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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This paper shows how a stylistic approach of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "The Revolt o 'Mother'" best articulates Mrs. Penn's self-assertion and appropriation of male discourse. Indeed Mrs. Penn's increasing control of language and assertion of her subjectivity become more evident through a close examination of the social deictics speech acts and speech thoughts, lexis and figures of speech within the text.
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Martha J. Cutter's article "Frontiers of Language: Engendering Discourse in "The Revolt of 'Mother'," is an excellent study detailing the gendered nature of language in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "The Revolt of 'Mother'." Women, according to her, fail to communicate in the male-dominated world because of gender language differences. It is only when women are able to wrestle language from males through revolutionary renaming that true understanding between the sexes can take place. Freeman's "The Revolt of 'Mother'," the story of Ms. Penn who moves into the barn her husband builds at the place he promised to erect a house forty years ago, well illustrates current feminist and recent linguistic and literary developments, preferring referential and propositional meaning. The oppressive nature of language, treated in Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place and Francine Frank and Frank Anshen's Language and the Sexes, is the gist of the 'The Revolt of "Mother." As Cutter so eloquently states in her article, "[t]his story [...] might enact a truce, a temporary act of communication that is successful, that invents a system of discourse which slips free from the binary system of sexual difference, of patriarchal or non-patriarchal language, of speaking men or silent women, of barn versus home" (291).
Numerous critics have written on the subversiveness of "The Revolt of 'Mother'." Joseph R McElrath, Jr. and Patricia M. Dwyer examine respectively how Freeman uses anticlimax narrative technique and voice to subvert male discourse. Elaine Orr discusses the relational nature of Mother's negotiation with her husband, Mr. Penn. Elizabeth Meese expounds on the contradictory critical receptions of the work and "the ambiguities of language" in Freeman's writerly text. And both Joseph Church and Cutter focus on discursive practices in "The Revolt of 'Mother'" and Mother's reconfiguration of male patriarchal structures. All the above critic eloquently and competently argue the prominent role of language in Freeman's text. Yet, I believe that a stylistic approach to "The Revolt of 'Mother'" best conveys to students the exclusion of women in the production of meaning and their need to appropriate male discourse. The above articles demonstrate that language is a conceptual grid through which we experience reality and females' relationship to language. But, they fail to explore the power relationships inherent in language use even though it is skillfully conveyed in "The Revolt of 'Mother'" through lexis, social deictics, speech acts, and the editorial comments of the omniscient narrator's figures of speech. Freeman's story is, in itself, an example of language appropriation.
Students frequently contend that meaning in literary texts is arbitrary and fluid because of the opacity and ambiguity of language. Indeed, the majority of critics, cited above, foreground the gendered nature of language and the problematic of textual interpretation. Still a stylistic approach, in my opinion, best provides students a sense of stable textual meaning by empowering them to discover the relational meaning of words, how the organization of language, utterance and social contexts affect meaning, and how language structure affects our understanding ant place in the world. Because the text acquires more significance through the interplay of its various linguistic features, as shown in this paper, students also become more attentive responders to the text.
Language, according to Roger Fowler, is "the chief instrument of socialization, which is the process by which a person is, willy nilly, moulded into conformity with the established systems of beliefs of the society into which s/he happens to be born"(30). Indeed, Thomas McLaughlin claims that "'it is part of the fabric of social and political life. It shapes our perceptions, but it is also shaped by its social context" (87). Language acquisition, however, is not an innocent act, for Deborah Cameron contends that, among other social factors, "the order of language is a masculine order dominated by the phallus; hence those who do not possess the phallus women remain marginal to language, in the culture (since women are compelled to learn to speak) but not entirely of it (9)."
In the "The Revolt of 'Mother'," however, Freeman de-absolutizes language through binary character representations and gender use of language. Because language is gender determined, women have to become definers to establish their counter-discourse as the norm that shapes the world. Therefore, it is only when Mother, Mrs. Penn, the heroine of the story, affirms her power and agency, through her use of language, and shifts from influence (achieving through men, children and services rendered to others) to personal power (transcendence) that she dismantles established beliefs and thus redefines the worldview of language. Since encodings of human experience are materialized through determined binary oppositions, empowering discourse, prompting women to action, can alone eventually create an egalitarian society.
The social and hierarchical linguistic distinction between men and women is well established in "The Revolt of 'Mother'" from the onset of the story. Since the title of the story foregrounds the word "Mother" by putting it between scarecrow quotations, associating the word "mother" with pejorative biological and social connotations, the reader carries these presuppositions to the story which begins in medias res with Mother calling her husband "Father." Obviously, the reader's directed decoding of the text establishes Mrs. Penn's objectification by making her an absence. By referring to him by his social and family role, she reveals the formal and hierarchical relationship between them. As father, Mr. Penn becomes the lawgiver while Mother holds her immanent role of procreator. Mrs. Penn, to whom Mr. Penn also refers as "Mother," is, nonetheless, always formally called "Mrs. Penn" or "Sarah Penn." Note that Mrs. Penn is referred to as either "Sarah Penn" or "Mrs....
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