Female Discourse Power in Wide Sargasso Sea

 New recent Brontë-related papers:

An Analysis of Female Discourse Power Wide Sargasso Sea
by Mengying Li
International Journal of Social Sciences in Universities Vol.4 No.3 2021
Xi'an Kedagaoxin University, Xi'an, Shaanxi 710000, China

Not only people speak languages, but languages also speak about people. One’s linguistic behavior reflects a socio-cultural influence from the past experiences, as well as a power relation among the present conversing parties. In Wide Sargasso Sea, non-European women characters lose their discourse power in terms of using a gendered and informal form of Creole English, whereas standard English is adopted in law and education to hold the colonizers’ authority. This article provides an analysis on the colonial oppression in the site of language, exposing how linguistically female gender and Creole English are constructed as indicators of inferiority, which justifies the power of the Englishmen over the colonized women.