WOMAN OPPRESSION IN THE HANDMAID’S TALE TV SERIES SEASON 1: TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS
Abstract
In 2017, the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 published book, The Handmaid’s Tale was brought up to online streaming service, Hulu. The Handmaid’s Tale TV series tells us a story about Gilead, the dystopian country that is made in result of the decreasing fertility rates. Through the protagonist, a handmaid called Offred, Atwood offers the cruel reality of women’s oppression that women face. This research focuses on the first two episodes of the TV series in season one, as the two episodes are introductory episodes. The utterances spoken by or targeted to Offred are used as the objects of this study. Stylistics approach is applied to provide the description of the story which then is combined with Halliday’s transitivity, in order to reveal Offred’s experience of being oppressed in Gilead. The oppression is seen from all five process types, relational, material, mental, behavioural, and existential. The findings found out that relational process type got the highest frequency, considering that Offred introduces her oppression and Gilead through this process type. It is also found that she used more free direct thought to narrate her story than to use free direct speech, as she opts to be silent but loud in her mind, the only place that she won’t get jailed for saying things that is forbidden according Gilead’s rules.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Arbaoui, F. Z. E. (2018). Feminist dystopian consciousness in margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture, 4(4), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.21744/ijllc.v4n4.231
Darani, L. H. (2014). Persuasive Style and its Realization Through Transitivity Analysis: A SFL Perspective. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 158, 179–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.12.066
Fienberg, D. (2017). “The Handmaid’s Tale”: TV Review | Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved September 30, 2020, from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/handmaids-tale-review-991871
Flick, U., Kardorff, E. von, & Steinke, I. (Eds.). (2004). A companion to qualitative research. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications.
Fowler, R. (1986). Linguistic criticism. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014a). Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar (Fourth Edition). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014b). Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar (Fourth Edition). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Harrison, C. (2020). ‘The truth is we’re watching each other’: Voiceover narration as ‘split self’ presentation in The Handmaid’s Tale TV series. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 29(1), 22–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020905756
Howell, A. (2019). Breaking silence, bearing witness, and voicing defiance: The resistant female voice in the transmedia storyworld of The Handmaid’s Tale. Continuum, 33(2), 216–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2019.1569392
Isti’anah, A. (2019). Transitivity Analysis of Afghan Women In Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul. LiNGUA: Jurnal Ilmu Bahasa Dan Sastra, 14(2), 223–234. https://doi.org/10.18860/ling.v14i2.6966
Leech, G. N., & Short, M. (2007). Style in fiction: A linguistic introduction to English fictional prose (2nd ed). New York: Pearson Longman.
Millett, K. (2000). Sexual politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Neuman, S. C. (Shirley C. ). (2006). “Just a Backlash”: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale. University of Toronto Quarterly, 75(3), 857–868. https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2006.0260
Nguyen, H. T. (2012). Transitivity Analysis of “Heroic Mother” by Hoa Pham. International Journal of English Linguistics, 2(4), p85. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v2n4p85
Sadeghi, Z., & Mirzapour, N. (2020). Women of Gilead as colonized subjects in Margaret Atwood’s novel: A study of postcolonial and feminist aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 7(1), 1785177. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2020.1785177
Simpson, P. (2004). Stylistics: A resource book for students. London ; New York: Routledge.
Verdonk, P. (2003). Stylistics (2. impression). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30813/jelc.v11i1.2402
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.