Functional Stylistics Analysis Of Kate Chopin’s Short Stories

Kate Chopin(1850-1904), a classic American writer, is famous for her novel The Awakening likewise the themes of her short stories also have distinct characteristics.This dissertation adopts the ideational and interpersonal meta-functions of functional stylistics to analyze the four representative short stories of Chopin—“The Story of an Hour,” “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” “Madam Céleston’s Divorce” and “The Kiss,”aiming at revealing the eternal confusion which the women faced in the 19 th century before and after their marriages.This research uses the transitivity system of ideational meta-function to analyze the protagonists’ mental transformation processes and the thematic meaning of literary works. In “The Story of an Hour,” Mrs. Mallard’s behaviors contain different types of Material Processes after she knows the news of her husband’s death, from which we can see her confusion between the marriage bondage and single freedom. “A Pair of Silk Stockings” reflects the women’s contradiction between their own needs and familial responsibility under the limited material conditions by analyzing the different proportion of mental and material processes exist in Mrs. Sommers before, during and after she buys the stockings. This research also uses the mood and modality system of interpersonal meta-function to analyze the protagonists’ personalities and the power relations among them. In “Madam Céleston’s Divorce,” we can speculate that Madam Céleston’s characteristics might be hidebound through the high frequency modal operator “always” occurs several times in the narration part. While in the dialogue between her and the lawyer, she uses “must” and “have to” several times to show her resolute attitude to divorce. She abandons the idea of divorce immediately in the end when her husband comes back. From all these aspects, we can see that Madam Céleston is also irresolute. In “The Kiss,” Miss Nathalie eventually chooses the rich but not really loved Mr. Brantain as her husband. We can explore her value on love andmarriage by analyzing her different status in the power relations with Harvy and Brantain, and the different modal operators she uses towards these two boys—one is handsome but not rich, while the other one is rich, but not handsome.This dissertation tries to explore women’s dilemma in facing the contradictions between love, marriage and money as well as material and spiritual freedom, reveal the women’s universal ideas beyond the times’ bondage. Meanwhile, it tries to prove that Functional stylistics is helpful for us to understand Kate Chopin’s stories in a more objective way and further deepen the research on her and her works.