My Mother Said I Never Should - Dialogue

One approach to thinking about the dialog in a work of fiction is by comparing and contrasting one character’s speech with another’s.

How can you distinguish between two characters? Can you identify differing vocabularies or registers? Do characters change their style of speech over time, or vary it by situation? Can you identify any patterns in how characters vary their speech, perhaps by hierarchies of relationship according to social standing or familial position?

My Mother Said I Never Should appears on the surface to be about the most mundane of events. The characters gather for birthdays, for brief visits, stop by after a holiday, fold laundry and sort household objects. Yet the dialog is rarely simple: each apparently innocent statement or question is revealed to have a subtext only understood by those conversing. This technique requires close attention, especially if you are reading the play rather than watching it.

One highly practical method of preparing for a literature exam is by memorizing some dialog. Choose a few key lines for each character, always taking care to identify which theme or themes the lines touch upon. This practice will aid your memory and help you to decide which quotations might be useful in an exam essay.

The quiz below asks you to remember which character speaks the words. Think for a moment about the significance of the quoted dialog before answering. How might you decide if the language is specific to a particular character? Is it possible for two different characters to have spoken the same words? Why, or why not? What does this tell you?