Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa and Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout: A Corpus-Assisted Study

Abstract

The study executes a rigorous, comparative corpus-assisted feministic stylistic investigation into Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride (1983) and Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything (2024), deconstructing how disparate socio-political metrics, namely South Asian tribal patriarchy and contemporary western localized domestic hegemony, systematically encoded gendered asymmetries into narrative prose. While cross-culture feminist literary critiques frequently rely on speculative thematic close reading that are structurally vulnerable to confirmation bias and selective data collection, this paper operationalizes a hybrid empirical methodology. By synthesizing Sara Mills (1995) three-tired feminist stylistic framework with corpus linguistics, the study maps ideological configurations across localized digital corpora of both the texts. The employed methodology explains how gender role, fragmentation, description of body parts, description of clothing, cataloguing, objectification and passivity can play their role in gender construction. At lexical level, semantic asymmetries and discursive fragmentation are evaluated through collocations. Syntactically, Key-Word-In-Concordance (KWIC) concordance pathways are isolated to execute a transitivity analysis, Material Actors Vs Passive Affected Goals. At macro level, the study extracts recurring n-gram lexical clusters and tests semantic prosody to unpack the latent cultural presuppositions and narrative focalization the reinforces structural hegemony.  For quantitative analysis Corpus based tool Antconc 4.4.0 has been incorporated for analysis. The empirical data revealed a striking convergence of structural subjugation achieved via distinct linguistic mechanisms. Ultimately, this study advances the field of corpus linguistics by providing a replicable, mixed method framework, empirically demonstrating that despite striking geo-political and temporal divergences, patriarchal hegemony remains deterministically embedded within the literal syntax of contemporary fiction.