Style, Ideology and Female Representation: An Ideo-Stylistic Analysis of Shakespeare's King Lear

Abstract

Language use proclaims an individual's personality and socio-political scenario of a particular age. The present study critically analyses the language used by female characters in Shakespeare's King Lear. The data has been collected from the speeches of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia from the mentioned play. The study employs an amended research model, which has been devised by drawing upon Fairclough (2012) and Mills (1995) to analyze the data Ideo-stylistically. The levels of analysis include the word, clause/sentence, and discourse. The analytical categories used in the study include representation, a normative and Marxist critique of language, comparative degree, rhetoric question, metaphor, simile, use of weak form, exclamation mark, contrasted pair, and parallelism. It finds that no use of language is ideology-free and linguistic conditions are highly ideological. Change in linguistic form changes the function of language. The language used by Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia mirrors their inward and social reality. The study in hand is a form of literary, linguistic research. Besides, it contends that an individual's linguistic habit proclaims their personality and reflects the prominent socio-political tendencies of a particular age.