CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1.1 The
Background of Analysis
Literature, in general, is life experience which is
uttered become a beautiful writing.
Its beauty may gives sense to the
reader even gives strong effect to the reader. The statement is supported by Taylor in his book
Understanding the Element of Literature (1981:1) who says that: Literature, like the other arts, is
essentially an imaginative of fact, that is, an act of the writer’s imagination in selection,
ordering, and interpreting life- experience.
It means that the raw material of literature is experience.
Anything that we face in our daily life can be made to be literary works. The problem is how
the writer creates it into beautiful words and makes sense to the reader. However, the
quality of the experience can be seen from the complex structure of words that the writer
creates.Literary work should have
artistic meaning and has good value as the meaning from Oxford Dictionary: ‘Literature is writings
valued as works of art, esp. novels, plays and poems’. It means that we should choose the
best word in doing literary work. The words are not words that we use in daily life but the
words should have artistic meaning that makes the reader is eager to read the literary work.
Literary work is hoped can give the reader moral lessons and good effect in daily life.
In writing a literary work, the
writer exactly has special purpose. The greatest pleasure and satisfaction to be found in literary
occurs where it brings one back to reality of human situations, problems, feelings, and
relationship (Moody, 1963:3). It may have meaning that we can see several of human behaviours which
are acted out by characters in a literary work.
That is why a literary work
should provide lesson to the readers how to solve the problems and situation that exist in the real life.
There
are three genres in literature; they are poetry, drama and prose and this thesis
is going to discuss prose as one of the
literary works. The word prose is derived from the Latin ‘prosa’, which is literally translated to
‘straightforward’. Roberts (1995:2) classifies prose into two, fiction prose, which is made based
on the author’s creation and imagination, and non- fiction prose which describes facts or
opinion.
Literature relates to literary
movement. One of the literary movement that quite popular is Idealism. In literature, Idealism
means the thoughts or the ideas of the writer.
Idealism refers to a tradition in
thought that represents things of a perfect form. In this way, it represents a human perfect being or
circumstance. Philosophical idealism is associated with Plato and this philosophy is also reflected in
a novel, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy.
Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928) is an
idealist writer. His idealism is reflected in the characters of his last novel Jude the Obscure.
Certainly, there are other parallels between Hardy’s own life and the portrayal of Jude,
though it was far from autobiographical. Hardy himself was apprenticed to an architect, Jude,
a stone mason who does church reconstruction, like Hardy’s father. Hardy studied Greek on
his own, as Jude does. Finally, at age twenty-six, Hardy was in love with his cousin. It is
difficult not to believe that this was the source for the character of Sue Bridehead in this novel. It
is clear that Hardy preferred to write about the world of his childhood and adolescence rather
than the more sophisticated world in which he moved as an adult. Hardy realizes that his
idealism is not good and it makes his life becomes obscure and absurd.
Jude the Obscure is the last
novel written by Thomas Hardy because from 1895 to 1928 he devoted himself to poetry. The novel
is a story about Jude Fawley who dreams of attending university, spending time
discoursing with other scholars about the Classics.
However, he is unable to fulfil
his dream and becomes a working man but never completely giving up his dream. Jude lived a vision of
idealism that couldn’t be manifested, and because of that vision, he was not able to accept the
world as it was. Part of Jude's tragedy arises from his incurable idealism. As a child he is
fascinated with Christminster, a shining ideal of intellectual life. Similarly, he idealizes Sue
as the perfect intellectual woman, but here too he is disillusioned and frustrated.
Christminster, the intellectual ideal, and Sue, the ideal of womanhood, promise fulfilment, and both
frustrate him. All his hard work and earnest effort at mastering Greek and Latin come to nothing,
and despite his great patience with Sue and devotion to her, he loses his job, his
children and finally even his title as husband.
The way of Hardy applies his
idealism in this novel through the two major characters (Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead) fascinated me
to do a research. In this thesis I want to represent an analysis of how the idealism is
reflected in the two major characters of the novel Jude the Obscure.
1.2 The Problem of Analysis It is
important to make the specification of problems which are going to be analyzed.
It helps me to avoid the
ambiguity of the analysis and get the clear description about the object of the analysis itself. So in this
thesis I decide some problems that should be analyzed.
They are: 1. What are the characteristics of Idealism
which reflected in the two major characters
in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure? 2. How is Idealism reflected in the two major
characters of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the
Obscure? 1.3 The Objective of Analysis The
objectives of the analysis are: 1. To
describe the characteristics of Idealism reflected in two major characters in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
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