Conceptual metaphors are a pervasive means through which literature conveys abstract ideas via concrete imagery. In literature, women are often portrayed through supernatural symbolism, reflecting their complex social, cultural, and moral roles. This study adopts a cognitive linguistic approach to examine the metaphor “WOMEN ARE SUPERNATURAL FORCES” in 20th-century Vietnamese and American literature. Drawing on 4,000 metaphorical statements, the analysis focuses on 213 statements within the “supernatural forces” domain, identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) across four sub-domains: types, features, activities, and realms. The findings reveal that women are perceived as supernatural entities evoking both positive and negative emotions. They are described in dualistic terms, embodying both extremes of good and evil in appearance, morality, and action. These portrayals depict women as divine or angelic figures symbolising beauty and virtue, and as witches or demonic beings representing ugliness, danger, and malevolence. This duality encapsulates cultural ambivalence—revering women while marginalising them. In both corpora, women appear as sources of enchantment and anxiety, but with distinct cultural orientations. Vietnamese literature, shaped by polytheistic and Buddhist traditions, frames women as spiritualised beings whose strength lies in harmony and transcendence. American texts, grounded in Christian cosmology, construe female agency through moral struggle, emphasising temptation, sin, and redemption. The comparison shows that while both cultures employ a divine–demonic hierarchy to conceptualise femininity, Vietnamese mappings stress spiritual harmony, whereas American ones dramatise moral dualism and inner conflict. These findings suggest that metaphorical cognition shows universal tendencies, yet its expression remains culture-specific.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor; women; supernatural forces; literature; contrastive study

DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3201-06

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