A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Racism In The Novel The Help

The Help is the debut novel of Kathryn Stockett,an American writer.It is set in a southern American town,Jackson,Mississippi,in the 1960 s.Through the depiction of maids' daily life from three main female characters' angle,the novel exposes the terrible living condition of black people in the southern part of the United States under the white hegemony,and vividly presents the racial issues in Mississippi area during the era of Civil Right Movement.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),a newly emerged instrumental linguistics,aims to reveal the hidden ideology in the discourse and further disclose the relations among discourse,power and ideology by analyzing the linguistic forms of the discourse.It can be applied to analyze the bias,discrimination,and other unequal power relations and social phenomena embedded in discourse.Due to the rich content about racial discrimination in The Help,the author attempts to analyze the linguistic features of The Help from the perspective of CDA,applying Halliday's SFG as the analytical tool,and taking the social historical background of The Help into consideration,with the hope of unveiling the ideology embedded in the novel and uncovering the complicated relations among discourse,power and ideology.This study analyzes various words used by the white and the black,passive voice,different mood structures of the maids and the white employers,as well as the use of material process,mental process and relational process in The Help by means of lexical classification,transformation,mood system and transitivity.It reveals the passive,low social status of black people and their loss of voice,as well as the asymmetrical power relations between the white and the black and the awakening of black people.And it finds out that Kathryn Stockett employs various linguistic strategies to constitute social ideologies at that time,and further discloses the dialectical relation between language and ideology.The present study proves that analyzing literature works from linguistic perspective enables readers to understand the ideologies and power relations in literature works,which will help readers comprehend works better.