Ideology of Marriage in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice": A Critical Discourse Analysis
ABSTRACT This article tackles Jane Austen's novel Pride and prejudice through the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to investigate the ideology of marriage. The study aims at identifying transitivity processes of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and examining gender inequalities in the selected texts, as well as, exploring Austen's personal perspectives and cultural dimensions in the novel. The present article is limited to analysing extracts of some selected characters: Mr. Darcy, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins and Miss Charlotte Lucas. The eclectic model of CDA adopted for the requirements of this study involves integrating Halliday's Transitivity System of SFL with Fairclough's (1989/1995) CDA approach. A mixed-method analysis (qualitative and quantitative) has been conducted to (17) selected texts extracted according to themes of marriage and love in the novel. The findings have proved that transitivity processes (mainly material, mental and relational processes) embedded to male characters outnumber those of the female characters. There are (68) processes belong to men in comparison with women’s that are only (52) which provide a linguistic evidence that women are the most vulnerable members of society with a few exceptions.