"I’m Mary Brady. I go to Saint Agnes in Queens": Il personaggio irlandese di Mary in Sex and the City

VIRDIS, DANIELA FRANCESCA

2008-01-01

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Abstract

In the first of the six seasons of HBO’s Sex and the City (1998-2004), Miranda Hobbes, a successful Harvard-educated attorney, and a cynical and pragmatic woman, establishes an unstable relationship with bartender Steve Brady; a son, Brady Hobbes, is born to the couple in the fourth season. After his birth, Miranda meets Mary Brady, Steve’s mother, who is a working-class woman, of Irish origin, in her sixties. In this article, through the linguistic tools of conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, and through feminist television studies, the author examines the first conversation which Mary participates in (season 5, episode 2, 2002), and tries to identify the linguistic features through which her female figure and Irish working-class identity are constructed as stereotypical. Linguistic scrutiny testifies to the fact that the clichéd representation of Mary’s non-American, non-middle-class identity is built against Miranda’s socioeconomic and cultural representation, and that the two female characters are constructed as antithetical. Nevertheless, since it is the American woman, not the Irish woman, who is one of the four protagonists of the TV series, the audience is likely to share both that woman’s viewpoint, which therefore becomes dominant, and her negative judgment on Mary, which becomes final.