The Image of Woman in English Proverbs: A Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This article deals with the English proverbs containing the concept of woman. The aim of the research was to analyse the means of expression used to portray the woman in her various social roles, to describe her personal traits and to reveal the attitude towards women in the society. The novelty of this paper lies in systematizing the stylistic devices used in proverbs about women and discovering a device that has not been included in the existing classifications of expressive means. In the course of the research, the authors selected English proverbs with the lexeme woman and analysed them from the point of view of stylistics. The fact that such proverbs are highly numerous indicates the importance of gender relations
in a society, while their subject matter demonstrates an arrogant and often dismissive attitude towards women in a world dominated by men. The stylistic analysis found metaphor, simile and epithet to be the most productive lexical devices in creating a negative image of women, while parallelism, antithesis and repetition seem to be the most frequent syntactic devices serving to emphasize the connotations of the proverbs. Irony and paradox render the sarcastic, condescending attitude towards women; this function is also performed by intentionally illogical sequences of homogeneous parts of the sentence, when women are placed on a par with animals, inanimate objects, and the elements (the stylistic device
for the first time described by the authors). It should be noted that the characteristic features of proverbs as a genre of folk art, i.e. rhythmic, intonational, and phonetic, are inherent in English proverbs about women as well. The material obtained can be used in linguistics courses at universities.