| Penelope Fitzgerald is one of British famous writers. She is called as ‘one of the most elegant and unique sounds in area of British fiction’. In 1997, she won the Booker Prize due to Offshore, whose plot is simple but full of feminist signs. The writer of this thesis examines the novel in the framework of Sara Mills’ Feminism Stylistics and centers on the three levels of feministic stylistics in the analysis of Offshore. Meanwhile, this thesis lays stress on the key points of the linguistic discrimination.This thesis consists of three parts, with main body coming between the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction mainly describes the writer and her Offshore and its literature review at home and abroad.Chapter One aims to discuss the theoretic foundation in linguistics. The writer of this thesis discusses Sara Mills’ Feminism Stylistics and the three levels of her analytic tool, i.e. the lexical level, syntactic level and discursive level.Chapter Two analyzes on the basis of the lexical level. The text shows feminism from three layers: pronouns and nouns, the semantic derogation and gender-free language. Through the three layers, this thesis interprets the voices of women in the area of linguistics and the lack of female role in the society at that time. In this novel, a number of ‘he-man’ language and suffixes are used unconsciously. Language determines mind, which shows the discrimination in jobs, education and so on. As a female writer, that Penelope Fitzgerald uses these words unconsciously interprets the theory of ‘linguistic determinism’ and in return her novel has its characteristics.Chapter Three provides a detailed explanation of the research at the syntactic level from the perspective of feminist stylistics. It analyzes the causes of women’s desperation and also their fight in sexist language in Offshore. In addition, it presents a brief analysis of the causes of metaphor in language and the way to interpret the use of metaphor reflected in Offshore.Chapter Four focuses on the analysis of feminism in Offshore from the perspective of feminist stylistics at the discursive level. In the patriarchal society, women are expected to play the roles as the object of men’s desire or virtuous housewives, both of which are presented in the novel. Firstly, from the characters in Offshore, the writer of this thesis takes the example of Laura and Nenna as a comparison. Secondly, gender description is exposed from the angle of social context.The conclusion part summarizes the major findings of the research, discusses the limitations of the study and gives suggestions for further study on sexist language of novels from the perspective of feminist stylistics. |
