From Fancy to Feminist Frenzy Fight: An Ideational Grammatical Metaphor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between the story and the author's personal life encounters. Specifically, it aims to construe the linguistic choices in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's <em>The Yellow Wallpaper</em>, which highlights the discriminatory factors that worsen the woman's plights and struggles specifically shown by masculine dominance, feminine poor role positioning, oppression, and marginalization. Considering these issues, the current study aims to describe the author's experience of the world, what's inside her, and around her. Results show that the text has 629 transitivity processes, with relational as the dominant process type by the inanimate characters which effectively describes the kind of environment which shapes a clear conflict against her milieu. Among the participant roles and circumstances, carrier, and location show their dominance, respectively. An in-depth analysis using the transitivity system unveils the author's connectivity to her own life presented through literary metaphors. The paper further proves that literature can be taught using linguistic approaches.