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b. Environmentalism
Environmentalism is a lifestyle of those who concern for preservation, reservation, or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation
of natural resources, prevention of polution, and the proper land using http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiEnvironmentalism. In the novel, we can see that
Eve’s biggest ambition is having Shrove as hers. She spends her childhood there, grows up there, and spends her teenage there. She witnesses the beauty of
Shrove since she is born and she falls in love with it p.151. She will never let Shrove is contaminated by anything that might harm the purity of the
nature. We can say that Eve is an environmentalist. She adores nature and tries to
live with the nature. She utilizes what the nature provides her to use. The woods, the garden, and all that Shrove has are her immense love. She teaches Liza to act
the same way as her, ‘I hate shooting birds. I hate people shooting anything, rabbits, squirrels, anything, it’s wrong. And I thought Eve - my mother - I
thought she did. She said so, she taught me to think like that” p.22-23. Liza also knows that her biggest love is Shrove, and not her,
‘Yes, I expect that’s the word. The dogs would have been destroyed like the ones in Bruno’s story. Mr Tobias loved his dogs and he’d
have blamed Eve and given her the sack and turned us out of the gate-house. Or that’s what she thought. Maybe he would and maybe
he wouldn’t but she thought he would and that was the important thing. She couldn’t leave Shrove, you see, she couldn’t, that was the
most important thing in the world to her, Shrove, more important even than me. Well, Mr Tobias was important to her too but only in
special sort of way.’p. 56
From the description in the novel, we can see Eve as an environmentalist because she has a big concern to Shrove. The reason is because Eve considers
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Shrove as the most important thing in her life.
c. Serial Monogamy
Serial monogamy is a form of monogamy in which the participants have only one sexual partner at any one time adopted from website page
http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiSerial_monogamy. What makes it different with ‘true’ monogamy is the ‘true’ monogamy suggests having one sexual
partner in a lifetime while serial monogamy proposes to have more than one sexual partner in their lifetime despite the fact whether they are married
or unmarried. Recently, this is the sexual lifestyle that is commonly applied in the world.
For years Eve has a kind of relationship with Jonathan Tobias, although they do not claim themselves as lovers. However, everytime he spends his
holidays at Shrove, Jonathan always stays with Eve. ‘This guy Tobias, he slept with your Mum? I mean, they was in the same
bed?’ ‘They were lovers, they were like us.’
‘That wasn’t right,’ Sean said very seriously, ‘not with you in the house, not with a little kid.’p.104
Eve is a person who employs this kind of lifestyle. She chooses to have her domestic partners. Her domestic partners are Jonathan Tobias and Bruno
Drummond. When she is with Jonathan Tobias, she is not interested in building a relationship with other men. She starts to have a new relationship after Jonathan
Tobias gets married to someone else. ‘But he married someone else and that was the end of her love life.’
‘Oh, no, you could say it was the beginning of it. That was when Bruno came. Now I’m grown up I think I know what went through her
mind. She thought , I’ve lost Jonathan , I can’t waste my whole life mooning over him , so I might as well cut my losses and have
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a new lover. She was only a bit thirty, Sean, she was young. She couldn’t give up everything.’ p.131
From the description we can conclude that Eve employs a serial monogamy lifestyle. When Jonathan Tobias leaves her for another girl, she
develops a relationship with a man named Bruno. However, when Bruno is gone, she is back again to Jonathan who is divorced.
d. Secularity
Secularity is the state of being free from religious or spiritual qualities. Secularity has two distinct meanings. The first one is it asserts the freedom of
religion and freedom from religion, and the second one is it refers to a belief that human activities and decisions should be based on evidence and fact,
not superstitious beliefs and religious domination taken from the website http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiSecularity.
Eve is not a religious person. She knows and understands the philosophy of some religions in the world but she does not follow any of them. It is
Shown in how she never goes to church and never prays. However, she does not compel her view to her daughter. She is quite liberal to her child
in the way she teaches her to know religions in the world and let her daughter to judge.
Eve is actually comes from a devoted Christian family. Her parents always go to church when they are still alive. However, Eve is different and she does not
want to be compared with anyone else, even her parents. The lady said, ‘Oh, my dear, I haven’t seen you for an age. Don’t you ever
come down to the village anymore? I must say I’ve expected to see you in church. Your mother was such a regular at St Philip’s.’
I am not my mother,’ said Mother, very coldly. p.70 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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