Nghiên cứu cơ sở lịch sử, xã hội và tính mới của việc sử dụng ngôn ngữ trong tác phẩm ‘Kiêu hãnh và định kiến’ của Jane Austen

Nghiên cu  s lch s, xã hi và tính mi
ca vic s dng ngôn ng trong tác phm
Kiêu hãnh và nh ki ca Jane Austen

Nguyn Kim Oanh

i hc Ngoi ng
LuNgôn ng Anh; Mã s: 60 22 15
ng dn: Dr. Ph
o v: 2012

Abstract: The study firstly aimed at giving some certain information about the
temporary English society and literature of the early eighteenth and late nineteenth
     
through the language use in three leading conversations between the two main
characters -Darcy Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Bennet -     
             
             
expressed the researc
as well as major findings and contributions were also stated to recommend a number of
things for readers to consider in the choice of widening their knowledge in literature.

Keywords: Ngôn ng; Ting Anh; S dng ngôn ng


Content
PART 1: INTRODUCTION

This initial part stated the problem and the rationale of the study, together with the aims,
objectives, the scope of the study, and the overview of the rest of this research
paper. Above all, it was in

this

part
that the research question was identified to work
as clear guidelines for the whole research.

1. Rationale of the study

In the eighteenth century, the readers were delighted by a new form of prose, which
was called
v
for the first time by Daniel Defoe  the first considerable British
novelist. A
o
with a certain
length

did
bring amusement, pleasure and joy to those
who were concerned when the contemporary British society was dreadfully chaotic in
the virtue of the changes in the monarch. In the innovation of this new form of prose,
there appeared a remarkable number of writers and their works. They were coined to
emphasize not only the social changes but also the imaginary stories, which exposed
their hope for
a

better
life, so even the family or social class problems were best put
down in words by one of the most famous female novelist in Britain and all over the
world  Jane Austen.

She was also said to be the first novelist capable of conveying both interior and

exterior of human life” as well as developing the means of representing the

totality of human life” (Ian Watt, 1957)

2. Aims of the study

This study was carried out with the hope of exploring the background of the
temporary Britain leading to the remarkable changes in its literal history of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries especially in the view on British novels.

The study also aimed at answering the question: “What is Jane
Austen‟s
distinctive writing style?”. The answer to the question would help the students of
Linguistics, the novel's readers as well as those who wished to specialize in
English Literature realize what made Austen one of the most successful female novelist of
the century.

3. Methodology of procedures

3.1. Design of the study

The study was divided into three main parts. While Part One dealt with the general
information which contained the rationale, aims and objectives, methodology and scope
of the study, Part Two went into further details of the historical and social background;
and the newness of language use in Jane Auste Pride and Prejudice through
four chapters. The suggestions for further research would not be omitted in the last part.

3.2. Data collection and data analysis

The study used the descriptive and contextual methods of data collecting and
analyzing.

Basing on the huge resources of library and internet materials, the researcher
analyzed and then agglutinated those ideas into her own brief clear and
understandable viewpoints.

On the other hand, several differences in the changeable literal trends of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be briefly stated in her Analysis on how main
characters exposed their own
e

and d in some certain
circumstances through the three volumes.

4. Scope of the study

As could be seen from the title, the study strongly focused not only on the
historical and social background but also on the language use of the novel which played
the most important role.
To understand that newness of language use in the novel, the researcher had to pay her
full attention to the main characters leading conversations in the three volumes
which helped expose the cherish love and the theory of  and

 the
main themes of the novel.
PART 2: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1. Definitions of key terms

To be able to analyze the newness of language use through the three acts of the novel,
there were several key terms: discourse and discourse analysis, literary style and language
use, which needed to be deeply understood. So for the purpose of providing a clear
and deep understanding of the matter, this first chapter would focus on the definitions
of those key terms while mentioning some necessary information about previous
studies that related to the matter of the study.

1.1. Discourse and discourse analysis

Through centuries, 'discourse' was defined in various ways by a number of
scholars.


was 'stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified and
purposive'. (Cook 1989:156)

Sharing a lot in common with Malinowski, linguists (Hymes, 1960s; Austin, 1962; Searle,
1969; Grice, 1975; and Halliday and Hasan, 1973, 1978, 1989, 1994) had drawn certain
attention to this branch by clarifying some “contextual, grammar and cohesional
models as well as pragmatic and conversational viewpoints”.

However, at the limitation of the minor thesis, the researcher wanted to focus on the
role of contextual analysis in the three major discourses for the reason that
'context' was created by the discourse and vice versa.

More systematically, Halliday (1989) developed a model of contextual analysis, just
following the context of situation, which included three components as followed:



Components of
a


SITUATION


Feature of the context

Field of discourse

what was happening, to the nature of the social action that
was taking place

Tenor of discourse

Who were taking part in the situation

Mode of discourse

The role assigned to language

1.2. Literary style

Literary style was defined in various ways by a number of scholars.

According to Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Literary style referred to “linguistic choice
in general” or to those aspects of linguistic choice which concern alternative
ways of rendering the same subject matter” (cited by Mitchell, A. & McGee, K. 2011:
31-32).

Similarly with those scholars, David Watson in  Elements of Style (1915),
defined literary style as the translation of thought into language”. This
identification of the style surely did not fail in width and generality”. In other words,
there was no doubt, as the widespread belief in the existence and the power of something
so called when words, sentences and voice were carefully chosen to be the means or the
medium of the garment of the certain processes of thought. It gave a distinction to
certain writers or compositions because even though it was not so easy to recognize an
authors
style, readers were still able to see her literary

accent of a school, a nation or an age which could be clarified through the concrete whole
form by means of a number of concrete parts.

1.2.1. Word choice

General speaking, nouns and verbs were the main medium, which helped readers
visualize and convey the meanings of a novel, and a novel writer was said to be good
only if she knew when to choose or weed out the words concisely and precisely. It
should be words which were “active verbs, concrete nouns and specific adjectives”
(cited in


Elements of
Style,
2000).

1.2.2. Sentence fluency

Easily seen in well-known novels that readers mostly were attracted by a variety of
sentences with different lengths and rhythms which was called “the flow and rhythm
of phrases and sentences”; in other words, it was ntence
fluency.
All the ideas were
carefully considered, chosen and then arranged in various structures to reflect the main
themes of the novel. They were not like in speaking when people could not rethink or
revise the ideas for effect. To make the sentences fluent, sounding like an own style,
the writer would re-choose the words, delete redundancies, make vague or
ambiguous words much clearer to convey the greatest effect as possible.

1.2.3. Voice

There was an old saying: “Style is the dress of thoughts”; and literary style was most
clearly defined by an authors voice. Although voice was difficult to be drastically
measured, it was the essential element that revealed the
writers
personality to
the extreme; and in  and Prejudice, Jane Austen was successful in
portraying characters with a great sense of irony.

In those hidden language, actions, differences and communications, irony was seen as
an art or a means of worth and effective persuasion in speeches when it

allowed people to convey the meaning above what was said. As Socrates (cited by
Colebrook,
2004)

once
implied, irony was used by saying one thing and meaning
another which resulted in an insistence. Irony was believed to bring about truth and
recognition” even if that truth was hard to be recognized and not fully meaningful.

1.3. Language use

Language use was said to be the
people‟s
production and understanding of a set of
sentences with particular meanings (cited in ny by Colebrook, 2004). In fact, the
term anguage  received a certain attention from literary scholars, but more clearly
and closer to
Halliday

s
theory that the researcher based on when analyzing the
discourses, Clark (2000) developed the theory by Gumperz and Hymes (1964, 1972)
and once acknowledged that the
speakers
word and sentence meaning came first in
theories of language structure. That was the reason for his further study in the use of
words and sentences in his enas of Language u According to him, the meaning
would be clearly recognized through the properties of the three certain arenas: 1.
Participants 2. Social processes 3. Collective activities.

1.3.1. Participants

The participants were the speakers and the speakers attendants  the addressees - and
certain so-called participants in the actions. They had certain additional roles  depending
on each situation  that helped define what the speakers said and meant. In conversations,
they were speakers and listeners.

1.3.2. Social processes

The language that was used should be depended on what the social processes were.
For instance, in the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth, they used the language,
which fit their social attitude towards the other even when the first

impression might be wrong. They spoke to the other in an ironic manner and voice due to
the awareness of their own
pride
and
e

toward the social status. The novel
ended when they both came to expose love to each other despite the social differences.

1.3.3. Collective activities

Three main acts of the novel included a number of activities that brought the
characters to take part in and to accomplish the social processes. People spoke and
listened to one another in collaboration and in coordination as to bridge the
communication gap and to reach the goal revealed at the end of the
novel.

Even though the language use was seen from various viewpoints, there was no doubt
that they had some similarities in the use and choice of words and sentence structures,
which were so typical for each character in different contexts.

1.2 Previous studies


Through centuries, not only the content but also the literary style in  and
prejudice was discussed a thousand times by a big number of scholars from all over
the world. However, several ambiguous and contradictory viewpoints began to be
discovered in the process of analyzing the novel such as Tory or Enlightenment
feminism, individual society, etc. By synthesizing
the

related
studies, several ideas
were recognized and considered some typical features, which helped exposing Jane
Austens distinctive writing style under the English society in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.


CHAPTER 2. ANALYTICAL BACKGROUND

2.1. Introduction to Jane Austen

Born on the sixteenth of December, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, England, Jane Austen
was
the

seventh
of the clergyman George
Austens
children and shared the most intimate
relationship with her sister Cassandra who had never got married. Jane Austen was in
possession of a great desire in reading from her father  a rector who lived an
uneventful life at the birthplace but always encouraged his daughters to read
passionately as much as they could. Not only Jane but other Austen children
from
ti
me

to time presented short plays watched by the family and neighbours for entertainment,
which helped create the warm and friendly living environment and the close
relationship amongst family members, which helped generate her writing ability as well
as give her the ideas for the later works.

2.2. Introduction to 'Pride and Prejudice'

2.2.1. Summary

Mr and Mrs Bennet lived their uneventful life with five daughters at Longbourn in
Herfordshire. In the absence of a male heir, their property would pass by entail to a
cousin, William Collins who lately came to the town, aiming to marry a fine woman in
the neighbourhood. The story really started when Elizabeth and four other sisters 
Mr and Mrs Bennets daughters  were wanted to go to the welcome ball of Mr
Bingley  a new single rich bachelor coming to the neighbourhood,
together
with
his two sisters and friend  Fitzwilliam Darcy. Mrs Bennet  a miraculously tiresome

mother - was consumed by the desire to see her daughters married and seemed to care
for nothing
else

in
the world because she believed: “It is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single man
in

possession
of a good fortune must be in want of
wife”. This ball brought Bingley and Jane  the eldest Bennet girl  together through an
actual attraction, and Elizabeths first impression

toward Mr Darcy - the proudest,
most disagreeable man in the world” who would never be welcomed again in
Longbourn. Furthermore, he was

one of the two  with Mr Bingleys sister  adding intensified aversion to the
separation of Bingley and Jane later on.

Meanwhile Mr Collins got a marriage refusal when he proposed to Elizabeth.
Promptly he transferred his affection to Charlotte Lucas which was finally
accepted. Elizabeth once again was brought into a contact with Darcy in
Pemberley, in Derbyshire where Darcy proposed to her in terms that did not conceal
his pride but got an indignant rejection back. During this visit, Elizabeth reached the
news that her sister Lydia eloped with Wickham, son of the steward of the Darcy
property. The story was untied since
Darcy


s
letter to Elizabeth and they finally engaged,
back to Longbourn and the relationship between Bingley and Jane was also renewed, and
then ended in a happy engagement.

2.2.2. Themes

The short courtship between Darcy and Elizabeth was an example of one of the most
cherished love stories” (Spark notes, 2012) in the English literature which displayed
the
Pride
and

even when their love and marriage was built and maintained
through their common interests in reading. Elizabeth, who even did not have a
home-tutor, had a great desire in reading books while Darcy
exposed his reading interest in preserving his fathers big library in the house,

revealed during
Elizabeths
stay in Pemberley and led to the
readers
realization of

a suitable match  Darcy and Elizabeth.
CHAPTER 3: HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF BRITISH NOVELS

3.1. Historical background

British history was said to be different from that of the European Continent

because there
had

been
no civil war in the country for centuries. The British Isles had
been inhabited by human beings for some 250,000 years, its history might
appropriately begin with the Celts, who crossed from the European continent and settled
in the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) during the very first
millennium B.C.

Those thousands of years had passed and the country had been through many
significant changes. During the Medieval Era, Anglo-Saxons conquest and then
Romans first invasion ruined the country, which finally recovered until the Age of
Elizabeth I. It was once again known as the age of the prosperity with economic and
political stabilities.

3.2. Social background

British society, with its class system and different class beliefs also provided a rich source
of
materials

for
character-based novels. Many of them depended on the contrasts, real
and imagined, between people of different classes, most especially the contrast between
the middle and upper class families those who were different mainly in social status and
fortune. On the contrary, to the middle class, who was able to partially afford their own
demands, the upper class was of a very good fortune, a plenty of fertile
lands

&
ten
thousand pounds per year. Those were seen as the upper class who received a deep
mutual
respect

and
care from the rest of the society and novels were coined to fulfill the
mission of describing the differences and conflicts.
3.3. Themes and forms of the late 18
th
and early 19
th
century novels

Different from those in the Medieval Era when the winner in language use was French
 the language of most of the literary work, the novels of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries owned some typical differences.

Although there were some stories with a considerable length, readers had to
patiently wait until the eighteenth century to first see the appearance of the word

which was seen as a „negative connotation‟ connecting to sentimental
romances. This era had begun since the appearance of a number of handsome and
courageous
heroes

who
rescued emotional miserable heroines from difficult
situations for the purpose of

serving

people
mainly from the middle class. By giving
the name
n
ovel

to this kind of prose, Daniel Defoe (1660  1731).

After Daniel Defoe, there were two other writers  Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding
who devoted their whole lives to novel writing with a core of bitterness which itself
was to expose a mad hatred to the contemporary society






CHAPTER 4: NEWNESS OF LANGUAGE USE IN ‘PRIDE AND
PREJUDICE’

4.1. Austen’s distinctive writing style

The popularity of Austens six novels did heighten her to be one of the most

important writers with the great contribution to the British Literature.

She was considered one of the most famous female novelists  “the first to
represent society, the general culture, as playing a part in the moral life,

generating the concepts of
„sincerity
and
vulgarity‟,
which no earlier time would have
understood the meaning of.”


and
Prejudice,
1991)

In other words that not being trapped by the Gothic plot which was very popular in the
eighteenth century, the appearance of Jane Austens novels was characterized as the one
who put the very first actual remarkable step to the Victorian/ Romantic Age. She
escaped from the terror implicit in the increasingly dictatorial reign of the
contemporary social values. Butler in his commentary on Jane Austen and Mansfield
Park once stated that Jane Austen was the first female novelist who brought “the
newness

and
modernity to the British literature through her intrigual writing style which
satire the vices of her contemporary society”.

(Jane Austen and Mansfield Park, 1957)

She was praised for the moral virtues as well as entertaining conversations - the
exceeding specialties that could be easily seen in all of her novels. It laid a gentle
humour of coward situations happening toward the different relationship between the
middle and higher classes, a rare flash of humour that readers seldom saw in other

contemporary novels.

4.2. Newness in language use

As mentioned above that to discuss the language use was to discuss the
participants, social processes and collective activities as Watsons theory, which shared
a lot in common with Field, Tenor and Mode in
Halliday

s
theory. The only difference
remained in Mode, which was always essential for readers to recognize an authors
voice. So as a result, this special part of the study would focus on the leading
conversations which formed this world-known novel firstly by briefly noting Field
(social processes and collective activities), Tenor (participants) then thoroughly
discussed Mode of the discourses through the two main
characters
use of language.
4.2.1. Language use in the three leading conversations

As playing the leading roles in the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy were portrayed and drawn
completely to a conflict as in the first Act, further away from her goal in the second Act
and finally resolved in the last Act.

Three leading conversations between Darcy and Elizabeth would be thoroughly
discussed in terms of Field, Tenor and Mode, which mostly helped expose
Austen's ironic voice through her choosing words differently from other authors. So,
this part of the study was to state and to analyze
what

happened
in each Act with
Austen

s
ironic voice through a cluster of main activities in the three volumes because in
de and Prejudice, irony was agreed to the “stratagem for survival”.

So as to understand more about its assumptions that the leading characters asserted in
their
claims

against
the overbearing society and emotion testing without betraying
themselves into
a

commitment,
the researcher aimed at putting much effort in
thoroughly analyzing the following acts.

4.2.1.1. Act 1

The first Act included the first twenty-three chapters, the circumstance in which Darcy
and Elizabeth started and remained the wrong impression on each other. The welcome
ball brought Darcy and Elizabeth together with the first mistaken impression when
Darcy insulted Elizabeths overhearing to his conversation with Mr Bingley.

4.2.1.2. Act 2

Visits were always made to bring people together. On Elizabeths visit to
Pemberley, she spent some days in Rosings which brought a great disturbance of
Darcys refusing to his increasing love
for

this
second Bennet daughter. He was a lover
who always wished to see his love even his mind stopped him from exposing

that inner desire; and was totally surprised at Elizabeths sudden presence in

Rosings.

4.2.1.3. Act 3

The relationship between these two leading characters had changed since

Elizabeth received and read Darcys letter, with the greatest curiosity, that
explained and brightened her every dull wrong personal opinions about him. He hastily
arrived in Pemberley as his sister who was introduced to Elizabeth to her surprise that
young lady was not like Wickham once told her in Longbourn. This also was the right
time for Darcys official second proposal to the Bennet daughter. The proud
gentleman had become “an exceptionally sweet-tempered, generous and good-natured”
(p. 328) who showed more of his warmth than ever.




PART III: CONCLUSION

In the previous chapters, the implementation and results of the research had been
thoroughly elaborated on. Finally, this part was supposed to conclude and evaluate the
outcome of the whole research paper not only by stating some main points in the
newness of language use in the novel by also by sharing her own viewpoint about the
matter of love and love expressing. Some contributions of the research were also put
forward some suggestions for further studies.

References
Vietnamese
1. Dip Minh Tâm, (2002). Kiêu hãnh và định kiến. NXB Hi nhà 
2. Nguyn Hòa, (2006). Phân tích diễn ngôn phê phán: lý luận và phương pháp, i
hc Quc gia Hà Ni, Hà Ni.
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