Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Intention process
‘Mary kissed Clare’
Action process
Supervention
‘The boy coughed loudly’
Event process
‘The lake shimmered’
Material
process
Figure D6.1
Subdivision of material processes in Burton’s study

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Through glass darkly: through dark glasses. On
stylistics and political commitment – via a study of a
passage from Sylvia Plath’s 
The Bell Jar
Deirdre Burton
(reprinted from Ronald Carter (ed) 
Language and Literature: An Introductory
Reader in Stylistics
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982, p.195–214)
[. . .] The piece of prose fiction I am going to consider in some detail is a short
passage from Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel 
The Bell Jar
. It is a passage which
details her experience of electric-shock treatment as a ‘remedy’ for severe depression.
Readers may care to look ahead at this point, to where the text is given, in order to
contextualise general points made here. Essentially, I will be analysing aspects of
clause construction and, in a preliminary reading of the passage, readers may find it
useful to pay specific attention to the simple question ‘who does what to whom?’.
Here, then, I want to consider two issues as preliminaries to that analysis. First,
I want to map out a model of some relevant features of clause construction in general,
against which any text can be charted, and our Plath text will be charted. Secondly,
I want to discuss why this type of analysis is particularly relevant to the issues raised
in the introduction, and similarly why this specific text was chosen for analysis.
The model of processes and participants in the structure of clauses that I shall
draw here is adapted from ideas in the work of Halliday (1970, 1973, 1978). Let me
quickly try to explain why processes and participants are a strong place to begin
analysis [. . .]. If the analyst is interested in ‘making strange’ the power relationships
that obtain in the socially constructed world – be it the ‘real’ world of public and
private social relationships or the spoken and written texts that we create, hear, read,
and that ultimately construct us in that ‘real’ world – then, crucially, it is the reali-
sation of 
processes
and 
participants
(both the actors and the acted upon) in those
processes that should concern us. Ultimately, I want to suggest, with Sapir (1956),
Whorf (1956) and Volosinov (1973 [1930]), that the ‘world’ is linguistically
constructed. But rather than a crude Whorfian view, which might lead us to believe
that we are trapped and constrained by that linguistic construction, I want to suggest
a far more optimistic line of thought. Simply, once it is clear to people that there 
are alternative ways of expressing ‘reality’, then people can make decisions about 
how to express ‘reality’; both for others and themselves. By this means, we can both
deconstruct and reconstruct our realities to an enabling degree.
And this brings me to an explanation of why the Plath text seemed peculiarly
appropriate to a feminist-linguistic polemic.
Where the topic of ‘women and literature’ is concerned, there are three imme-
diate areas of thought and study that are being researched:
(1) Images of women in literature written by males – particularly in relation to details
of social history. This is, of course, work that draws upon, and contributes to,
a ‘new’ feminist version of that history. (See Rowbotham, 1973a, 1973b.)
(2) Images of women in literature written by feminist women. This may well involve
finding them in the first place. (See Showalter 1977; Rich 1977)
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111
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T R A N S I T I V I T Y A T W O R K : A F E M I N I S T - S T Y L I S T I C A P P L I C A T I O N
187
Deirdre
Burton

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(3) Images of women in literature by women who were not/are not feminists – either
by ‘free’ choice, or because they were unaware that that choice was available to
them.
Sylvia Plath’s work and life can clearly be seen in relation to the third point here.
Reading her prose, poems and letters, and reading about her, in the context of the
raised consciousness and women’s support groups of the 1970s and 1980s, is a
moving, and disturbing, experience. It is so easy for us to locate her contradictions,
dilemmas and pressures as they are expressed by her texts. It is so easy to see her
writing herself 
into
a concept of helpless victim, and eventually, perhaps, into suicide
itself. Her texts abound in disenabling metaphors, disenabling lexis, and – I wish to
demonstrate here – disenabling syntactic structures.
[. . .] I want to assert the importance of perceiving those sorts of forces, pervasive
in the language around us, and would maintain that both individuals and social insti-
tutions require analytical access to knowledge about the intricacies of the relationship
between linguistic structures and reality, such that, with that knowledge, reality might
be reconstructed in less damaging ways – and again, I would emphasise, with regard
to both individuals and social institutions.
I do not, by any means, wish to suggest that only women ‘are’ victims, or construct
themselves as such. If this were a text written by a man (and there are, of course,
similar texts), then it would be open to similar sympathetic analysis and discussion.
However, that seems to me to be a job for somebody else to do, given that life is
short and we must follow our immediate priorities. My general message is: stylistic
analysis is 
no
t just a question of discussing ‘effects’ in language and text, but a
powerful method for understanding the ways in which all sorts of ‘realities’ are
constructed through language. For feminists who believe that ‘the personal is polit-
ical’ there is a burning issue which has to be investigated immediately, and in various
triangulated ways. We want to understand the relationships between severe and crip-
pling depression that many women experience and the contradictory and disenabling
images of self available for women in models of literature, the media, education, folk
notions of the family, motherhood, daughterhood, work, and so on. [. . .] Any reader
with any other radical political commitment should see what follows as a model to
appropriate and to be made relevant to his or her own convictions. [. . .]
On reading the passage, readers repeatedly formulate the following sorts of
responses:
(1) the persona seems quite helpless;
(2) the persona seems ‘at a distance’, ‘outside herself ’, ‘watching herself ’, ‘detached
to being with – and then just a victim’;
(3) the medical staff seem more interested in getting the job done than caring.
In order to understand something of what is happening in the language of this
passage, that gives rise to such responses, the following instructions enable us to get
a firmer grasp of the persona’s ‘reality’ as constructed in the clause-by-clause make-
up of the text as a whole:
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E X T E N S I O N

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(1) isolate the processes 
per se
, and find which participant (who or what) is ‘doing’
each process;
(2) find what sorts of process they are, and which participant is engaged in which
type of process;
(3) find who or what is affected by each of these processes.
First, then, here is the text with sentences numbered for ease of reference, and
processes isolated and underlined.
THE TEXT
(1) The wall-eyed nurse