• Aniqua Munawar

  Author

Language reflects culture and collective thought of a society. Feminist stylistics has
been one of the major interests of feminist linguistics. The goal of feminist stylistics is to reveal
gender concerns and patriarchal patterns inscribed in texts. The following study aims at
analysing the subversion of patriarchal language by Brantenberg (1977) in her novel Egalia’s
Daughters. The novel satirises the gender constructs in an imaginary place named Egalia, a
matriarchal society. Brantenberg deconstructed the English language by subverting its sexism
and coining words and phrases to suit the need of the novel. The use of matriarchal language in
a society ruled by women brings into sharp focus the sexism prevalent in the current use of the
English language. The purpose of the research is to foreground norm through studying its
deviation.
The research is focussed on analysing the lexical and semantic elements that represent
matriarchy. Purposive sampling from the text was done. Word level analysis taken from Mill’s
(1995) three-layered model of feminist stylistics was conducted on the text. The ideological and
semantic implications of lexical items were analysed. The findings revealed lexical items which
the author deconstructed. The analysis can help explore ideological underpinnings of gender
constructs.

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