THE LANGUAGE OF SACRIFICE AND THE DISCOURSE OF DEPRIVATION: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF GENDER, CLASS, AND ECONOMIC POWER IN O. HENRY’S “THE GIFT OF THE MAGI” AND MAUPASSANT’S “THE NECKLACE”

Abstract

The paper focuses on the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the two short stories, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” (1884). This study aims to explore how the lexical choices, the patterns of transitivity and the descriptions of domestic settings are intertwined to construct a specific ideological image of gender, class and economic power in the two stories. The study will employ the three-dimensional model of CDA proposed by Norman Fairclough, which involves the text itself, the process of text production and consumption and the social and cultural context in which the text is constructed and interpreted. In addition, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar will be employed to underpin the micro analysis of language use. Through these analytical frameworks, this paper reveals that both stories frequently use the discourse of economic absence and the lack of money. Such discourse positions the female protagonists into a larger system in which women are produced as commodities and consumed in a gendered way. However, though both stories involve a female protagonist and an economic issue, they constitute very different ideological implications of the relationship between femininity and economic agency. In O. Henry’s story, the discourse of the story sentimentalizes and ennobles the idea of a woman’s economic self-sacrifice. Della’s action of selling her beautiful hair is constructed as a supreme sign of love for her husband. Linguistic representation endorses and glorifies the loss and poverty as something spiritually valuable and moral. On the other hand, in Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” a more critical attitude is adopted. The story reveals the social and economic structures that construct women’s class desire and later punishes them for the desire. Mathilde’s ten years of painful experience are not caused by her greediness and immorality but are rooted in the structural inequality of the economic system. Her suffering is constructed because of the social context in which women are lack of access to the economic capital, rather than a result of individual immorality.