Womanly Pursuit of Self-fulfillment Versus Stereotype of Women as Housewives in Alice Munro’s The Office: A Stylistic Analysis

Document Type : Original research

Authors

1 Department of English, Faculty of Al-Alsun, Suez Canal University

2 Professor of Linguistics & Translation, English Department, Dean Faculty of Arts, Suez University

Abstract

This study aims to stylistically analyze the womanly pursuit of self-fulfillment versus the stereotype of women as housewives in Alice Munro’s short story “The Office”. The significance of this interdisciplinary study is to help both specialists and generalists understand the theme of womanly self-fulfillment versus women’s stereotypes, using Leech and Short's model to analyze sentence structures, lengths, and types in “The Office”. Regarding relevant studies, numerous studies show that the use of language reflects and perpetuates women's subordinate position in society by defining their roles and societal status. This is evident in the tradition of women changing their last names to their husbands upon marriage, which signifies the marginalization of women. Concerning the methodology, this study is both qualitative and quantitative. It is qualitative as it explains the role of sentence structures, lengths, and types in the meaning of Munro’s “The Office”. In addition, it is quantitative as it includes statistics to show the frequency and significance of each grammatical feature. The results show that Munro uses four different sentence structures: complex, simple, compound, and compound-complex. Furthermore, Munro uses short and long sentences. The sentences are classified into statements, commands, and questions. In a nutshell, “The Office” is stylistically analyzed by showing the role of various sentence structures, lengths, and types in conveying the theme of womanly pursuit of self-fulfillment versus the stereotype of women as housewives.

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