A Critical Stylistic Study of the Notion of Women Empowerment in the Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

Abstract

This study unveils the ideologies of women empowerment encoded in the Mona Lisa Smile movie (2003). It reveals how the stereotypical image of women born only to be wives and do the duties of upbringing and housework is challenged. Katherine Ann Watson (Julia Roberts), the main character in the movie, wants to make a difference in the next generation of women. She rejects the imposed traditional ideologies. Linguistically, she opposes conventional thinking and seeks to persuade her students that life is about more than getting married. The primary focus of this study is to examine and clarify how the characters’ linguistic choices convey their ideologies concerning the notion of women empowerment. To do this, the researchers apply Jeffries`s (2010) critical stylistics, using of five stylistic tools: Negation, Hypothesizing, Equating and Contrasting, Exemplifying and Enumerating, and lastly, Representing Actions/Events/States. The data for this study consists of four extracts taken from the movie Mona Lisa Smile (2003). The analysis shows that the critical stylistic tools account for a significant portion of the meaning of the text under consideration and contributes to the linguistic formulation of the notion of women empowerment, especially Negation and Hypothesizing processes, which score the highest frequencies while Exemplifying and Enumerating score the lowest.