| Desiree's Baby is a famous short story written by Kate Chopin who is a pioneer of American feminism literature. In this work, Chopin reveals the distress and confusion of women who live in racialism and patriarchal society, as well as the spiritual crisis in their inner heart. The previous studies mainly analyzed this work from the perspective of feminism and narrative, but not enough is done on discourse analysis of language choosing and using. This paper, however, from the point of transitivity system, provides linguistic proof for analyzing the attitudes toward women and deeper thematic significance of Desiree's Baby.Transitivity system is a semantic system to realize the ideational function, one of the three metafuntions, which is originally promoted by Michael A. K. Halliday. According to Halliday, transitivity system put what people has seen, heard and done into six processes, namely material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioral process and existential process, each process with certain "participant" and relevant "circumstance". Therefore, transitivity analysis aims to realize the ideational function of language, through analyzing each process and relating participant as well as its circumstance. However, at present transitivity system is mainly used to analyze the characters, involving personality of characters, existential state of character and power relations between conflicting parties. Nevertheless, different from the previous character analysis, this paper extends transitivity system to the exploring of ideology and deeper thematic meaning behind language. Through transitivity analysis, this paper aims to find out the transitivity characters when Chopin portrays the life, status and fate of female under patriarchal society, and also point out what kind of attitudes toward women and deeper thematic significance are reflected by these transitivity characters.Analysis indicates that Chopin mainly uses material process, verbal process, relational process and mental process to describe Desiree. That most of the material processes have no goals indicates the low control power of Desiree to the outside world. What is more, most of the verbal processes delivered by Desiree are related to her husband and son, showing that Desiree, as a traditional wife, is obedient completely to her husband. And the static relational and mental processes indicate that naturally accepting her subordinate social status, Desiree attaches herself to her husband without independent personality. In describing Desiree's husband, Armand, Chopin mainly uses the material process and mental process. The overwhelming material process shows that, as a symbol of power in patriarchal society, Armand dominates the right of discourse in the family. While the mental process shows that he never loves Desiree, only treating her as a part of his belongings whose life and happiness are dominated by him. In describing Mrs. Valmonde, the adoptive mother of Desiree, Chopin mainly uses material process. However, similar to Desiree, most of them have no goals, which indicates that Mrs. Valmonde also belongs to the part being oppressed and prejudiced, living in passive position under the protection of her husband.In terms to the deeper thematic significance, several contrastive analyses of transitivity in "white" and "black" have been conducted. Chopin attributes the positive qualities to the white but the negative qualities to the black through relational process. The white are portrayed as kind and benevolent, while the black are cold and cruel. Then as related to the suffering of Desiree, contrastive analysis shows that the oppression and discrimination to the black actually comes from the black themselves, however, the white also turn to be a victim of that prejudice. Furthermore, it reveals that the aftermath of racial discrimination and gender prejudice not only does harm to the black but also to the white. |
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