Open AccessDepicting Women Through Transitivity Choices: A Comparative Analysis
Author(s) -
Tazanfal Tehseem,
Humera Iqbal,
Saba Zulfiqar
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
pakistan journal of women's studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2708-8065
pISSN - 1024-1256
DOI - 10.46521/pjws.028.01.0087
Subject(s) - ideology , transitive relation , depiction , feminism , critical discourse analysis , romance , perspective (graphical) , affect (linguistics) , gender studies , sociology , systemic functional linguistics , field (mathematics) , psychology , literature , linguistics , psychoanalysis , art , philosophy , politics , law , mathematics , communication , combinatorics , political science , pure mathematics , visual arts
The study aims at depicting how male and female authors portray female characters and how their core ideologies and social influences affect these depictions. This study is based on the feminist stylistic approach, proposed by Sara Mills (1995), embedded with the literary theory of feminism. It is an overlapping field that has its roots in critical discourse analysis. This stance is significant as it allows to critically look at the substance to uncover the ideology related to women. From a feminist stylistic perspective, the notion of presenting the distorted image of the female entity is associated with male authors leading to the point that female authors portray female characters positively as compared to their male counterparts. By employing Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytic tool, the utterances of the female protagonists from both the novels: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, have been analysed into the process, participants and circumstances. Social influence, mostly in the form of male domination, on ideologies and linguistic choices in the depiction of women in both the writers’ work has been found on almost equal grounds.