The Background of Analysis

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 The Background of Analysis

There are so many thought that women are dominated by men in family and society and treated as the ‘second’ society because women are weak and powerless. Women are supposed to be good mothers and women are only to speak when they are spoken to. I am interest to talk about women because women should get their independence just like men have. I want to show about women’s independence from this thesis because women are not meek like the men thought. Based on my opinion above, I found a good literary work which talked about women independence. This literary work shows us about women’s determination. The literary work entitled Little Women written by Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888, published in 1868. The book was written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Little women is one of the best-loved children’s stories of all time, based on the author’s own youthful experiences. It chronicles the lives of March family; father, Marmee Mrs. March, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy and it details the struggles of the March women, especially Jo, to find sustenance for their family and identities of their own in the culture of a masculine society. When Mr. March lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend, the two oldest girls begged to be allowed to do something toward their own support. Meg, hired out as a governess, while Jo hired out to Aunt March as a companion. But Jo’s desire to be a successful writer and to support her family had long been cultivated in her strong and independent mind. Jo toiled at the confinement of being companion and then a governess, but her imagination could not be confined to the quarters of her mind. Write she must, and write she would, until she was good enough to earn her bread. Jo’s conviction that she should provide support for her family has been bound up with her Universitas Sumatera Utara desire to become a fluent and financially independent writer. It also describes about the story of their domestic adventure, their attempts to increase the family, their friendship with the neighboring Laurence family and their later love affairs remain as fresh as ever. I choose Little Women to be analyzed from the point of view of feminism because in Little Women , the characters have to struggle for the life by their own support without men. Alcott deliberately creates strong female characters in order to support the self determination of women. When Mr. March left for the war, Marmee should continue to take care for the girls by her own and can run their home without a man supporting it. And also the daughters should be strong females and make decision by their own choice and work to support their family. In this thesis, I will discuss a novel since novel is the main object to be discussed. Novels are stories of book length written in prose. They are about imaginary people and events. Novels are about individual human beings, living in a particular time and place, caught up together in a series of events. Novel is included into the prose fiction besides myth, parables, romance and short stories. Based on Robert statement in Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing 1995:2, prose fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction prose are classified as the literature genres. Literature is one of the great creative and universal means of communicating the emotional, spiritual, or intellectual concern of mankind. The basic material of literature is experience. Through literature, an author tries to express his or her ideas about what heshe ever experienced in hisher life time or what was happening around them from natural phenomena to the lives of the people in their community. The word literature, basically, comes from the Latin ‘littera’ which refers to the written or printed works. Literature helps people grow, both personally and intellectually as it provides an objective base for knowledge Universitas Sumatera Utara and understanding. It makes people understand human dreams, desires and struggles that happen in different places and times.

1.2 The Statement of Problem