A Feminist Stylistic Reading of Naomi Alderman’s Novel The Power

As there is social, political, and economic sexism, there is also linguistic sexism. The last one cannot be discovered by traditional feminist analysis, but by subjecting a text to a linguistic analysis as the feminist stylistic analysis. The present paper offers a feminist stylistic analysis of one contemporary novel to show how some lexical choices can be described as sexist and how their uses affect the representation of women negatively. To meet this aim, Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power is selected as a sample. It is qualitatively approached from a feminist stylistic point of view. A close reading of the text is conducted to find out the gendered biased uses of language at the level of words to relate their selection to gender meanings. Results show that the text is not free from lexical linguistic sexism. However, it is produced in the golden age of feminism and its main theme revolves around empowering women with electrical power to control the world. The researcher attributes the disability of avoiding using sexist language to social and cultural factors that overwhelm the consciousness of writers and make them unwillingly choose sexist words.