The thesis and journal stated above helps the researcher understand the values in the Victorian era adopted by the Americans and the story better.
However, the researcher wants to be more specific with the feminism and the Victorian background in this undergraduate thesis. So, instead of focusing on the
literary work during the Victorian era, the researcher is doing the research on how women have to deal with stereotypes in the work written in the 1960s.
It is done to see if the standards of an ideal woman made during the Victorian era actually
affect the future condition, especially in the 1960s.
B. Review of Related Theories
These are some theories to find the answers of the problem formulations
1. Theory of Characterization
According to Forster, there are two types of characters; those are “round”
and “flat”. Round characters are usually can be found in the main characters. They usually change into someone better, or worse. Meanwhile, the flat character
usually can be found in minor character, but not all of the minors are flat characters. “To the degree that round characters possess many individual and
unpredictable human traits they may be considered as dynamic; that is, they demonstrate their capacity to change or grow” 1987: 121.
Murphy in Understanding Unseen 1972: 160-173 stated that there are nine ways to understand and explore about a character. They are personal
description, character as seen by another, speech, past lives, conversation of others, reactions, direct comment, thought, and mannerism.
2. Theory of Women as Angels and Monsters
In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar 1984 examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar note the
perception that women writers of the nineteenth century were bound in their writing to make their female characters either embody the angel or the
monster. This struggle is caused by male writers tendencies to categorize female characters into two figures. Women are seen as either pure, angelic women
or rebellious, unkempt madwomen. In their argument, Gilbert and Gubar point to
Virginia Woolf , who says
women writers must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been killed into art in Gilbert Gubar, 1984: 18. It means that they have to get
out of the angelic stereotype of women set by men. By then, they can be free like the monsters and able to make arts with no limits.
While it may be easy to figure that feminist writers embody the monsters, Gilbert and Gubar stress the importance of killing off both figures
because neither accurately represents women or women writers . Instead, Gilbert
and Gubar urge female writers not to fall to the said stereotypes, which they see as imposed by a reductionist patriarchal view of womens roles 1984: 18.
3. Theory of Liberal Feminist
Liberal Feminism began in the 18th and 19th centuries and has continued through to the present day
. Throughout the history, the liberal feminist movement has been and continues to be focused on eliminating female subordination
. According to National Organization of Women NOW, female subordination is
rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women’s entrance to
and success in the so-called public world . To the extent that society holds the false
belief that women are, by nature, less intellectually and physically capable than men, it tends to discriminate against women in Tong, 2009: 2
. Its long history is a testament to how well it has been able to adapt and change to the many issues
confronting women .
Mary Wollstonecraft represents the beginning of the liberal feminist movement
. According to Tong, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she makes the case that women need to be educated just as well as men
so that they can grow up to be moral and autonomous human beings 2009: 12- 13
. Then in the 19th century John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor wrote about women needing to be more involved in society
. While Harriet Taylor called for women to work outside the household as
well as raise children, John Stuart Mill believed that women should be recognized as fully rational and worthy of the same civil liberties and economic opportunities
as men in Tong, 2009: 17 . Though many of their thoughts differed, both Mill
and Taylor supported the suffrage movement .
After the passage of the 19th amendment liberal feminism was quiet until the 1960s when it awoke during the civil rights movement by realizing that
similar to race discrimination there was a great deal of sex discrimination in the system
. There are several critiques of liberal feminism. One is that liberal feminism focuses too much on women becoming like men and it unnecessarily
denigrates the importance of traditional female roles 2009: 35 .
