ГЕНДЕРНА ІНТЕРПРЕТАЦІЯ ЗАПАХІВ ПРИРОДИ У ТВОРАХ ФРАНЦУЗЬКОЇ ПРОЗИ

Abstract

The article is dedicated to an actual linguistic problem: peculiarities of gender comparison of the olfactory information interpretation based on the material of French belles-lettres prose of the late XIX – the first half of XX century. The investigation aim is to analyze gender interpretations of scents by male and female authors, depicting nature phenomena, through paysage contexts, found out in French fiction. In order to achieve the aim, a complex of analytical methods has been used: contrastive, contextual, structural, descriptional, lexical, and stylistic as well as quantitative. 27 male and 7 female text fragments have been analyzed, referring to the olfactory information of objects/phenomena of nature. The most widespread methods of scents nomination are immediate description of smell source and application of stylistic devices (epithets, similes, metaphors, synectic metaphors etc.). It has been identified that male olfactory images are more vivid, comparing with female ones. French authoresses almost avoid scents descriptions, naming them accidentally. Therefore, their interpretations are rather sketchy. The research results disprove the accepted stereotypes on social roles of men and women, in which male behavior is associated with reason and rationality, whereas female – with emotionality and certain expressivity in actions and words. The stylistic analysis of the sorted out lexis revealed a completely opposite tendency, where an author is more expressive in scents interpretations. Thus, belles-lettres texts contain valuable empirical material, accumulating peculiarities of writers’ perception processes, nuances of the worldview and gender characteristics of language/speech (similarities and differences) of men and women.