Im/politeness, gender and power distance in Lady Windermere’s Fan

Im/politeness has attracted considerable attention over the past decades (starting with Lakoff 1973Lakoff, Robin. 1973. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row. ; Brown and Levinson 1978Brown, Penelope, and Steven Levinson. 1978/1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; Leech 1983Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.) and has kept expanding rapidly with the discursive turn (Eelen 2001Eelen, Gino. 2001. Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome.; Mills 2003Mills, Sara. 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Watts 2003Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Bousfield 2008Bousfield, Derek. 2008. “Impoliteness in the Struggle for Power.” In Impoliteness in Language, ed. by Derek Bousfield, and Miriam Locher, 127–154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ; Locher 2008Locher, Miiam A. 2008. “Relational Work, Politeness and Identity Construction.” In Handbooks of Applied Linguistics, Volume 21: Interpersonal Communication, ed. by Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, and Tilo Weber, 509–540. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.). There is a growing interest in examining im/politeness from a number of perspectives, e.g. society, gender, cross-cultural etc., and multiple definitions have been proposed, however, impoliteness as such has not had a distinct theoretical framework yet.

This study investigates impoliteness through drama translation data. It focuses on manipulation of im/politeness in target versions of a playtext, in terms of gender, and examines how humour may be facilitated through such shifts. The aim is to confirm that impoliteness does interact with gender (Mills 2003Mills, Sara. 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), and that humour creation draws on reversed gender stereotypes. It also shows that power (ensuing from reversed gender stereotypes) interacts with impoliteness strategies, to manifest humour in the target versions. The study uses Bousfield’s (2008)Bousfield, Derek. 2008. “Impoliteness in the Struggle for Power.” In Impoliteness in Language, ed. by Derek Bousfield, and Miriam Locher, 127–154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. model to account for im/politeness shifts, between the two versions.

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892Wilde, Oscar. 1892. Lady Windermere’s Fan. [URL] accessed January 23, 2019.) is a comedy and a satire targeting the aristocratic society of the time. The two Greek translations of the play (2006 by Karhadakis and 2010 by Belies) are a most suitable context for examining how impoliteness interacts with power distance and gender to create humour, because of its humorous aspects and cross-gender talk. The paper also intends to show impoliteness scholarship that translation has a rich potential for deciphering or confirming pragmatic aspects of the phenomenon, which are elsewhere pursued through monolingual research.