Feminism in Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter": A Semiotic Analysis

DOI

10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.30How to use a DOI?

Keywords

semiotics; structural semiotics; Barthes; five systems of codes; narrative structure

Abstract

Literary works have been shaping how people see the world around them for hundreds of years; they have become a medium for portraying and/or criticizing a certain society in a certain period of time. One thing that has never ceased to appear in literary works is gender role and representation, which is still the subject of controversy. People believe that writers oftentimes portray men and women in their works in line with their views of men and women in real life, which is very interesting to investigate. This paper aims to investigate the representation of women in the short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” written in 1953 by a famous British writer, Roald Dahl. This descriptive qualitative research focuses on the structure of the story and is analyzed using Barthes’ five systems of codes, which falls to the area of structural semiotics. The story is divided into 135 different lexias and afterward categorized into the five codes, each of which helps reveal how Dahl portrays women in his story. It is found that despite the woman is portrayed to fit the traditional gender role as a homemaker at the beginning of the story, Dahl reverses the role in the end, portraying women to be a more independent and resourceful in time of trouble. The findings also show that men are not portrayed as positively as women, and thus lead to the deduction that there is an issue of feminism imbued in the structure and the choice of words in the story.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jeanyfer Tanusy
PY  - 2018/08
DA  - 2018/08
TI  - Feminism in Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter": A Semiotic Analysis
BT  - Proceedings of the Fourth Prasasti International Seminar on Linguistics (Prasasti 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 159
EP  - 163
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.30
DO  - 10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.30
ID  - Tanusy2018/08
ER  -