950s, and she is being approached by a man who, by his stereotyped appearance, looks as if he works, or would like to work, in the record business. This use of we is also singular in referent, in that the narrator is speaking only for herself; yet it is also global and impersonal (compare the paraphrases: starting from the feet one had, or starting from the feet there was, or, losing the mockery, starting from the feet he wore). This use of we serves to divide the approaching PR man from the rest of humanity, thereby aligning Alma Cogan with the reader. The effect is inclusive, uniting narrator and reader in a common reaction to the approach of the newcomer.
TEXT 12
This text is taken from a novel about the status of people of mixed ancestry in India. It focuses, by contrast, on the exclusive properties of we:
1 we think God fixed everything in India
(we Anglo-Indians) 2 we despise the Indians, but we need them
(we Anglo-Indians) 3 we take them there
(we Anglo-Indians) 4 she talked the way we do
(we Anglo-Indians?) 5 when we leave
(we Englishmen) 6 we’re not going to do anything
(we Indians) Each of the three racial groups uses we to exclude the other two groups. Inherent in inclusion with one group is exclusion from the others. The Indian shows by his emphasis on the word we (‘We’re not going to do anything’) that the cohesive group of residents in India identified by the English colonel doesn’t in fact exist. 26 THE NOUN PHRASE
Rather, the Indians perceive themselves as separate from the Anglo-Indian community, and vice versa. Neither the English nor the Indians wish to have any responsibility for the-Anglo-Indians. This text is about identity; in particular, about how difficult it is for the Anglo-Indians to have any self-identity in a society where social hierarchy depends on racial background. The pronoun we can take on hostile overtones when used to distinguish one group of speakers from another in this way.
SUMMARY
We can be put to several uses, with effect. It may include the reader, or convey lack of affiliation, as well as affiliation.
1.7
Pronouns: the second person Definition
In strict grammatical terms, you is the pronoun used to address one person (singular) or more than one (plural). However, just as one can be used generally, and we can be used in the singular, the referent of you in actual usage can be surprising.
TASK 1
Look at the you forms in the following text—do they all have the same reference?
TEXT 13
‘Little Ricky Ricardo,’ she said.She squeaked her nails up and down the spine of the book. I could tell she was hurting. ‘It can’t mean much to you.’
‘You’ll be okay.’
‘So I waited too long,’ she said. ‘I wrote poems. I was going to be the next Adrienne Rich. I mean, it isn’t the end of the world or anything.’
She got me there, too.
You hove nice hips,’ she said. But she gave the ‘you‘ a generic sweep. You teeming millions with wide hips breeding like roaches on wide-hipped continents. ‘Wide. Nature meant you to carry babies.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. What else could I have said?
You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ I didn’t deny it. ‘It was easy, wasn’t it? You didn’t wait, you’re lucky.’
The truth is, I am young enough to bear children into the next century. But. I feel old, very old, millennia old, a bug-eyed viewer of beginnings and ends. In the old Hindu books they say that in the eye of the creator, mountains rise and fall like waves on the ocean.
TASK 2
What person forms does this text use to refer to the old woman? Why do the forms pattern as they do?
TEXT 14
The weakening winds of spring fawned against the old house. The old woman’s thoughts cowered in the hot room where she sat in solitude…She would not see her niece…Keep her away…
Make some excuse. Shut her out. She had been here a month and you had not seen her. She thought it strange, did she? She dropped hints that she would like to see you. You did not want to see her. You felt…you felt…some strange emotion at the thought of her. You would not see her. Your thoughts wound slowly round the room like beasts rubbing against the drowsy walls. And outside the walls the winds rubbed like drowsy beasts. Half-way between the inside and the outside walls, winds and thoughts were both drowsy. How enervating was the warm wind of the coming spring…
When you were very small—so small that the lightest puff of breeze blew your little crinoline skirt over your head—you had seen something nasty in the woodshed.
You’d never forgotten it.
You’d never spoken of it to Mamma—you could smell, even to this day, the fresh betel-nut with which her shoes were always cleaned—but you’d remembered all your life.
That was what had made you…different. That—what you had seen in the tool- shed—had made your marriage a prolonged nightmare to you.
Somehow you had never bothered about what it had been like for your husband…
That was why you had brought your children into the world with loathing. Even now, when you were seventy-nine, you could never see a bicycle go past your bedroom window without a sick plunge at the apex of your stomach…in the bicycle shed you’d seen it, something nasty, when you were very small.
That was why you stayed in this room. You had been here for twenty years, ever since Judith had married and her husband had come to live at the farm. You had run away from the huge, terrifying world outside these four walls against 28 THE NOUN PHRASE
which your thoughts rubbed themselves like drowsy yaks. Yes, that was what they were like. Yaks. Exactly like yaks.
Solution
TEXT 13