AUTHOR: Mills, Sara

TITLE: Feminist Stylistics

SERIES: Interface
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 1995

Reviewer:
Oana Celia Ilieş -Gheorghiu,
M.A. student in Translation and Interpreting,
Faculty of Letters,
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi

` The issue of language and gender or gendered language has imposed as a distinct
category in the field of sociolinguistics starting with Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s
Place (1975) and Dale Spender’s Man-Made Language (1980), although its roots have come a
long way from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir.
Sara Mills’s works - Discourses of Difference: Women's Travel Writing (1991), Feminist
Stylistics (1995), Feminist Reading/Feminist Readings (1996), Gender and Politeness (2003), ,
Language and Sexism (2008), etc. – and her activity as an editor (e.g. Feminist Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader, 2008) recommend her as one of the most important theoreticians of gender
and discourse in the last decades, together with Robin Lakoff, Deborah Cameron, Deborah
Tannen, Jane Sunderland, Lia Litosseliti, etc.
Feminist Stylistics (1995) remains even today, almost twenty-years after its publication, a
ground-breaking work in the field. It provides an insight into aspects of feminist writing, on the
one hand, and stylistics, on the other hand, and it is useful for young researchers with an interest
in the field, as it is clearly structured and does not require prior thorough knowledge of the
feminist issues tackled.
Feminist Stylistics is structured bidimensionally: it begins with a thorough theoretical
component, entitled “General Theoretical Issues”, and continues, in the second part, with a
generous applicative section (“Analysis”) consisting of three subchapters.
The general theoretical issues deal, in the first chapter of the book, with “feminist models
of texts”, analysing types of language. In an approach inspired by David Crystal, language
represents for Sara Mills “a form of information transfer [...] a form of social networking or
social bonding, or [...] the site where power relations are negotiated and enforced; [...] a set of
mutually exclusive choices in a closed system” (1995: 18). Further, she criticises the traditional
approaches to the literary text, which, most often than not, overlook that fact that the writer is not
in complete control of her material, that “there are constraints on the way in which we use
language and organise information” (Foucault, 1972, qtd. in Mills, 1995: 21). Another drawback
of the traditional approach is that most texts focused on in stylistic analyses are canonical—
drawn from a limited number of texts which are seen to have literary value (e.g., D. H. Lawrence,
Shakespeare, Pinter, Beckett and so on). To prove her point, Mills resorts to feminist literary
critics, like Toril Moi (1985) or Elaine Showalter (1978) who have shown that “women’s texts
have often been excluded from canonical status, by the process termed phallocentric criticism”
(22). In contrast, the model of analysis proposed by feminist stylistics takes two major aspects
into account: the production and the reception of the text. The former is dependant upon
discourse constraints, socio-historical factors, textual antecedents and literary conventions,
affiliations in point of gender, race, class, nation and, last but not least, publishers and
advertising. The latter is affected by the intended vs. actual audience, implied vs. actual reader
and, again, socio-historical factors and publishing practices. With a larger focus upon the reader
and the incorporation of socio-historical constraints, this type of analysis “helps to explain, for
example, why it is that women’s writing is read in a certain way, why some women writers use
similar language and why certain features of a text produce a gendered address to the reader”
(28).
The second chapter, “The Gendered Sentence”, relies on the works of Virginia Woolf,
associating her ideas with those of the representatives of the French School of Feminism (Julia
Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray) to explain the culture of difference and
phallogocentrism. It is one of the strong points of the work, as the author does not limit herself to
linguistics issues but resorts to a feminist/psychoanalytical/deconstructivist contextual framework
to support further stylistic aspects which are developed in the next subchapter, “Linguistic
analysis of difference”. In search for the gendered sentence, she provides insights into works
dealing with this issue, citing Mary Hiatt and Susan Leopardi. In the end of the subchapter, Mills
proposes two samples of texts that seem to be feminine (co-ordinated incomplete clauses, no
dominant voice, concerning women’s experiences and difficult to read), but she reveals
afterwards that one of the texts belongs to James Joyce, which would make the available
definitions clearly inadequate. “It is a simplification of gender difference”, she asserts, “to
assume that all women will write in a similar way or that all men will” (49). The refuting of
overgeneralisations adds to the pluses of the book, revealing an unbiased linguistic approach.
In keeping with reader response and reception theories and with her own schemata of
analysis, the third chapter, “Gender and reading”, deals with reception, tackling issues such as
direct and indirect address or dominant reader, that would be male. She brings evidence from
advertisements and radio programmes clearly directed to men. Although it relies on multiple
examples and cites authoritative names, this last theoretical chapter seems hastened and less
uniform in point of information provided, which, from the perspective of Feminist Stylistics as a
work accessible to readers less acquainted to the topic, may be considered a weak point. Her
aims, stated in the introduction, were primarily to “design a toolkit” (2) and to “ask questions
about our commonsense notions of gender and text” (16); nevertheless, they are subverted by the
assumption that every reader is an expert in reception theories.
The second part of Feminist Stylistics deals with analyses at the word, phrase/sentence,
and discourse levels . One of the problems carefully tackled concerns the generic pronouns and
nouns, which are generally masculine, or, when feminine, referring to professions stereotypically
ascribed to women, such as nurse, secretary or librarian (66). In Mills’s view (as in other feminist
linguists’), the language presenting male-oriented experience as the norm is clearly sexist and can
be avoided by using a few choices of “gender-free language”: the plural pronoun, the s/he
convention, the passivisation or the use of the feminine pronoun as generic (72) – the latter being
very difficult to implement and equally sexist, in our opinion. In the same chapter, “Analysis at
the level of the word”, Sara Mills discusses the semantic derogation of women in pairs such as
master/ mistress, lord/ lady, bachelor/ spinster (84), asserting that the second term of each pair
may acquire negative connotations. Although the information provided is neither new nor
revolutionary, the chapter is well-structured and advances some valid proposals for a less sexist
English language. Interestingly enough, Mills’s findings can be enlarged upon at the level of
other languages as well – and maybe a monumental work is worth mentioning here, Gender
Across Languages – The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, edited by Marlis
Hellinger and Hadumod Bußmann, published by John Benjamins in 2001, dealing with 30
languages: Arabic, Belizean Creole, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Eastern Maroon Creole,
English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian,
Japanese, Norwegian, Oriya, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Spanish,
Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh (2001: ix). Although the work mentioned does
not cite Sara Mills directly, her influence is undeniable.
The second applicative chapter, “Analysis at the Level of the Phrase /Sentence” deals with
ready-made phrases, such as proverbs or famous quotations, metaphors, following in the steps of
Lakoff and Johnson (1980), or jokes and humour. All these are based, in her view, on ideology,
stereotypes, presuppositions and inference. Relying on representation and context, this chapter is
actually only an extended introduction to the next one, “Analysis at the Level of Discourse”.
As Sara Mills admits in her introduction to this chapter, stylistic analysis used to be less
common at the discourse level, as it was less concerned with individual lexical patterns, but with
“larger structures and patterns which determine[d] the occurrence of these lexical patterns and
[...] with the effect of these items and larger structures on readers” (123). Relying on Foucault’s
discursive frameworks (1972), Sara Mills sets out to analyse the constructions of characters in
literary texts, but also in the media, identifying stereotypical notions employed. A very interesting
approach, inspired by Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), is the analysis of
women’s roles in literature, following the scheme of thirty-one functions identified by Vladimir
Propp in folk tales. Sara Mills makes another step in connecting stylistics with narratology in the
subchapter on “Focalization”, in which she asserts that “the focalization through the male’s
experience inevitably represents the female as the object of the male gaze” (146). The concept is
not at all new, being coined as early as 1975 by Laura Mulvey, in her article, “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema”, and used widely in film and media studies ever since; nonetheless, it is
Mills’s merit to introduce it into the field of linguistic studies. Otherwise, this entire chapter relies
on an interdisciplinary approach and this confers the book topicality.
The conclusions bring forth a detailed summary. The book is completed with an extended
glossary, notes and index.
Clearly organised, interdisciplinary and innovative, comprehensible and well-
documented, Sara Mills’s Feminist Stylistics is a pioneering work in the field and, despite its year
of publication, can be as useful today as it used to be in 1995.
 References

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Harvester, 90–9.
Crystal, D. (1988) Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.Sheridan Smith, New York: Harper.
Hiatt, M. (1977) The Way Women Write, New York: Teachers’ College Press, Columbia University.
Hellinger, M and H, Bußmann (2001) (eds.), Gender Across Languages – The Linguistic Representation
of Women and Men, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Irigaray, L. (1985) The Sex Which Is Not One, ed. C. Porter, New York: Cornell University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1981) ‘Oscillation between power and denial’, in E.Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds) New
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Propp, V. (1968 [1928]) The Morphology of the Folktale, Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Spender, D. (1980) Man-Made Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.