Style-Shifting in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth  

Oleh:

Herman, David

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language and Literature (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST) vol. 10 no. 1 (Feb. 2001), page 61–77.
Topik: class; dialect; gender roles; The House of Mirth; register; sociological stylistics; style shifts; Wharton; Edith
Fulltext: 61LL101.pdf (69.17KB)

Isi artikel

Using Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth as a case study, this article revisits the issue of speech representation in narrative fiction by drawing on recent socio-linguistic and discourse-analytic research on style. Wharton’s novel features a broad range of social styles, with style-shifts both indexing and helping to precipitate conflicts pertaining to class as well as gender. Wharton’s speech representations thus reveal a mutually constitutive relationship between style and identity, patterns of usage and contexts of use, undermining the commonsensical idea that one selects from among various available styles to communicate who and what one is. Rather, her text suggests that it is by communicating, by stylizing, that interlocutors take on a role as selves, or centres of subjectivity. In particular, Wharton’s novel shows that discordant communicative norms, far from being secondary conflicts that are parasitic on some primary, prelinguistic division between those already equipped with a masculine or a feminine gender, do much to account for the antagonistic role relationships lived out by men and women from day to day.

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