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Key Question: What linguistic features and
techniques are used to represent gender?
Re-read either Daily Mail article, or opening to
Mrs. Dalloway.
Don't judge us on looks, says MP Louise: Tory
condemns 'trivialisation' of women politicians in
magazine interview
• Is the Daily Mail article
sexist?
• Are its comments – sexist or
not – directed at women, or
just Louise Mensch?
• What language
choices/techniques can you
point to as evidence?
These are the photos included in the Mail
article, taken of Mensch during the GQ shoot
and interview; the headline above is from the
Mail article.
Point of interest: What does “mensch”
mean in English?
What linguistic features and techniques are used to represent gender?
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges;
Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning —
Ecriture
fresh as if issued to
childrenfeminine
on a beach.
Literally “women’s writing”; but the term was
coined
by For
French
feminists
who were
interested
ina little squeak of
What a lark! What
a plunge!
so it had
always seemed
to her,
when, with
non-standard
forms
and styles
the hinges, whichfinding/developing
she could hear now, she
had burst open
the French
windows and plunged at
Bourton into the of
open
air. How
fresh, how
calm,
this of course, the air was in the
writing,
because
they
feltstiller
thatthan
“standard”
early morning; like
the flap ofwas
a wave;
the kiss of
a wave; chill and sharp
language
inherently
sexist/gendered.
Theyand yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that
new ways
of writing/speaking
something awful thought
was aboutthat
to happen;
looking
at the flowers, at thewould
trees with the smoke
equate
to
new
ways
of
perceiving
the
world.
You
winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until
Peter Walsh said,
“Musing among the
was
that it?—“I
men to cauliflowers”— was that it?
do vegetables?”—
not have to be
a woman
to prefer
“do” ecriture
He must have saidfeminine”.
it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace —
Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for
his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his
smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it
was!— a few sayings like this about cabbages.
What can you say about the language choices
in this extract? (Think, particularly, about verb
processes; also, about noun and adjective
choices.) Is the lang. particularly or essentially
female/feminine/feminist?
• Stative verbs/participles
• Free indirect discourse/stream
of consciousness (temporal
experience rather than
“movement” of plot...)
• H/W: Answer today’s Key Question, analysing
the Virginia Woolf extract. Be specific about
word classes, dynamic/stative verbs, pre/post-modification.