CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
This chapter provides a
discussion of the background of the study, problems of the study, purpose of the study,
significance of the study, scope and limitation,
and definition of the key terms.
1.1 Background of the Study Literary
work is an author’s creative thinking. The author writes the literary based on what he feels, sees, and the
experiences in real life. Literature represents
life; and life is, in a large meaning, social reality, even though the natural world and subjective world of the
individual have also been the objects of the literary ‘imitation’ (Wellek and Waren,
1956: 94). In other way we can say, literature
is one of the subject which deals with inner and outer factors of human life which are described through author’s
imagination.
Jonee, Jr. (1969: 1) stated that
literature includes all written material. He divided this all written material into two
different groups. The first is the Literature
of Knowledgethat is functioned to teach such as scientific articles, dictionaries, directories, school textbooks,
history books, and etc. The second is Literature
of Power that is functioned to move such as novels, poems, plays, magazines, and etc.
Novel is one of the literary
works which is different from short story. The term “short story” generally applied from one
thousand to fifteen thousand words.
On the other hand novels are
generally contained about forty-five thousand words or more (Kenney, 1966:104).
Novel often presents a
documentary picture of life. It looks at the people in society. As the presentation of documentary
picture of life, many people have conducted
some researches on novel by using various literary theories, including feminist theory.
Betty Friedan in her book
Feminine Mystique stated that feminist criticism is part of the broader new women's movement
initiated in early 1960s (Leitch, 1944:
307) as Abram's statement that as a self-aware and concerted approach to literature, feminist criticism is not
inaugurated until late in the 1960s (1985: 233).
It has begun from the reality
that traditional cannon and person’s view in literary works still have been differentiated,
especially in describing women and men’s character in the literary work. Sometimes the
description is not equal and it is still influenced by patriarchal view and gender
discrimination.
Peck & Coyle stated that Feminist criticism might seem only to be
concerned with demonstrating that
literature is sexist in the portrayal of women, or with showing how texts reveal the injustices of a male society
where women are regarded as inferior...
But radical feminist criticism seeks not merely to describe the way things are but also to challenge the status
quo (1986: 152).
Feminist theory was blown up to
deconstruct the opposition of men or women
and the oppositions associated with it in the history of western culture.
Feminist theory tries to champion
the identity of women, demands rights for women, and promotes women’s writings as
women’s experience representations.
(http://www.wikipedia.com/feminist.php,
accessed on 2 July 2008).
Some of the authors write a novel
in the form women’s experience novel.
One of the authors writing the
novel as representation women’s experience is George Eliot. George Eliot was the pen name
adopted by Mary Anne Evans. She was one
of the most popular novelists in England.
Mary Anne Evans was born at South
Farm, Arbury on the outskirts of Warwickshire,
on November 22, 1819. The youngest child of Robert Evans and Christiana
Pearsons Evans. On September 23rd ‘1356, she began to write The Sad Fortunes
Reverend Amos Barton. On October of 1857 she began work on Adam Bede. When she
moved back to London in late 1860 she wrote The Mill on the Floss.
The Mill on the Flossis based
partially on Eliot's own experiences with her family and her brother Isaac, who was
three years older than Eliot. Eliot's father,
like Mr. Tulliver in the novel, was a businessman who had married a woman from a higher social class, whose
sisters were rich, ultra-respectable, and self-satisfied; these maternal aunts provided
the character models for the aunts in the
novel. Eliot drew on her own experiences with a once-beloved but rigid and controlling brother to depict the relationship
between Maggie and her brother Tom.
(http://www.wikipedia.com/themillonthefloss .php, accessed on 4 February 2009).
The novel details the lives of
Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister
growing up on the river Floss near the village of St. Oggs, evidently in the 1820s. Maggie is more like her father's family
than her mother's. She has olive skin
and untidy black hair, traits that upset her mother's family, and she is continually bothered by their obsession with
her looks. In her childhood Maggie is
known as naughty girl with big curiosity of education. Her act which is different from other girls brings her as a
silly girl. Maggie is an intelligent girl.
She is very smart and hard to
give up. Even her father thinks that she should have been lad. The fact that she is female keeps
Maggie from getting education.
One day Maggie Tulliver heard her
father conversation with Mr. Riley, who
recommends that Mr. Tulliver send Tom to Reverend Stelling for school. Mr.
Tulliver said: “You see, I want
to put him to new school at Midsummer,” said Mr.
Tulliver; “he’s coming away from
the academy at Ladyday an’ is shall let him
run loose for a quarter ; but after that I want to send him to a downright good school, where they’ll make a
scholard of him.(The Mill on the Floss:
12).
Mr. Tulliver prefers his son to
go to school and gets a good education then his daughter. The causes of woman oppression
are lack ness of opportunity and education.
Education will lead women to be more active instead of passive. In the mid-nineteenth century, women often did not
attend to school, but those in the wealthier
classes had private governesses who schooled them in ladylike "accomplishments" such as painting,
drawing, and playing music.
Women were expected to marry and
had children. Because they were not allowed
to go to school and entered any jobs other than menial ones. Women were dependent upon either their parents or
husbands for money. In addition, because money and property were inherited only through
males, it was almost impossible for a
woman to be single and financially independent even if she had wealthy parents, because her brothers or male cousins
would inherit everything from them, leaving
her without an income. Those who, like Maggie, when her father was death she did not have wealthy parents and
were not married, she had to find work,
but her need to work was regarded as somewhat shameful, both for her and families.
When Mr. Tulliver dies, Tom
decided to leave his desultory schooling to enter a life of business. He eventually finds
a measure of success, restoring the family’s
prior estate. Meanwhile Maggie languishes in the impoverished Tulliver home, her intellectual aptitude wasted in her socially
isolated state. She passes through a
period of intense spirituality, during which she renounces the world.
This renunciation is tested by a
renewed friendship with Philip Wakem, with
whom she had developed an affinity while he was a fellow pupil with Tom.
Against the wishes of Tom and her
father, who both despise the Wakem. Maggie secretly meets with Philip, and together they
go for long walks through the woods together.
The relationship they forge is founded partially in Maggie’s heartfelt pity for broken and neglected human beings, as
well as an outlet for her intellectual
romantic desires. Philip and Maggie’s attraction is, in any case, inconsequential due to the family antipathy.
When Tom discovers the relationship between
the two, however, he forces his sister to renounce Philip, and with him her hopes of experiencing the broader, more
cultured world he represents.
Several more years pass, Lucy
Deane invites Maggie to come and stays with
her and experiences the life of cultured leisure that Lucy enjoys. This includes long hours conversing and playing
music with Lucy's suitor, Stephen Guest,
a prominent St. Ogg’s resident. Stephen and Maggie, against their rational judgments, become attracted to each other.
The complication is further
compounded by Philip Wakem’s friendship with
Lucy and Stephen; he and Maggie are reintroduced, and Philip’s love for her is rekindled, while Maggie, no longer
isolated, enjoys the clandestine attentions of Stephen Guest, putting her past professions
for Philip in question. In the event, Stephen
and Maggie, though they try to forswear each other, allow themselves to elope, almost by accident Lucy conspires to
throw Philip and Maggie together on a
short rowing trip down the Floss, but when Stephen unwittingly takes a sick Philip’s place, Maggie and Stephen find
themselves floating down the river, negligent
of the distance they’ve covered, he proposes they board a passing steamer to the next substantial city, Mudport,
and get married.
Maggie struggles between her love
for Stephen and her duties to Philip and
Lucy, contracted as it were in her past, when she was poor and isolated, and dependent on either of them for what good her
life contained. Upon arrival in Mudport
she rejects Stephen and makes her way back to St. Oggs, where she lives for a brief period as an outcast, Stephen
having fled to Europe. Although she immediately
goes to Tom for forgiveness and shelter, he roughly sends her away, telling her that she will never again be
welcome under his roof. Both Lucy and Philip
forgive her, she in a moving reunion, he in an eloquent letter.
Maggie’s brief exile ends when
the river floods. She is having struggle through the waters in a boat to find Tom at
the old Mill; she sets out with him to rescue
Lucy Deane and her family. In a brief tender moment, the brother and sister are reconciled from all past
differences. When their boat capsizes, the two drown in an embrace, thus giving the book its
Biblical epigraph, “In death they were
not divided.” The Mill on the Flossdeals with a young girl and the consequences
of her passions. Maggie Tulliver,
although a character of intelligence and determination, is ultimately defeated by both the repressive
society of her time and her own unwise
impulses. In this novel we will see how Maggie Tulliver is trapped (and the implication is that many women were) by
being to compliant with other’s people
expectations of her. Meanwhile The Mill on the Flossis in part a complaint against the limitation imposed on women by
19th century society using Maggie as a
representative of yearning and frustrated womanhood.
The researcher is interested in
analyzing George Eliot’s novel since the novel portrays the growth of women’s role in society.
Maggie Tulliver as the main female
character in this novel seems to reject all tradition ideas about women. She first displays her resistance to
conventional models of interpretation with
her counter-reading of Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil: And this
dreadful blacksmith with his arms akimbo, laughing — oh, isn’t he ugly? — I’ll tell you what he is. He’s the
devil really(here Maggie’s voice became
louder and more emphatic), ‘and not a right blacksmith; for the devil takes the shape of wicked men....’
(The Mill on the Floss:13).
Maggie’s unexpectedly sympathetic
reading of evil in this text defeats Mr.
Riley’s attempt to dominate her,
when he patronizingly tells her to “come, come and tell me something about this book; here
are some pictures — I want to know what
they mean” (The Mill on the Floss:16). Mr. Riley’s attempt to foreclose Maggie’s future response by treating her with
authoritative condescension leaves him
open to parody, and Maggie’s lucid criticism of the text undermines his assumed possession of truth. Her reply
anticipates the continuation of a dialogue that he refuses to engage in, an experience
that she will repeat many times in her subsequent
life: ‘Ah, a beautiful book,’ said Mr. Riley; ‘you can’t read a better.’ ‘Well,
but there’s a great deal about the devil in that,’ said Maggie, triumphantly, ‘and I’ll show you the picture
of him in his true shape, as he fought
with Christian...he’s all fire inside, and it shines out at his eyes.’ (The Mill on the Floss: 14).
Maggie’s description of the
devil-figure in The Pilgrim’s Progressrefuses to resolve the issue of whether he is a
traditional figure of evil or a transformative force for good, leaving these alternatives in
productive suspension. As well as identifying
with a traditionally vilified figure, her counter-reading attacks the religious assumption that evil can be easily
located, isolated and defeated. In this way,
Maggie’s counter-readings of embedded texts frustrate patriarchal taxonomies by making a case for the
essentially arbitrary nature of moral classification.
Maggie’s refusal to adopt a
hypocritical ethical system contrasts with the other characters’ uncritical adherence to
unjust moral guidelines. She is willing to sacrifice her own wellbeing in an effort to
undermine society’s repressive notions of
sexual and emotional normality, rather than opting out of making such distinction altogether. Unfortunately, this
commitment makes her eventual destruction
inevitable.
From the explanation above, the
researcher interested in analyzing the oppression
toward women in George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Flossbecause women everywhere lost out with the
polarizations of society into classes and the rise of the state. There was a shift in their
status, thrust into a position of dependence,
and subordination. The exact nature of the subordination varied enormously from one class society to another
and from class to class in each society.
But it existed everywhere that class existed. So universal did it become that even today it is usually treated as an
invariant product of human nature.
Furthermore, the study on George
Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Flosshas been
much conducted by some researchers. Ken Retno Yuniwati, the student of University of Muhamadiyah Surakarta (2008).
She focused her research on Struggle for
achieving happiness of Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss: An Individual Psychological
Approach. In her research she found that
George Eliot has successfully combined all the structural elements. Based on individual psychological analysis, in this
novel reflects Maggie’s coping behavior to
minimize her inferiority feeling and to maximize her superiority in order to
get her life goals.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar