Exploring Ideology and Gender Roles Represented in Ice-Candy-Man: A Corpus-Based Study of Transitivity Analysis

Abstract

The earlier research in the novel has revealed the partition and some other themes as the author's major concern in Ice Candy Man, a novel by Bapsi Sidhwa. This study aims to explore the ideology and gender roles represented in Ice-Candy-Man through transitivity analysis. Transitivity analysis is part of the systemic functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), in which Halliday explores the metafunctions of language. This research focuses on the ideational meta-function of the language that explores the representation of the ideology and gender roles in the texts. This study uses a mixed-methods design and the UAM corpus tool to analyze the data. The findings of the study revealed the ideology represented through the two major themes: Female exploitation/abuse and partition. The process types revealed that female exploitation was the dominant theme, and one of the types of process, i.e., the material process, represented the theme of partition and abuse of land and females in the novel. The other types of transitivity analysis also supported the theme of female and land abuse. Based on the findings, it is suggested that other corpus-based studies may be conducted to discover the authors' ideologies in the literary texts.