Language, Style And Feminist Consciousness

Feminist stylistics takes critical linguistics, critical discourse analysis and feminist thoughts as its theoretical basis. This approach locates texts in certain historical cultural environment and introduces the concept of gender into classic stylistic studies, focusing on the discrimination against women images and gender stereotypes in stylistic analyses. It is aimed to challenge the conventions in the patriarchal society and the conventional distortion of women’s experiences in the interpretation of the text, criticize the patriarchal ideology in language through analyzing the stylistic feature of literary texts and construct the multiple meanings and diversity of textual analyses as well. Feminist stylistics especially emphasizes analyzing the language of texts in the context of productive and receptive process.This paper aims to explore the relationship among style, feminism, and feminist consciousness, and seeks to address the following questions:1) How do linguistic features reflected feminism in literary works? 2) How is feminist consciousness presented in the literary works? The research approach adopted in this thesis is descriptive and qualitative textual analysis from microcosmic and macroscopic perspectives in the theoretical framework of feminist stylistics.In terms of the major findings of the study, firstly the microcosmic analysis shows that words can reflect author’s intension and finally decide the fate of characters, and metaphors can help readers have an impressive understanding of how social culture and conventional ideas influence lives of people at that time. Secondly, through the macroscopic analysis, we can find that there is one common standpoint, i.e. feminist consciousness, which shows the readers how women can struggle to grow up into a whole being with a true maturity and how women can find self-identity in a patriarchal society. The analysis of the linguistic reflections of feminism in literary works and the socio-cultural context and the relationship between them indicates that based on the theory of feminist stylistics, textual analysis can help the readers to have a more comprehensive and profound understanding of the theme and characterization in feminist novels.The paper consists of six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction of the thesis, briefly introduces the motivation and research significance, and indicates the overall organization of the thesis. Chapter Two describes the development of stylistics and feminist stylistics, as well as Kate Chopin and Alice Munro and their works. Chapter Three as the theoretical preliminaries on which the present study is based, presents that this thesis will be analyzed from the micro-level and the macro-level, i.e. the analysis of linguistic features and the analysis of socio-cultural context in the two literary works. Chapter Four and Chapter Five compose the main portion of this thesis, which explore the relationship among language, style and feminist consciousness. Chapter Four analyzes the linguistic features in the two novels at two levels:lexical level and syntactic level and Chapter Five discusses feminist consciousness in the works in detail, including the authors’feminist conception and socio-cultural background. Chapter Six is the conclusion, which includes the major findings, the limitations of the study and the prospects for future research.