Lexicalized Autonomy of Desire and Survival: A Feminist Stylistic and Cognitive Metaphor Analysis of Female Independence and Prostitution in Coelho’s Novel “Eleven Minutes”
Abstract
The speech of independence reshapes the choice of moral grammar. Maria Coelho’s protagonist of the novel “Eleven Minutes” is in search of true love and adventure transits into prostitution. Implied language presents readers with prostitutional diction, metaphorical conceptualization and gendered stylistic choices throughout the development of narrative. This qualitative research article aims to investigate the contribution of prostitutional linguistic construction and female independence by integrating Cognitive Metaphor Theory and Feminist Stylistics shaping the struggle between constraint and autonomy. Study also extends the analysis beyond fiction and analyzes the contemporary discourse about the modern independent women doomed to childlessness and singleness to resonate contemporary gender debate with Coelho’s Eleven Minutes. Study has explored the language mediation which has normalized prostitution for the construction of independence in the shape of sacrifice and empowerment by examining stylistic patterns and lexical choices legitimizing prostitution as both choice and work. There is an observable discursive negotiation through transitivity, modality and evaluative language with recurring cognitive metaphors framing freedom, prostitution and female body. Feminist stylistic markers reveal tensions between exploitation and self-determination while the conceptual metaphors maintain homeostasis between relational and emotional loss. Dominant conceptual metaphors such as freedom as transition, sex as labour and body as capital have been explored through Lakoff and Johnson’s Cognitive Metaphor Theory. The findings propose that Coelho’s Eleven Minutes has linguistically framed independence as empowerment encoding freedom within metaphorical and economic structures of isolation, exchange and emotional repression. Study concludes that the modern-day feminist discourse and Eleven Minutes makes it problematic and reflects contemporary ideals of female independence through cognitive and stylistic mechanisms which construct gendered experiences of loss, struggle and autonomy.
Keywords: Feminist Stylistics; Cognitive Metaphor Theory; Prostitution; Independence.
Introduction
