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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
The object of this study is an American novel written by an American feminist, Dorothy Allison. She is also a working class storyteller, a Southern expatriate, a
sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. She writes this novel about white trash
after she writes a book about an explanation of white trash in America. Bastard out of Carolina
covers 320 pages and was published on March 1992. The novel is adapted in a movie in 1992 with the same tittle, it becomes one of the
chosen finalists in National Book Award of Fiction. This novel is about the white trash family called Boatwrights in Greenville
Country in South Carolina. It centers Bone as the main characters and the story teller in the novel. Bone is a daughter of 16-year old unwed mother who is left by
her husband and remarried for twice. Her father left her when she is still a baby. Her first step father died in car accident. The second step father is Glen Wadell who
comes from upper middle class family. During her life as a white trash, Bone experiences many obstacles in reaching
her truly identity. Starts form economical problem, social, psychological, misbehavior from Glen and other tragic moments. Exhausted of all the problems
she has to overcome by herself, Bone decides to move to her lesbia n aunt’s home
named Aunt Raylene. On the other hand, her mom Anne leaves without anyone knows where she is. Suddenly when Bone is already desperate, her mom comes and
leaves her the birth certificate without illegitimate stamp anymore. Again, Bone is left alone by her mom, step father, her sister and lives with her Aunt Raylene.
B. Approach of the study
Dorothy Allison writes this novel to show how an identity of someone is actually determined by their representations of themselves. It is the reason why
every person have different identity depends on the journey throughout her life. It is related to the approach selected which is Psychoanalytic because:
Many of Freud’s ideas concern aspects of sexuality. Infantile sexuality, for instance, is the notion that sexuality begins not at puberty, with physical
maturing but infancy, especially through the infant’s relationship with the
mother Barry, 2002: 97. The quotation above gives an idea about psychoanalytic believes that
some one’s experience and the way she thinks will determine her identification of
herself. One of the factors constructs someone’s identity is it has to be seen since
she was born until she got her permanent idenity. Thus, both the novel and the approach emphasizes the same thing that the infantile life has to be considered to
see the development of someone’s sexual. Moreover, in the book of Feminist Thought, psychoanalytic is said to be able to
discuss psychosexual developments such as oedipal stage, pre oedipal stage and post oedipal stage. Inside this theory from Freud, there are some concepts offered.
“The models of the psyche, the concepts of repression, the role of the sexual instincts” Wright, 1998: 9. All these concepts are needed to know to analyze
hum an’s identity.
C. Method of the Study
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