Women Discrimination in Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The current research paper aims to investigate and reveal the implicit ideologies that are used by Lynn Nottage in her play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark to represent her patriarchal society. The study exhibits critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the representation of women discrimination within Nottag’s play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. The study delves into the complex construction of American societal stratification, centering on the discursive depiction in the context of women discrimination in the play. The study adopts Reisigl and Wodak’(2001,2009) framework to analyze the collected data qualitatively and quantitatively. The data of this study are four extracts from a different scene of the play to represent women discrimination. The analysis of the data reveals that Nottage criticizes American society for the interplaying between power dynamics, societal status, and the depiction of women exploitation, spotlighting on the multifaceted dimensions of discrimination exemplification within the play. By utilizing all of the discursive strategies, the study concludes that the predicational strategy gets a higher percentage of the total use of the discursive strategies, which indicates the writer’s frequent reliance on predicational strategies to project how characters’ attributes and qualities thereby affecting the depiction of discrimination in the context of the play.