Transitivity Analysis of Mariam’s Character in A Thousand Splendid Suns

This study investigates the portrayal of the central character, Mariam, in A Thousand Splendid Suns through the framework of Transitivity based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study has analyzed some important events in Mariam’s life such as her childhood, her marital life, and the act of murdering her husband towards the end of the novel. A clause–by-clause analysis reveals that Mariam is assigned mental processes more than material, verbal, and relational processes in the beginning of the novel. Within mental processes, a majority of the processes are cognitive which illustrate that Mariam is a rational person. In contrast, a large number of verbal processes assigned to the Mullah, a religious figure, especially on the eve of Mariam’s wedding, suggest the influential and controlling role played by the religious/orthodox segments in the Afghan society as depicted in the novel. Towards the end of the novel, there is a shift in the use of material processes from Rasheed to Mariam which suggests the transfer of ‘power’ from one to the other, culminating in the murder of Rasheed at Mariam’s hand. The study shows the transformation of Mariam’s character from an ‘innocent’ and docile person into a powerful and empowered woman who takes her fate in her own hands.


Introduction
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is an approach to the study of language which argues that language is a system of lexical and grammatical choices influenced by the context of use. It is a descriptive and interpretive approach that views language as a 'strategic, meaning making resource' (Eggins 1994:1) beyond its formal structure (Halliday 1985(Halliday , 1994Matthiessen, 1995;Martin & Rose, 2003). Systemic Functional Linguistics views language as a 'social semiotic system', where the connection between the form and its meaning is socially and culturally determined. According to Martin (2016), the descriptive and explanatory quality of grammar as meaning making resource distinguishes SFL theory from other linguistic (SFG) offers a variety of tools such as Mood, Modality and Transitivity for linguistic analysis.
These tools and resources are employed to describe, analyze and interpret language beyond its formal/abstract structure and focus on the functions of language in social and cultural contexts.
The present study uses transitivity as a theoretical framework to investigate the portrayal of Mariam in Khalid Hosseinni's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by analyzing the thought processes, feelings, and experiences of the main female character in how she evolves as a person in the course of the novel. This research provides a functional explanation by exploring the transitivity patterns in the description of Mariam and offers insights into her character.
Literature Review Transitivity has been extensively applied to many literary and non-literary texts.
Halliday in his seminal work on William Goldings' novel The Inheritors (1981) employed transitivity as a framework and opened up a whole new way of linguistic analysis of literary texts. He argues that the transitivity system used in the portrayal of Lok shows his limited cognition, and Lok comes out a powerless and weak character. Burton (1982)  Similarly, Rashid (2017) analyzed the central character in the novel Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. The novel is about the life of a Japanese woman Hiroko Tanaka, who is a school teacher by profession and survives the Nagasaki bombing of 1945. Rashid analyses roles played by different participants and their effectuality and non-effectuality in the text from 'subtexts' from four different sections of the novel with each section dealing with different context. In other words, the selection of the 'subtexts' is based on different contexts found in these four sections of the novel. According to the study, Hiroko has been assigned with 65% roles, Konrad 4%, Sajjad 13%, James 4%, llse 3%, Raza 6% and Kim has 3% of the roles given.
While percentages of transitivity concordances roles remain the same for all the four sections of the novel, the dynamism roles score keep on changing. Initially, she comes across a helpless and ineffective being, more of a thinker not a doer; in the last part of analysis, however, she Australian Vietnamese writer. Nguyen believes that the heroic mother is a lonely and sad person who has no strong ties with her family members. While she is considered lunatic by other, she professes that she is not crazy but posed insanity during war time.
The above review is representative of the application of transitivity to some literary texts. Taking

Methodology and Framework
The analysis is carried out by using a three-step procedure of Transitivity framed by Burton (1982) in her study of The Bell Jar. The procedure is as follows: Isolating the processes from their participants.

b)
Sorting out the different types of processes and finding the participants involved in each type of process. Following Burton, the present study identifies and sorts out all the processes used in the description of Mariam, explains their functions at length, and shows 'who affects whom or what' in the clause system used in the text. In other words, the study of the roles of participants in how they affect the environment or other participants involved, is central to the present analysis. Unlike Burton's model, however, which deals with the main process types only, such as material, mental and relational, this study uses all six types of processes categorized by Halliday (1994): they are: material, mental, relational, verbal, existential, and behavioral. This research thus adopts an eclectic approach i.e. the combination of different approaches by using

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Halliday's six processes along with Burton's additional classification of processes in her threestep model of transitivity for achieving the objectives of the present study.
A clause is the point of departure in the transitivity analysis of a text. Halliday (2004) defines clause as the central processing unit in the lexicogrammarin the sense that it is in the clause that meanings of different kinds are mapped into an integrated grammatical structure (p.10). Since the present study analyzes all the clauses used in the portrayal of Mariam for the study of transitivity patterns, the analysis will be limited to the discussion of the roles of participants and processes used. The traditional notion of transitivity in English syntax is concerned with the verb followed by its object in a sentence. Using the same concept, Halliday (1994) has elaborated and added to the system of transitivity expanding it to a clause and its meaning. In Halliday's system, the subject in a clause performs many roles such as that of an actor, senser, carrier of an attribute, token, sayer, and behaver, etc. A clause thus represents the experiences; doings, happenings, feelings, thoughts and other 'goings-on' in ones 'mind and the outside world.
Transitivity is a very useful and productive tool for researcher that provides them with a means to realize the experiences embedded in the structure of a clause. Halliday (1985) defines Transitivity as follows: A fundamental property of language is that it enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around them and inside them. …Our most powerful conception of reality is that it consists of "goings- Likewise, Simpson (1993) asserts that transitivity generally refers to how meanings are represented in the clause (p.88). Berry (1975) describes the transitivity choices in the following words: In English grammar, we make choices between different types of process, between different types of participants, between different types of circumstances, between different roles of participants and circumstances, between different ways of combining processes, participants and circumstances. These choices are known collectively as the transitivity choices. (p.150)  The main purpose of the present study is to decipher the experiential meanings and authorial ideology that underpins the description of Mariam, using transitivity as a tool of analysis.

Analysis Mariam's Childhood
There is a total of 21 clauses in the text about Mariam's childhood, out of which 13 use mental processes, 3 make use of relational processes, 4 have employed verbal processes and only one clause has used a material process.
Out Given very few material processes are used for Mariam, her role as an Actor in the text is limited. In one of the clauses, the Goal of her action is band which is an inanimate thing, suggesting that Mariam is incapable of influencing her environment except insignificant things such as a band. In the same clause, Rasheed is an Actor and the Goal is Mariam herself showing how patriarchy works in Afghan society where men think of women as weak and timid creatures who cannot do anything without a man's help.

Discussion and Conclusion
This study aimed at investigating transitivity patterns in exploring the character of Mariam as portrayed in A Thousand Splendid Suns. The use of a large number of mental processes in depicting the character of Mariam shows the cognitive ability of Mariam and the rational side of her personality. Her murdering of Rasheed is shown to be the result of her rational thinking: she kills him to free herself from lifelong sufferings inflicted on her by patriarchy as symbolized by Rashid. Mariam is someone who thinks and finally uses her rational faculty and decides to take matters in her own hand. This is in contrast to how Rasheed is portrayed: assigned with only few processes of cognition, Rashid's character is marked by ego and anger which does not allow him to think rationally and he comes out as a lop-sided and imbalanced character.
There is an obvious shift in the use of a greater number of material and verbal processes for Mariam towards the end of the novel: Mariam is finally in possession of her voice which materializes into actions culminating in the death of Rashid. Mariam's stigmatized and marginalized status because of her illegitimate birth and her gender is over and she becomes the symbol of woman empowerment in the novel. She challenges the established norms of her society and carves an individualistic identity for herself. The use of a large number of material processes for Mariam towards the end of novel shows the shift in the power dynamics. In the beginning of the novel, the control and power was in the hands of men, however, it is transferred to women towards the end of novel.