Middlemarch and Gynocriticism: Language and Gender

This paper aims to read the language of George Eliot's Middlemarch with the help of Elaine Showalter's Gynocriticism that summons the study of women's text as authors. Gynocriticism has four areas of study including the biological, cultural, psychological and linguistic. Rather than focusing on male writing, Gynocriticism concentrates on women writers, their style and writings. The focal point of Gynocriticism is the concepts of difference calling distinctive feminine features presented in literary works. Mary Evans or George Eliot's Middlemarch as a provincial study of Victorian life and a slice of history mirrors a patriarchal society in which some iconoclast women stand against traditional feminine roles, defined by masculine social power. The focus of this paper is on the language of Middlemarch on the basis of Gynocriticism approach. It studies of women and men's innate language differences by focusing on the language of Dorothea. There are many specific differences in male and female speech which cannot be explained in terms of two detached sex specific languages, but need to be considered instead in terms of styles, strategies and context of linguistic performance. Therefore, it is attempted to investigate the stylistic, strategic and contextual linguistic differences of Dorothea, narrator and Mary Evans on the basis of Gynocriticism. The research methodology is a library research. Therefore, the entire information and sources are provided through libraries, multimedia, encyclopedias, and electronic sources.Despite the fact there are some differences between men and women's languages; no one is able to draw a distinct line between these two boundaries. Some linguistic characteristics belong to a specific gender, for example, emotive language is closer to feminine mood. Moreover, both genders have potentiality of either feminine or masculine language. In another word, women are not supposed to search for fundamental differences in their language, but some linguistic features including style, strategy and context are key factors in this regard. Dorothea's language indicates feminine linguistic style of Victorian women class through the novel. It is Victorian context that represents feminine linguistic differences more vivid. Feminine cultural strategies of that era make them more muted, more submissive and contextually more unknown