A Study Of Psychological Changes Of Hester Prynne In The Scarlet Letter:Transitivity Analysis

Ideational metafunction is one of the three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics,which means that language reproduces people’s experience.Transitivity System reflects ideational metafunction,which expresses people’s experience in the objective and subjective world in the form of clauses.Character’s subjective world includes their psychology.Therefore,Transitivity System is closely related to character’s psychology.The Scarlet Letter,as a pioneering work of American psychoanalytic novel,has a lot of psychological descriptions of the protagonist Hester Prynne.Hester’s psychology is of great significance in promoting the development of the story and reflecting the theme.Previous studies mainly interpreted The Scarlet Letter from the perspective of feminism,cultural criticism,comparative study and post-structuralist psychoanalysis.However,from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics,research on character’s psychological transformation in literature works is rare.This thesis applies Transitivity System in Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze The Scarlet Letter.It intends to find out the relationship between Transitivity System and Hester’s psychological change.Therefore,two questions are put forward:1.What is the distribution of six process types in Transitivity System in revealing the psychological transformations of Hester? And why does such distribution exist?2.How does Transitivity System reflect the protagonist Hester Prynne’s psychological changes?Based on the above questions,this study selects clauses closely related to Hester’s psychology as research materials,in which Hester Prynne is one of the participants or exists in circumstances,and it divides Hester’s psychological change process into four stages,the stigma stage,the growth stage,the struggling stage and the salvation stage.It adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze process types,participants and circumstantial elements of clauses,and identify the distribution of six process types,exploring the relationship between Transitivity System and Hester’s psychological changes.It has found that: firstly,six process types of Transitivity System are all employed in clauses.Among them,material process clauses,verbal process clauses and mental process clauses are the main clauses,because The Scarlet Letter is a pioneering work of American psychoanalytic novel,and what Hester expressed reveals her mentality directly,so it corresponds to the creative characteristics of this novel;secondly,Transitivity System reveals Hester’s psychological transformations through the distribution of six processes,their proportion change at different stages and the choice of processes,participants and circumstances.According to Transitivity analysis of The Scarlet Letter,this research examines the protagonist Hester’s psychological transformation at each stage from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics,provide a new perspective for the study of The Scarlet Letter,and help readers deepen their understanding of the protagonist Hester Prynne.