CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents background
of the study, statement of the problems, objectives of the study, scope and limitation,
significances of the study, research methodology,
and definition of the key terms.
A. Background of the Study Literature is human’s creative work which has
value. It can be moral value, social
value, educational value, etc. Literature is the author’s expression of the environment he or she sees and feels.
Novel, poetry, and drama are the kinds of
literature. In everyday usage literature is the telling, writing, and acting
out of stories. In all-encompassing
terms, it includes essays, biographies, memoirs, and many varieties of oral or written expression
that represent fact of fantasy (F.
Borgatta and L. Borgatta,
1992:1141).
There have been various attempts
to define literature. Marxist literary theory
for instance, starts from the assumption that literature must be understood in relation to historical and social reality
(Newton, 1989:85). Culler (1997:27) states
that Literature is an institutional label that gives people reason to expect
that the results of their reading
efforts will be worth it. William J. Grace in his book Response to Literaturesees that literature is
a creative work of art, anobject that an
artist makes. Ideas, theories, and system of thought enter to it. As an object made by an artist, it has two main purposes.
First,a creative work expresses the truth
of experience in term of beauty. Second, a creative work meets the human necessity for a means of communicating ideas
of intellectual and social significance.
Studying literature is the one of
the exciting activities that gives people some new experiences because literary works
containhuman feeling, love, human life,
etc. It describes how human life is, and it furthermore reflects the events which happen in a society.
Literature has not only value,
but also some functions: it functions to reflect the generic and idealized norms of
universal experience; to tell people the fact of life within a controlled artistic form
(Grace, 1965:184). The function of literature
is to make a heightened or selective imitation of life through literary art.
The art itself is often
envisioned as the agent holding the mirror up to nature (Abrams, 1981:42). Marxist critics have often
revealed a reference for art, feeling that,
through literature; the writer can stand apart and see the faults of society (Peck and Coyle, 1984:155).
Richard Hoggart (in Teeuw,
1984:237) also states “good literature recreates
the sense of life, its weight and texture. It recreates the experimental wholeness of life- of the emotions, the life
of themind, the individual life and the social
life, the object-laden world.” Indeed, The literary work both neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social
reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental
truth: it is a material fact, whose functioning could be analyzed like one examining a machine (Eagleton, 1983:3).
Literary work is divided into
three kinds. One of them is fiction or novel.
For novelists, novel is the form
of art that studies and researches part of life.
Novelists observe about secret of
life in the past or future. Most novelists in their writing are usually influenced by what they
see andfeel in the environment.
Novel is one of the literary
works which is expressed in paragraphs. It is not created in vacuum; it is the work not simply
of a person, but of an author fixed in time
and space, answering to a community of which he is an important, because articulates part (Wilbur, 1962:123). Most
novels are concerned with ordinary people
and their problems in the societies in whichthey find themselves.
Novelists frequently focus on the
tensions between individuals and the society in which they live, presenting characters that
are at odds with that society (Peck and Coyle,
1984:102).
To interpret the novel, people
can use literary criticism. Literary criticism is usually regarded as the analysis,
interpretation, and evaluation of literary work: it does not mean ‘finding fault with it’ (Peck
and Coyle, 1947:6). Criticism should be
concerned with neither the literary work as object nor the reader as subject
but with the fact that the work has no
existence other than as an object presented to consciousness (Newton, 1988:74). Stevick
(1965:372)says that a much more complicated
problem, however, and one less easily resolved, is the nature of relationship between the author fictional
world andhis real world. This is a creative
problem for the author, and it is a critical problem for the reader.
There are many criticisms can be
employed to analyze a novel. One of them
is sociological criticism which is used to analyze fiction as a mirror of
social truth. It starts with a
conviction that art’s relations to society are vitally important and that the investigation of this
relationship mayorganize and deepen one aesthetic
response to a work of art. The sociological criticism, therefore, is interested in understanding the social care
and theextent to which and manner in which
the readers respond to it (Wilbur, 1962:123).
Lourenson and Swingewood (in
Endrasawra, 2004: 79) state that there are three perspectives related to sociology of
literature. The first perspective is research
in which a literary work is viewed as a social document which forms a reflection of situation at the time when it
was created. The Second perspective is research
that explores a literary work as a social mirror of the author. The last is the research that elaborates the literary work
as ahistorical manifestation of socio- cultural
condition. In this research, the researcher would like to use the first perspective. It is the research in which a
literarywork is viewed as a social document
which forms a reflection of situation at the time it was created.
According to Marxist critics,
literature is not a work created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as a
product of the economic and ideological determinants
specific to that era. The Marxist critics also examine the relation of the literary product to the actual economic
and social reality of its time and place (Abrams, 1993: 242).
By using this sociological
criticism, the researcher wants to analyze the novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure written
by John Cleland in eighteenth century,
exactly between February 1748 and March 1749 in London. The novel concerns with titular character and started by
the story of a poor country girl, Fanny
Hill, as the main character, who views the scandalous stage in her life, is forced by poverty to leave her village home
and go to town. Arriving in London alone,
poor and innocent, she falls into the hands of brothel keeper. There, she is tricked into working in a brothel, she works
as a prostitute. By her profession, she finds
a man named Charles with whom she has fallen in love. After several months of living together, Charles is sent out
of the country unexpectedly by his father.
When she is separated from the man she loves, she enrolls her profession of the “prostitution” again. And she is forced
to take up a succession of new lovers to
survive, but finally, she can marry Charles and she lives happily.
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