The cognitive-narrative strategy of feminisation in Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry and its Ukrainian translation

Abstract

Feminist narratives represent compelling and intellectually provocative forms of literary expression that address sensitive and urgent societal issues. This study examines the conceptual, narrative, and linguistic properties of feminist narratives and their Ukrainian translations, focusing on Bonnie Garmus’s novel, Lessons in Chemistry. The novel exemplifies contemporary feminist literature by exploring the intersection of gender, professional identity, and societal expectations through both personal and collective women’s experiences. Using a multi-layered analytical framework that integrates conceptual, narrative, lexical-semantic, and translation analyses, this research investigates the strategic construction of feminist narratives and reveals cognitive and narrative modeling within the strategy of feminisation in the original text and its Ukrainian translation. The analysis emphasizes key narrative elements such as the narrator and focaliser and their cognitive foundations. The results show close relationships among author, narrator, main character, and focaliser in feminist narratives, which are overtly feminist, as the story is presented with profound support for and understanding of the female protagonist’s position. In Lessons in Chemistry, the strategy of feminisation shapes the narrative and is realized at conceptual, narrative, and lexical levels through cognitive and narrative tools including conceptual metaphor, plot, narrator, focalisation, character, and lexical and stylistic means. This approach presupposes "herstory" as the foundation underpinning the plot, while the conceptual metaphor WOMEN’S LIFE IS A GLASS CEILING permeates the narrative structure. In the Ukrainian translation, the feminisation strategy is also evident through the systematic use of feminitives.