Women In Colonial India

The best known and most widely read of E. M. Forster's novels, A Passage to India, has always been the focus of critics. It is widely accepted as a realistic novel with the theme of racial conflicts that undermine the "connectedness" of human beings. The thesis aims to explore the issues about women in colonial India from feminist stylistic perspective, finally concludes that sexual discrimination represented in the novel also prevent people from connection. The thesis enriches the interpretations of the novel, by examining the language within feminist stylistic framework. Also, it enables readers, from an entirely new perspective, to better understand and appreciate the novel.The thesis firstly gives a brief introduction to Forster's writing and A Passage to India, previous critical studies on this novel, and also critical mode and aim of the thesis. The theoretical framework of this paper is feminist stylistics, in which the practical analyses of language are conducted.The language used to represent women in A Passage to India is analyzed from the feminist stylistic point of view. The study shows how the low status of women is constructed through certain language items and how the author chooses the type of language appeared in the text. In conversational analysis, the thesis, adopting Grice's cooperative principle and Toolan's speech move model, undertakes a conversational analysis in which the female voice is restrained at first by male power, and armed eventually with her own strength to challenge the male-defined social norms and achieve autonomy and subjectivity to some degree.Through the previous analyses, the conclusion makes an objective assessment of the theme of women contained in the novel which enriches theoriginal theme and Forster's achievements realized by his keen eye for social nuance and successful representation.