Chapter Overview

• • communication in fiction

• • feminist stylistics

• • checklist of feminist stylistic categories

• • The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

• • feminist stylistic analysis of an extract from The Handmaid's Tale

Introduction

This chapter is an extension of the investigation of textual ideology in narrative fiction. In the previous chapter, we carried out a critical linguistic analysis to examine the role of modality and modes of narration in the representation of characters’ outlooks and states of mind. In this chapter, we continue the exploration of authorial ideology but with reference to the textual construction of women. For this purpose, we will use the feminist stylistic framework outlined in Mills (1995). We will start by considering the ideological representation of reality in fiction, go on to sketch out the feminist stylistic framework, suggest a checklist of analytical categories, and present the findings of the feminist stylistic analysis of an extract from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

Communication in fiction

A novel offers a representation of reality mediated by the author's ideological assumptions about the world. The represented reality, by design, perpetuates and naturalises (contested) ideologies, and seeks to manipulate the reader's perspective and outlook on the experiences represented in the narrative. The narrative representation is ‘inherent in the verbal patterns’ of the text (Widdowson 1992: 37). The reader reconstructs this account of reality, and deconstructs the naturalised ideologies, through linguistic analysis of the language of the text. This chapter investigates the textual construction of gender ideology in fiction. Using the analytical framework of FEMINIST STYLISTICS, the chapter explores gender bias, the distribution of gender roles and the fragmentation of the female body in a twentieth-century novel.

Feminist stylistics

Feminist stylistics ‘has a precursor in critical linguistics’ (Mills 1995: 8). In the tradition of critical linguistics, feminist stylistics holds that language ‘is not a transparent carrier of meanings, but is a medium which imposes its own constraints on the meaning which is constructed’ (Mills 1995: 8). In other words, language is a medium of social control. The lexis and structures of texts encode, and even perpetuate, naturalised ideologies and social processes. Drawing on Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, feminist stylistics offers a set of strategies that aim to ‘draw attention to and change the way that gender is represented’ (Mills 1995: 1).