Implying and Suggesting: A Critical Stylistic Study of Gender Identity Crisis in Ebershoff's The Danish Girl

Abstract

The paper attempts to portray a critical stylistic analysis of gender identity crisis as an ideology. Ginder identity crisis means a sense of conflict inside an individual as a result of mismatch between his/her biological sex and his/her gender identity. Selected passages from David Ebershoff' The Danish Girl (2000), are the data of the analysis. The novel talks about (Einar) who becomes unaware about his real gender. This sense of Einar occurs when his wife (Greta) asks him repeatedly to put on Anna's dress, a famous opera singer, whom Greta used to paint. The selected data presents Einar's suffering when he starts to believe that he has feminine features inside his body. The aim is to examine critically the language and to investigate the conceptual meaning of the terms in use. Further, the aim is to reveal the implicit meaning of the linguistic expressions that the writer has selected to reflect ginder identity crisis in (Einar). In such analysis, a tool which is taken from Jeffries' approach (2010) named "Implying and Assuming" is used. The stylistic features and technical terminology are presented in relation to the textual practices of implying and assuming. The results may provide social and psychological impacts on the novel's readers.