A Critical Discourse Analysis of Feminism in Drama: Susan Glaspell and Alice Childress as a Case Study

Abstract

This study is a critical discourse analysis of two feminist plays: The Verge by Susan Glaspell (1921) and The Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White by Alice Childress (1966) dealing with the representation of feminism of the heroines of the two plays. Many studies have dealt with critical discourse analysis of feminism in different literary genres, however, plays have been given less attention in this respect. This study shows the role of feminism in two different societies; it also tries to highlight the problems that women face at the time of the World War I in America, the thoughts and beliefs that society has against women and how women fight to break these traditions throughout these selected plays. Accordingly, the study hypothesizes that society and social traditions have an important role in the lives of women in the sense that both black and white women face different kinds of oppression. The model adopted for analysis is Fairclough's model (1989) and the data are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively leading to the most important conclusions revealing that oppression is used against both black and white women and that women though of different societies face oppressions and undergo outdated social traditions; however, women differ in their way to break these traditions.