CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Background of the Study
Literature comes from the Latin word ‘littera’ which means letter. It primarily refers to the written or printed words. Literature represents culture and
tradition. But literature is more important than just a historical or cultural artifact. Literature introduces to new worlds of experience. Taylor 1981:1 states,
“literature, like the other arts, is essentially an imaginative act of the writer’s imagination in selecting, ordering, and interpreting life-experience”. Also in
Theory of Literature Wellek and Warren, 1967:212, it is said, “literature must always be interesting; it must always have a structure and an aesthetic purpose, a
total coherence and effect”. Thus, literature, in general, can be defined as the mirror of human life that portrays the human feeling, thought, imagination, and
perception which can be viewed based on personal judgement. Literature can be divided into three genres, they are prose, drama, and
poetry. Prose derives from the Latin word ‘prosa’, which is literally translated to ‘straightforward’. Prose is the ordinary form of spoken and written language
whose unit is the sentence. Prose includes novels, short stories, romances, essays, and so on. Drama derives from the Greek word ‘dran’ which means ‘to do’ or ‘to
act’. Drama is performed on a stage. Poetry derives etymologically from the Greek word ‘poiesis’ which means ‘a making, forming, creating in words, or the
art of poetry, or a poem’.
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In this thesis, poems which deal with feminism are going to be used as the source of data. Feminism is a kind of social changing which derives from
women’s suffrage movements in the nineteenth century in Europe and America. It is closely related to the social changing of gender issues. Mary Wollstonecraft, the
first feminist who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792, encourages woman writers to insert feminism in their literary works. Finally, feminism has
been widely spreading. Awuy 2002:1 in his essay Feminisme di Persimpangan Jalan states:
Feminisme merupakan sebuah fenomena kultural...alasan kemunculannya ialah berdasarkan ketidakpuasan terhadap realitas
yang dianggap sebagai konstruksi patriarkal. Feminism is a cultural phenomenon of unsatisfactory to the reality
of patriarchal construction.
From this quotation, the reason of why feminism exists is because the patriarchal construction has subordinated and repressed the essence of women during the last
decades. In a patriarchal society, men have the power, dominate social or cultural systems, and have authority over women and children.
Furthermore, there are seven selected poems of Maya Angelou that are going to be analyzed from the view of feminism within this thesis. These seven
poems will be later abbreviated in alphabetical order, they are Phenomenal Woman poem A, Still I Rise poem B, Equality poem C, Woman Work poem
D, Men poem E, Remembrance poem F, and Caged Bird poem G. Maya Angelou and other woman writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s concerned
their literary works on women’s issues. They used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about womens lives and identities in a male-dominated society.
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Many feminist poets, especially those who concerned their poems on women’s issues, had started to spread their personal ideologies about feminism itself
through their poems. And so did Maya Angelou in her poems. She stressed the importance of understanding the essence of women’s struggle in fighting against
patriarchal society by criticizing the society itself for its unfairness to women as well as to children. Maya Angelou has also intended her poems to provide
inspiration and strength to female readers, and give them pride in being themselves. Her most famous poem entitled Phenomenal Woman shows how it
reflects the idea of liberation and how Angelou criticizes modern cultural ideas about female beauty. It also shows the womans power over men and emphasizes
the authors sexuality. All of her poems are also a kind of painful process of recalling and remembering her past which was broken and dismembered in
fragments, and an effort to show the black women seeking to survive against masculine prejudice at social or psychological level.
Men are culturally different from women. Physically, men are strong while women are weak. Men’s nature is rude and women’s is gentle. Men’s idea is
always authoritative and women’s is dependent. Men are always active and become determiner while women are only passive and become receiver. These
issues finally cause women to start questioning this kind of gender inequality and struggling to fight against the superiority of men. And this men’s superiority,
which is also supported by the culture, finally creates significant injustice as portrayed in Maya Angelou’s selected poems. And this becomes the background
of the analysis.
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1.2 The Problems of the Study