Forty-nine: Pygmalion

THE NOTE TAKER: You see this creature with his Queen's English: the English that will keep him on the dole queue to the end of his days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass him off as an American graduate student at a faculty-student tea party. I could even get him a place as an American historian which requires altogether different English.

When I came to do graduate work in the United States, I was immediately confronted by the need to alter my writing style. Such style as I had acquired would have been representative of the British public (private) school and the British university system – not Oxbridge perhaps, but a very respectable Scottish version. This style was marked by long sentences and a liberal use of the passive voice. Such style, I soon learned, was verboten in an American graduate school. Indeed, any manual of style that one might consult would almost always tell you to eschew the passive voice, and make all sentences, where possible, active. I did not perceive the need for this change myself, but was soon informed that it would need to be done. Rather, I would need to do this. The first seminar paper draft that I handed in was so marked up when it was returned to me that almost every sentence needed alteration. Indeed, my professor had marked up so many of my sentences that I would have to alter almost every one. 

No harm done, I suppose. My sentences were shortened and simplified; I even did this myself: I shortened and simplified my sentences. Now, I would no longer sound like Gibbon, or to the American ear a longwinded gibbon, but would be to the point and direct. My actors would do their acting, and my thick description would have the benefit of all being about people actively doing things. Agency would be clear for one and all.

The significance of this for me is more than mere nostalgia. I am no Eliza Doolittle. I do not feel that I have been changed irreparably by several American Henry Higginses, and that this is not entirely a good thing. The point is rather to note that American academics’ preference for the active voice over the passive says something about them. This is a political preference, and links tidily to the kind of social history that has predominated in the United States. There is something that we might consider very American about the notion of agency (even if it descends from E.P. Thompson, we can blame it on his American Mom!), because having people make their own history and performing these things in the active voice can, I think, be tied to the gendered discourse of republicanism (i.e., the idea of independence as the mark of respectability). [Now, before I am accused of being an exceptionalist, let me say that this was also one of the characteristics of the British colonial official charged with the duty of uplifting the "benighted" masses – acting. It was also part of the anti-intellectual ethos of the British public school (a connection that may be suggestive about the atheoretical proclivities of Social Historians).] 

But the active voice only ever takes us so far. However hard we try we always seem to stumble on the person trapped in his/her passive passivity – the subaltern who is certainly not able to speak in the active tongue of the bona fide citizen of History.