A Study On The Gowth Process Of Female Characters In Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories-A Functional Stylistic Perspective

As a famous British short story writer in the 20 th century,Katherine Mansfield successfully depicted multitudes of female characters and explored their hard living conditions and complicated mental struggles.Her short stories have been widely studied from the perspectives of modernism features and narratological strategies,and her female characters have also been thoroughly examined from the perspective of feminism thoughts.This study aims to analyze the growth process of female characters in Mansfield's short stories from a functional stylistic perspective.The study selects typical materials from Mansfield's short stories of each period and adopts the statistical method and descriptive method to make a detailed analysis from transitivity,mood,and thematic them.Firstly,according to the natural order of the growth of female characters,the author divides their growing experience into early,middle and late periods.Then,the author observes the linguistic features of Mansfield's short stories in describing these female characters in different periods.It is found that the grammatical features of expressing ideational,interpersonal and textual meanings differ significantly in different periods of the growth of female characters,which successfully reflect the physical and mental growth and transformations of female characters.In early period,the material processes are mainly used to depict female roles.It shows young women's struggling for survival;in middle period,the marriage and family life of middle-class women is mainly described by mental and behavioral processes,which indicates that women are moving towards self-awareness;in late period,verbal processes are clearly used to indicate that women have begun to have the right to speak.In addition,female characters use more declarative mood in early dialogue.In middle and late stages,women began to produce more words in dialogue and use more imperative mood,which indicate that they began to move towards resistance and independence.Finally,unmarked themes about female characters are mostly used to describe their situationsin each period and marked themes expressing time are also frequently used to reveal the anxious daily life of female characters.On the one hand,the study proves the universal adaptability of functional stylistics and its unique advantages in the analysis of female characters;on the other hand,it provides a new and objective perspective for the analysis and appreciation of Mansfield's works.