A Pragmatic Analysis Of Scarlett O'Hara's Language Power And Her Feminist Consciousness In Gone With The Wind

Turn-taking in conversations reveals distribution of the floor for speech and the speaker's control of language power.The use of impoliteness strategies is a means to indicate one's attitudes in communication.The present thesis intends to explore power of language and feminist consciousness in Scarlett O'Hara,the protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind,through analyzing the 22 conversations related to her from a pragmatic perspective within the framework of Yu Dongming's quantitative analysis model of turn-taking and Culpeper's impoliteness principle.The conversations in the novel are divided according to the interlocutors and the topics in the conversations.There are four groups of interlocutors and four groups of topics respectively.The four groups of interlocutors are:Scarlett and Ashley,Scarlett and Rhett,Scarlett and Charles or Frank,and Scarlett and other characters as well.The four topics are:love,business management,childbirth and social restraints to females.After analyses,the thesis considers that Scarlett has an absolute language power and controls the turns and topic development by long turns and interruption when she talks with Charles or with Frank.Her language power increases gradually in her conversations with Ashley.At first,it is Ashley who controls the development of conversations with long turns and interruptions and monologue,but with the development of the plot in the story,Scarlett gradually dominates the conversations in the post-war reconstruction period,since she holds longer turns and initiates more new topics.In her conversations with Rhett,though he always possesses strong language power with long turns and successive sarcasm,Scarlett is still capable of seizing the power by offending him with some impolite strategies.Scarlett represents her competence in her communication with people by obtaining language power even in the traditional South of the United States where men are supposed to dominate in communication.Besides,faced with some topics that were forbidden to talk in the traditional South,like love,business management,childbirth,Scarlett dares to speak out her thinking.Though some of her conversations are devoid of sincerity,and some of her unscrupulous behaviors are not in accordance with social morality at the time,her bold love declaration,her persistent pursuit of rights for business management,and her dauntless resistance to childbirth forced on her by marital duty and social restraints shown in her conversations all indicate that Scarlett is an independent female with a strong personality and feminist consciousness.