A Linguistic Stylistic Analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Abstract

Literary texts have largely been analysed from the perspective of literary criticism, literary stylistics. This paper is a linguistic stylistic analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House. The principal aim of the paper of the paper is to identify and analyse linguistic features used in the play. For a systematic analysis, these linguistic features are clustered into phonological, graphological, lexical, grammatical and semantic levels of analysis. A Doll’s House is a play that explores family relationships, friendship and patriarchy among other thematic concerns. Helmer Torvald, one of the main characters, is the embodiment of hegemonic masculinity in the play. The study adopted a desktop research; the researcher read the text and identified linguistic features which he intuitively felt to be stylistically foregrounded. The results show that the author has effectively used linguistic features to develop the themes and characters of the play. The study concludes that stylistics provides the linguistic toolkit instrumental not only for the analysis and understanding of a given text, but also for the performance of the acted forms of art like a play (drama). Linguistic stylistics is a tool that can be used to analyse any form of text.