A Systemic Functional Grammar Analysis of Pecola Breedlove’s Language as a Tragic Female Protagonist in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

This study employed Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to analyze Pecola Breedlove's language as a tragic female protagonist in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. While Morrison's work has been extensively analyzed through feminist and postcolonial lenses, limited research has explored how Pecola's language functions as a site of her oppression and marginalization. Specifically, the study aimed to examine Pecola's spoken dialogue by analyzing the process types within the ideational metafunction, mood structure, and pronoun usage within the interpersonal metafunction. Additionally, the study explored how her language reflects her identity as a tragic female protagonist. The results indicated a prevalence of mental and material processes, interrogative and imperative mood structures, and exclusive pronouns in Pecola's language. These linguistic choices depicted her as an emotionally and psychologically burdened character who lacks agency, emphasizing her vulnerability, desperation, and alienation. Together, these features contributed to the development of her tragic characterization. Through the exposure of how language encodes powerlessness, this study offered a fresh linguistic perspective on Pecola's tragic characterization and deepened feminist readings of The Bluest Eye. Future research can build on these findings by applying SFG to other marginalized characters in Morrison's works or across different literary genres, deepening the understanding of how grammatical structures shape meaning and representation in literature.