Dystopie et personnages féminins

Abstract

The article concerns the social representations of the female linguist in a corpus of dystopian short stories. Dystopia is a very popular literary genre and vehicles representations of women in society, especially the scientist and specialist of linguistic. We used the work of Anne-Marie Houdebine about sociolinguistic representations and of Denis Preston about folk linguistics in order to analyse the corpus. This corpus is composed of three short stories. Female characters are mostly staying out of the action on both, the narrative basis and the scientific field. Women are represented as being out of the scientific and social areas and the three male writers of these short stories assign them to stereotyped roles. We made a binary analysis and compared the results about the feminine characters with those about the masculine characters. This article terminates with the study of the relationship between the short stories (through the characters) and the language. In fact, we see the language as a character itself. This can be explained by the highly emotional reactions that are expressed in each short story and by the physical commitments from male characters: language can be considered as another feminine character, for which one may fight, but still does not take part of the action.