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Example of Gender  Theory and how to apply it to a literary text.

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Example of Gender  Theory and how to apply it to a literary text.

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Reading time: 4 minutes

In this digest, we look at how one researcher has explored the use of a particular lexical item in the speech of male and female characters in Jane Austen's novels.

The question of whether men and women speak differently is one that's been hotly debated for many years. Current thinking in linguistics suggests that male and female speech styles are not driven by biological differences. Instead it is argued that speakers construct and perform gendered identities for themselves, which may either draw on or challenge perceived stereotypes. The idea is that gender is something that speakers and writers 'do' as part of a more or less deliberate projecting of identity. But how might these ideas be explored in literary representations of gendered language? In a recent study on the use of the adverb 'quite' in three Jane Austen novels, Victorina González-Díaz of the University of Liverpool demonstrates how Austen plays on eighteenth and nineteenth century stereotypes of female speech in the construction of her characters.

González-Díaz starts by tracing how research in linguistics has demonstrated that there are five main functions of 'quite':

as a manner adverb, indicating how something happened (this use of 'quite' disappeared in the Middle English period)

as a maximiser, synonymous with 'entirely', 'completely' eg 'That is quite true'

as a scalar degree modifier, suggesting a point on a scale eg 'He is quite old'

as an emphasiser indicating a writer or speaker's opinion on an expression, synonymous with 'honestly', 'truthfully' eg 'That is quite what happened'

as a response particle commenting on something that has already been said eg 'Teachers should be paid more' said the Secretary of State 'Quite!' replied the union leader.

González-Díaz explores late eighteenth and early nineteenth century uses of 'quite' and finds that the maximiser function of 'quite' tends to occur most frequently, while use of 'quite' as a scalar-degree modifier, emphasiser or particle response are less frequent. Reviewing the prevailing eighteenth century attitudes towards standards, notions of correctness and prescriptivism, she concludes that 'quite' used as a maximiser would have been considered the default and therefore 'correct' function, whilst the others would have been viewed as linguistic novelties and therefore corruptions.

González-Díaz then analyses frequencies of each of the functions of 'quite' across narration and characters' speech in Pride and Prejudice (early career), Mansfield Park (mid career), and Emma (later career). Her analyses show that across all of the novels there is frequent use of maximiser, scalar degree and emphasiser forms of 'quite' with relatively few if any examples of response particle use. However, and more interestingly, González-Díaz highlights the difference between use of 'quite' between male and female characters. While male characters used 'quite' on fewer occasions and where they did, used the conventional maximiser function, female characters not only used 'quite' generally more frequently, but often used the more novel scalar degree and emphasiser functions. They therefore could be said to use more linguistic novelties but crucially, also display a greater versatility in using 'quite' in functionally different ways depending on the contexts they spoke in.

González-Díaz contextualises these findings by explaining that the novels work as literary representations of gendered identity since in the eighteenth century, standard and correct forms of language were often associated with male speech; in contrast, linguistic novelties would have been associated with female language. So, we have the beginning of the kind of gendered stereotyping that persisted well into the late twentieth century - and some might argue still persists in the twenty-first!

To conclude, González-Díaz argues that Austen was probably very conscious of this kind of stereotyping and exploited this for her own literary effects. Rather than drawing on her experience of natural speech, Austen was able to integrate contemporary stereotypes about male and female language into her novels in order both to draw attention to them and, given the versatility of female characters, to provide some ironic comment on these crude distinctions about male and female speech!
This is a digest of the following article: González-Díaz, V. (2014) ''I quite detest the man': Degree adverbs, female language and Jane Austen', Language and Literature 23(4), 310-330.
Taking it further

You can use this research digest to support your teaching of AQA's AS and A-level English Language and Literature specifications in the following ways.

1. Ask students to explore the distribution of a particular lexical item or discourse marker across male and female characters in the novel they are studying (Imagined worlds, A-level; Views and voices, AS). What patterns emerge? Do authors play on stereotypes of male and female speech? What interpretative effects might these have?

2. When studying dialogue, either represented (Imagined worlds, A-level; Writing about society, A-level; Dramatic encounters, A-level) or natural speech (Remembered places, AS and A-level), students could look at male-female interaction. You could introduce them to some of the main ideas from sociolinguistics around gendered language and ask them to explore any connections between real and literary representations of discourse.

3. Remembering that explorations of language and gender can also focus on male language, explore the construction of male identities in the poetry of John Donne or Robert Browning (Poetic Voices, A-level; Views and Voices, AS), in material from the AQA Anthology (Remembered Places, AS and A-level) or in any of the dramatic texts on the specification (Dramatic encounters, A-level).

4. The activities above could form a personal investigation on a literary text and some non-literary data (Making Connections, A-level) that explores representations of gender, speech styles, idiolects, the construction of identity and so on.

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"Well, quite!" Gendered language in the novels of Jane Austen (research digest)

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15/09/2015 Reading time: 4 minutes In this digest, we look at how one researcher has explored the use of a particular lexical item in the speech of male and female characters in Jane Austen's novels. The question of whether men and women speak differently is one that's been hotly debated for many years.

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Read this article from The Independent

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Carol Ann Duffy is sitting on a strange, throne-like leather chair, with padded sides that curve round to form a kind of hood. It seems appropriate for a woman who has been described as "the queen of modern British poetry" and who was hotly tipped for the laureateship, but who avoids publicity and hated the fuss. Appropriate, too, for a poet whose new collection The World's Wife (Picador, £10) features such imaginative rewritings of history as the figures of Queen Herod, Queen Kong and Pope Joan. The figure that emerges from the looming leather canopy is plumply elegant in a tailored black trouser suit. Together, we move to a quieter corner of Manchester's Midland Hotel.

Carol Ann Duffy is sitting on a strange, throne-like leather chair, with padded sides that curve round to form a kind of hood. It seems appropriate for a woman who has been described as "the queen of modern British poetry" and who was hotly tipped for the laureateship, but who avoids publicity and hated the fuss. Appropriate, too, for a poet whose new collection The World's Wife (Picador, £10) features such imaginative rewritings of history as the figures of Queen Herod, Queen Kong and Pope Joan. The figure that emerges from the looming leather canopy is plumply elegant in a tailored black trouser suit. Together, we move to a quieter corner of Manchester's Midland Hotel.

Carol Ann Duffy has had a difficult fortnight. Her partner, the poet and novelist Jackie Kay, has been in hospital after suffering a severe allergic reaction to a midge bite. Jackie's son Matthew has started secondary school; her own daughter, Ella, has begun primary school and, to cap it all, she has been trying with limited success to house-train the latest addition to their home: Dinks the dog. "All of this would have been a lot easier without the dog," she declares grimly.

Such images of bustling domesticity are not what one associates with a poet famed for fierce feminism and uncompromising social satire. The World's Wife will, however, please those who like such labels, as well as just about everybody who picks it up. It's a playful and extremely funny look at history, myths and legends through the eyes of the invisible wives. Mrs Faust recounts the meteoric rise of a husband who "didn't have a soul to sell". Mrs Midas has to install her husband in a caravan "in the wilds" in order to avoid the deadly effects of his magical touch. Pilate's Wife swaps a thrilling glance with the rugged, sexy Christ before her husband washes his "useless, perfumed" hands. Mrs Aesop gives her boring, pompous husband a little tale of her own: one that involves an axe and a cock. "I laughed last, longest," she announces triumphantly.

"I wanted to use history and myth and popular culture and elements from cinema and literature, but also to anchor it in a deeply personal soil and make an entertainment," Duffy explains as she nibbles a ham sandwich. "It was fun to juggle around with and there were times when I sat laughing as I was writing." Certainly, her subversion of history is a far cry from the earnest "herstory" that is usually associated with such enterprises. It sparkles with wit, intelligence and an impressive lightness of touch, while drawing on some weighty emotional experiences: loneliness, jealousy, self-loathing, desire, the fierceness of a mother's love.

These are archetypes, of course, but Duffy admits that the book is also a kind of autobiography. She is famed for her dramatic monologues, which combine compassion, rhythmic verve and an astonishing gift for ventriloquism, and for her tender, lyrical love poems. This collection brings both genres together in the form of masks which, she says, gave her the freedom to explore intensely personal experiences.

The most personal poem is the last one, "Demeter", a deeply touching lyric in which she writes of the transition from winter to spring, from "a broken heart" to "a blue sky smiling" through the arrival, "at last", of "my daughter, my girl, across the fields".

The World's Wife seems to me much less angry than her previous work, the satire more affectionate. Does she agree? "My great angry days were in the Thatcher years," she replies, before going on to admit that yes, it might have something to do with her current domestic happiness. "There's no doubt about it that for me having a child was a revolutionary experience. I can't now remember my life before I had her - it seems to have been lived by someone else."

Certainly, little Ella has been the impulse behind the children's poems she is now obsessively writing. Her first collection for children, Meeting Midnight (Faber, £3.99), is published later this month. Every day, while walking the dog, she mulls on a poem for the next one. Meeting Midnight combines the playful wit of The World's Wife with the exuberance and sublime nonsense of the best children's writing. From the "electrifying rustle" in "Chocs" to "Toy Dog", in which a toy dog becomes a real one - "alas, that poem came true, it's appalling!" - it is full of the child's energetic delight in the world.Faber will also publish Duffy's collection of children's fairy tales, Rumpelstiltskin and other Grimm Tales (£8.99). These originally arose out of a commission for theatre director Tim Supple at the Young Vic. Duffy did one batch in 1995 and another in 1997. Initially, she was intimidated by the weight of the tradition and read five or six different versions, some going back to the 19th century. She followed Supple's advice to "stick completely to the original stories as they were, in a language his actors could speak now".The resulting tales are punchy and poetic, bringing the freshness of contemporary idioms to the reassuring familiarity of the originals. Duffy enjoyed writing them a lot and now wants to do all of them. "I'd love it when Ella has children if she said, 'Go and look it up in Grandma's Grimm,'" she says with a grin.

It's amusing to read them in parallel with the legends of The World's Wife. Mrs Aesop, for example, provides an ironic counterpoint to "The Hare and the Hedgehog", though the moral of that tale - that hedgehogs should marry hedgehogs - seems delightfully subversive. "I think in Grimm hedgehogs should marry hedgehogs and you shouldn't look elsewhere," says Duffy, with a wicked glint in her eye. "But in our world we can marry who we want, or even better not marry at all." You can see why New Labour might feel she was not the ideal New Laureate.

Duffy is sick to death of the laureate issue. She was bruised by the brouhaha and what she sees as the media's invention of imagined rivalries. She does, however, speak generously of Andrew Motion, of his recent TUC poem and his comments about education, but has made it very clear that next time she would declare herself "out of the picture".

Does she think there's a role for a laureate? "Yes, absolutely," she insists, "particularly for young people. It's nice to have a poet laureate in the way that it's nice to have a football manager or a mayor, and it's good to have someone who's prepared to say poetry is part of our national life."She believes passionately in the public role of poetry, predicting that it will "become more important and take a larger place in our lives in the next century". She thinks poetry should be splashed everywhere: "The newspapers should get their act together and follow the Independent's example; radio should have poetry all day, every hour. You should have a poem last thing at night on TV, the Royal Mail should put them on stamps. It doesn't trivialise it - put Milton on milk cartons!" We laugh at the prospect of the devil displayed on full-fat milk.

As one of the few living poets who has always been a full-time writer, Duffy has done plenty of the readings, workshops and school visits that are the poet's bread and butter. She has less time these days, and can afford to be a little more selective. After walking Ella to the school gate and dealing with the dog, she settles down daily to what she does best: bringing language alive in the near-miraculous act of poetry.

"The beginnning of a poem is always a moment of tiny revelation," she explains, "a new way of seeing something, which almost simultaneously attracts language to it - and then the impulse is to catch that with a pen and paper." For her, the process usually takes a few days "until the poem seems to have assumed the same shape as the original revelation".

She and Jackie have separate writing lives, separate studies, diaries and phone-lines. They don't criticise each other's work. They do, however, meet for cups of coffee, indulge in impromptu shopping trips and laugh together over reviews. "In our household, reviews are great fun," Duffy smiles. "They're a form of entertainment." Does she ever get upset by them? "No, not really," she replies, as if considering a fascinating new concept. "I regret to say that it's quite thrilling to get a bad review."

It all sounds enviably cosy: writing, reading "all the time", chatting about poetry, looking after and playing with the children and, of course, the dog.In the great tradition of poets, Carol Ann Duffy goes into the countryside nearly every weekend. She also plays poker and watches the football - she supports Liverpool - and Coronation Street. "Tony Warren is Ella's godfather," says the queen of modern poetry with a smile, "so she's a very lucky girl."

Biography

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955, the only daughter of left-wing working-class Catholics, and grew up in Stafford. After reading English at Liverpool, she started working as a full-time writer, of plays as well as poetry. Her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and was hailed by Robert Nye as "the debut of a genuine and original poet". Selling Manhattan (1987) garnered further awards and praise. It was followed in 1990 by The Other Country and in 1993 by Mean Time, which won the Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. The World's Wife appears next week from Picador. Her many other awards include the National Poetry Competition and Dylan Thomas award. She lived in London from 1981 to 1995, but moved to Manchester in 1996, where she lectures part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has edited a number of anthologies including Stopping for Death and Anvil New Poets. Her Selected Poems were published in 1994.

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Carol Ann Duffy: Street-wise heroines at home

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Carol Ann Duffy is sitting on a strange, throne-like leather chair, with padded sides that curve round to form a kind of hood. It seems appropriate for a woman who has been described as "the queen of modern British poetry" and who was hotly tipped for the laureateship, but who avoids publicity and hated the fuss.

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Poetry is pleasure.

Sometimes people say to me, "why should I read a poem?" There are plenty of answers, from the profound - a poem is such an ancient means of communication that it feels like an evolutionary necessity - to the practical; a poem is like a shot of espresso - the fastest way to get a hit of mental and spiritual energy.

We could talk about poetry as a rope in a storm. Poetry as one continuous mantra of mental health. Poetry as the world's biggest, longest-running workshop on how to love. Poetry as a conversation across time. Poetry as the acid-scrub of cliche.

We could say that the poem is a lie detector. That the poem is a way of thinking without losing the feeling. That a poem is a way of feeling without being too overwhelmed by feeling to think straight. That the poem is "the best words in the best order" ( Coleridge). That the poem "keeps the heart awake to truth and beauty" (Coleridge again - who can resist those Romantics?). That the poem is an intervention: "The capacity to make change in existing conditions" (Muriel Rukeyser). That poetry, said Seamus Heaney, is "strong enough to help".

Yes.

And pleasure.

Carol Ann Duffy has often spoken about poetry as an everyday event and not as a special occasion. She wants us to enjoy poetry, to have as much as we like, to be able to help ourselves to a good, fresh supply, to let poetry be as daily as talking - because poetry is talking. Words begin in the mouth before they hit the page. Speech is older than writing, and poetry is as old as speech. Poems are best spoken to get the full weight and taste of the words and the run of the lines. Difficult poems become easier when spoken.

Just as the body is shaped for movement, the mind is shaped for poetry.

Rhythm and rhyme aid recall. Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in 20th-century classical music - atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness - so modernism rebranded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea towels; not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet.

It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap and the rise of performance poetry have played a part in that return.

As a powerful modern voice, Duffy has been unafraid to use rhyme from the beginning. In her TS Eliot prizewinning collection, Rapture, poem after poem deployed rhyme with accurate beauty.

Her poetry is a practical proof of rhyme as expressive, flexible, purposefully baited. Dangle a rhyme at the end of a line and the mind-fish bites. Not only end-rhymes, but off-rhymes, hidden rhymes, half-rhymes, ghost rhymes, deliberate near-misses that hit the mark:

I was wind, I was gas

I was all hot air, trailed

Clouds for hair.

I scrawled my name with a hurricane, When out of the blue

Roared a fighter plane. ("Thetis")

The poems in The World's Wife - about women behind the scenes, women behind the throne, women behind history - are rhyme-rich, though not always obviously so:

I flew in my chains over the wood where

we'd buried

the doll. I know it was me who was there.

I know I carried the spade. I know I was

covered in mud.

But I cannot remember how or when or

precisely where.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The complacent end-rhymes of lines two and four are taunted by the askew "buried" and "carried", and made sinister by the pagan sacrifice embedded in "wood" and "mud" with the ancient "wude" and "daub" sitting behind the rhyme. Repetition of "I know", three times in four lines, works as a locked rhyme - lethally right for a mind that can never escape itself or be set free by others; a mind that belongs to Myra Hindley.

Other poems rhyme with cheeky exuberance. In "Mrs Sisyphus" the repetitive idiocy of the rock and its roll suits the uphill build of the poem (towards its inevitable collapse). The punishment of the gods turns out to be a 24/7 meaningless managerial job, where no matter how many emails you answer, your inbox will be full again the next day.

Then there's the glorious "Mrs Darwin" with its Edward Lear nonsensical sense: "7 April 1852. // Went to the Zoo. / I said to Him - / Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you." Hidden behind this ditty in diary form is the shadow of Dorothy Wordsworth, endlessly walking, endlessly writing her Lake District journal so that William could use it for that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" he liked a poem to be. The famous daffodils, we remember, were Dorothy's.

The title of The World's Wife is both a tacit understanding that it's (still) a man's world, and a joke on the world's most popular dedication: To My Wife.

Ask who was at a party and the answer is often, "Oh, the world and his wife." Our language pictures are inherently patriarchal - unless challenged. But the fact that three simple title-words can be the challenger affirms the power of language to disclose the unthought norm.

William Wordsworth. Photograph: Alamy

And the unthought known. Men and women alike know that more than half the world is female but men and women alike forget it every day. It takes a poet to jog our memory.

The characters in The World's Wife come from fairytales, Bible stories, legends, modern horrors (Hindley, here recast as the devil's wife) and ancient myths. Their common link is that the poems themselves are told by the spouse-voice of the famous male.

This headstand, the world turned upside down, gives us another look at history through her-story. The "other"; the angry and the ignored, as well as the sure-footed and sexy. Of course there's a political agenda - there always is: poets write poems because they have something urgent to say.

First-world-war poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen claimed of his work that "the poetry is in the pity". In The World's Wife, the politics is in the poetry. The politics is feminism.

But there's nothing po-faced about these poems. They are written with such humour or poignancy, or insight or recognition, that we get the point, the many points, the points of view and the points of light. Like every good atom, these poems are composed out of empty space and points of light - the dazzle of the poet's vision, the space for the reader to reimagine matter, the matter, what matters, what is the matter?

Here is Frau Freud, in mad lexical delight, listing every word she can think of for Penis - and at last, in a bout of new theory-making that would have given us a very different psychoanalysis, she drops Penis Envy and opts instead for Penis Pity. It's a short poem - a loose sonnet - but it says as much as bookshelves of debate. The fact is that women don't suffer from penis envy. (Actually or symbolically, practically or poetically). Only a man would think anyone could.

Here's Red Riding Hood gutting the wolf-poet to get at his words. She has no objection to sleeping with him first, or bringing him breakfast in bed. When she gets on with the axe-work and slits him "scrotum to throat", she discovers it's her grandmother's bones inside. The skeleton of language is female. Deeper, it seems, than our mother tongue.

There's Mrs Midas, who has to lock the cat in the cellar and jam a chair against the bedroom door, while her husband turns their life into gold. What you risk reveals what you value. This thoughtful, funny poem questions the masculine obsession with money - far from the stereotype of woman as a gold digger. What Mrs Midas misses most about her husband is the one thing she can never have: his touch. "Mrs Faust" conjures up a much more money-minded female. It's Faust who has amassed world-pools of cash but she's happy enough to spend it:

"I grew to love the lifestyle / not the life. / He grew to love the kudos / not the wife."

The ballad-form rhyming here is tidy and deadly. Duffy, throughout her work, has made good use of both the English ballad and its 19th-century development, the dramatic monologue.

The ballad form is made for narrative stretch. It's an old form - the Robin Hood ballads date from the mid-to-late 15th century. It's a form for storytelling, for late-night firesides, for pub entertainment, for the popular chapbooks (cheap books) that were just folded printed papers sold at fairs. It's street corner, it's troubadour, it's busking.

Ballads had a lucrative disruptive sideline as political agitprop, in broadside ballads, as they became known. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Lennon and McCartney of the 18th-century poetry scene, published their Lyrical Ballads, a moody, up-close, melodic extension of the ballad form, making it both personal and political - about ordinary people, not legends or hate figures, and using natural speech and the sights and sounds of what was around them. They were modernising poetry.

The ballad is usually a third-person narrative, and it can run on forever - it was designed to have verses added - while its later development, the dramatic monologue, throws the reader into a highly charged first-person narrative, closer to the urgencies of the stage than the shaggy dog of a story.

But both forms have a story to tell. The poems in The World's Wife are hybrids: first person, dramatic situations, at once intimate and theatrical, as you'd expect from a monologue, but with the authority of a ballad - a legend being told, a larger-than-life figure that belongs in myth as well as history. And there's something of the broadside here, too, in their high-stepping protest at the truth that the story unfolds. Some of these poems are laments for women in captivity.

The dramatic Mrs Beast pictures a world where smart women with their own money ditch the prince and choose the beast. Better sex. Keys to the wine cellar. The women run a weekly poker game.

Marilyn Monroe. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt

But behind each player stood a line of

ghosts

Unable to win. Eve, Ashputtel. Marilyn

Monroe.

Rapunzel slashing wildly at her hair.

Bessie Smith unloved and down and out.

Bluebeard's wives, Henry VIII's, Snow White

Cursing the day she left the seven

dwarfs, Diana,

Princess of Wales.

The startling last line? A paraphrase of Auden: "Let the less-loving one be me."

From women who need a lesson in loving less to a creature who could not love more, "Queen Kong" is the story of a female gorilla who falls in love with the documentary film-maker who turns up in her remote part of the world. They have an affair. He leaves for home, much like Aeneas leaves Dido, but this gorilla doesn't kill herself: she goes after him to New York city, squeezing herself between the skyscrapers, "pressing my passionate eye / to a thousand windows, each with its modest peep-show / Of boredom or pain, of drama, consolation, remorse." Until ... "I picked him, like a chocolate from the top layer / Of the box, one Friday night, out of his room".

It's a wonderful image, and as she dangles him there, high over the Manhattan grid, we get a new sense of what is meant by arm candy.

The range of Duffy's imagination is vast. She moves easily from gorilla-scale to the interiority of the sonnet. Duffy loves the sonnet form - she says: "They remind me of prayers." "Anne Hathaway" is also a sonnet - a gentle vindication of the love between the famously neglected wife and the most famous writer in history. For those who fear that feminism doesn't include men, except at the level of anger or contempt, read this one.

The final poem in the collection, "Demeter", is also a sonnet, as mysterious and complete as the moon. It is about nobody's wife. That choice is an audacious signal. A message that something else is happening now. We are leaving for elsewhere. A new beginning.

"Demeter" celebrates mother and daughter in their ancient form as the two-that-is-three of the Great Goddess - mother, daughter, wise woman. I guess the invisible third is writing the poem - or perhaps she's renewed, as she always is, in the new moon of the last line. "Demeter" is a love poem. A poem of spring and the coming future - its symbol, fresh flowers. A future, perhaps, where there will be no need to voice history with the words we never heard.

A future that starts with a prayer.

The World's Wife is published as a Picador Classic. Carol Ann Duffy will be reading from The World's Wife at the Picador Classic Day at Foyles bookshop, London WC2, on 7 February. foyles.co.uk

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Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy - of course it's political

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Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife gives the women behind the scenes - from Mrs Midas to Queen Kong - a glorious and powerful voice. She is a poet of vast imagination. By Jeanette Winterson