Abstract
A focus on discourse analysis, this study presents a particular interest in the power relationship artfully constructed by Charlotte P. Gilman in three dialogue instances in her most memorable short narrative, The Yellow Wallpaper. With the awareness of gender differences in mind in terms of how men and women use language, Gilman evinces the ways in which language could be a medium of silencing the other. Consequently, this paper carefully examines the protagonists’ discourses through J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and John Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts. The corpus of the study consists of the utterances of the husband/doctor and of the wife/patient, and both the quantitative and qualitative research methods have been employed for the data analysis. The results have shown that the patriarchal discourse, originally dominated by representatives (opinions, facts) and directives (commands, orders, advices, and refusals), produces utterances meant to fabricate reality (erroneous diagnosis) and generate refusals, whereas the discourse of the other consists mainly of representatives- true statements and opinions -which contradict men’s reality in the journey to achieving self-assertion and selfexpression.
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