Women's Voice-A Stylistic Analysis Of Monkey Grip

Monkey Grip, published in 1977, is the first novel of the famous contemporary Australian writer Helen Garner. It aroused quite a lot of controversy the moment it was published. However, this book won Book Council Award in 1978, and later it was widely regarded as a feminist pioneer work and a turning-point of Australian women literature.Two main factors contribute to the great success of this novel: the unique linguistic art displayed by Helen Garner in the novel on the one hand, and the profound themes contained in the novel on the other hand. Seen from the superficial level, it is a novel about sex and drugs, however, the further study of it reveals women's courage of challenging the traditional values which restrain their development in patriarchal society.The author of this thesis analyzes Monkey Grip from the perspective of stylistics, precisely speaking, from literary stylistics. The analysis consists of three parts: linguistic description and analysis, the interpretation of some foregrounded language, and the analysis of two conversations between the hero and the heroine with the application of Grice's cooperative principle and speech-turn theory.Linguistic description and analysis covers graphological level, lexical level, syntactic level, and figures of speech. From this perspective, firstly readers can discover the frequent use of commas, simple sentences and elliptic sentences, which aim at highlighting the swift tempo of characters' flow of inner thoughts; then the frequent use of italicized words, inverted sentences and repeated sentences, which aim at highlighting characters' state of mind; finally the abundant use of various figures of speech, through which the abstract meanings can be vividly conveyed to the readers.Foregrounding can be divided into qualitative foregrounding and quantitative foregrounding. The analysis of foregrounded language from the perspective of traditional figures of speech mainly focuses on the theme-related or aesthetics-related language as well as the theme-related repeated language, through which we can appreciate Helen Garner's linguistic art of conveying abstract things in a vivid and impressive way, and especially we can sense her linguistic ability of revealing characters' complex innermost thoughts in an accurate and vivid way.Speech can reflect one's innermost thoughts. Characters' speech can display their personality to a great extent. Through the analysis of two conversations between the heroine Nora and the hero Javo with the application of Grice's cooperative principle and speech-turn theory, readers can find some special qualities possessed by the heroine, such as activeness, independence, openness, kindness and tolerance.