Review of Related Literature

CHAPTER II LITERARY REVIEW

A. Review of Related Literature

This study is going to reveal the aspect of women’s movement in the 19 th century America as reflected in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. Actually, James’s reveal about women’s rights consciousness is not only illustrated in The Bostonians, but also in his many previous novel which depicted American women as his heroines. In this case, the writer use Daisy Miller as a related literary study compared to The Bostonians. Sumayyah in her study on the aspects of Romanticism in Daisy Miller’s character Aspek-aspek Romantisme dalam Daisy Miller karya Henry James, 1991, found that Daisy as Henry James’s representation of American girl who had romanticism values applied in her individual life. Her character that was independent, innocent, natural, and individualistic were the reflection of romantic mind and values that made her the representation of American freedom. As a matter of fact, romanticism in its greater influence to American social and political identity catalyzes the expansion of democracy in poor and oppressed nations. American Declaration of Independence includes this individualism spirit in its content, whereas the 19 th centuries’ New England Transcendentalism supports reform movements which fostered human potential such as abolition of slavery, and enfranchisement of woman Holman Harmon, 1986: 309-310. Thus, reform idea as a further development of this ism is then portrayed on American social and political life, one of them was women movement. Moreover, in the Post-Civil War era, there was a tendency of the American change in social and political life, included the transition of American literary tradition from romanticism toward realism. The trends in literature after the War expressed the social change that was affecting the American society. Writer had to face up the reality of their national issues caused by the industrial order and may to seek for the truth “whether social change, as they were witnessing it, was a progressive movement guided by supernatural force toward always higher goals or was a haphazard and uncontrolled process tending to no particular end” Williams Current, 1963: 68. And it was reflected on Henry James’s novel The Bostonians that will be analyzed in this study. “ The Bostonians is one of Henry James’s novels that attempt to give a broad social and documentary picture of movements and issues.” Richards, 1991: 12. Related criticism of feminist movement in the 19 th century is stated also by Carol Iannone in her Perspective about Feminism in Henry James’s The Bostonians: “The nineteenth-century women’s movement is also offered as an instance of a moderate feminism based on the classical liberal principles of the American Founding- individual rights, political equality, the primacy of reason. This view sounds plausible, inasmuch as early feminism apparently pursued a limited, rational goal – the vote – and, retired quietly from the scene. But scratch the surface of this picture and you find the utopianism beneath, that aspect of the 19 th century women’s movement that Henry James caustically satirized in The Bostonians” Iannone, 2001.

B. Feminists Concept and Movement in Struggling for the Rights of Women