Feminist Stylistics: A Lexico-grammatical Study of the Female Sentence in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hume-Sotomi’s The General’s Wife

Abstract

This paper is a stylistic study of the major aspects of lexis and grammar which exemplify the dialectics of genderlectal linguistics in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hume-Sotomi’s The General’s Wife. Both texts are separated in period and culture by about a hundred and seventy eight years as well as sub genre, the former being explicitly fictional whereas the latter belongs to the genre of faction. Employing the postulations of feminine stylisticians such as Virginia Woolf, Sara Mills, Deidre Burton as well as those of French feminists such as Jacques Lacan, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, supported by Halliday’s scale and category grammar as its theoretical basis, the study appraises the major lexical and grammatical components of the ‘female sentence’ or ‘ecriture feminine’. In doing this, the research attempts to discover whether it is indeed the case that women’s writing is stylistically unique or just a deviation from men’s writing considered as the norm. On the evidence in both texts, the research concludes affirmatively that ‘ecriture feminine’ is at once unique and androgynous.