child‟s inborn tendency to organize and classify information from the environment. The other is the
culture‟s heavy emphasis on providing gender distinguishing cues such as clothing, names, and occupations, which makes
these concepts easily identifiable as cited in Vasta, 1998. This gender schema theory will be implemented to analyze how Dawan experiences the encourages
with the people in her environment and the culture in which she lives. The experiences and culture create gender schema such as stereotypes towards girls‟
rights compared to boys. Then, to answer the second research question, the writer uses the belief-desire understanding of mind and action from Davidson 1963,
in Bartsch, 1995. He states that the center of a theory of mind is conceptual triad
of constructs actions, beliefs, and desires p. 5.
16
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
This chapter includes the object of the study and the approach of the study. The object of the study includes the summary of the work, special record of the
work, and awards achieved by the author. The approach of the study discusses the characteristics, procedure, application, and the purpose of the approach.
A. Object of the Study
The object of the study is the novel entitled Sing to the Dawn by Min Fong Ho. This object of the study delivers the summary of the object of the study,
special record about the object, and also awards behind the work.
1. The Summary about the Work Sing to the Dawn
This novel was first published in 1975 by William Morrow Co. Sing to the Dawn consists of one hundred and sixty pages. Min Fong Ho is a Chinese-
American writer. Min Fong Ho has won many prizes from her novels and mostly
her novels are about children fiction.
Sing to the Dawn novel tells the reader about Dawan, a young village girl who lives in Thailand. She wins a scholarship to study in a city school. Her
brother, Kwai, places s econd and is initially jealous. Kwai‟s jealousy causes a
conflict between the two previously-close siblings. This hostility is further PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
17 exacerbated by Dawans father, who feels that the city is not a place for a girl.
Dawan faces obstacles at every turn, and eventually overcomes these obstacles and proves to herself and to others that she is fully capable of handling the
scholarship and she can take the responsibility to improve her village later. Min Fong Ho shows the gender role discrimination that becomes a common thing for
our society. Even in education field, gender role stereotypes also influence men and women‟s in getting the appropriate education for themselves.
2. Special Record of the Work
There are some special records about the literature works entitled Sing to the Dawn by Min Fong Ho. This novel has been made a movie, TV, and also
theatrical adaptions and those works are:
a. The animated feature film, Sing to the Dawn, co- produced by MediaCorp
Raintree Pictures, the Media Development Authority of Singapore MDA, Infinite Frameworks IFW and a new financing partner, Scorpio East
Pictures, is set to hit the big screens in June 2008 This inspirational animation is based on the award-winning novel of the same title by
Minfong Ho.The movie was localised into an Indonesian version with the title Meraih Mimpi and released on Indonesian cinemas on 16 September
2009. “Infocomm”.
b. Sing to the Dawn was adapted into a critically acclaimed musical by
Singaporean composer Dick Lee in 1996 and was directed by Steven Dexter. The musical has proved extremely popular after its initial run, and
has been restaged several times, including a restaging by the Singapore PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
18 Management Universitys production house in 2003 and a joint production
between Raffles Institution and Raffles Girls School in 2004. “Infocomm”.
c. First prize, Council of Interracial Books for Children, 1975, for Sing to the
Dawn. d.
First prize, Annual Short Story Contest of Singapore, Ministry of Culture, Singapore, 1982.
B. Approach of the Study
The study uses a psychological approach to analyze the novel. Freud in Brannon, 1996, p.6 emphasizes the role of instinct and physiology in personality
formation and he finds that instincts provide the basic energy for personality and that child‟s perception of physical differences between boys and girls was a
pivotal event in personality formation. Freud sees childhood experiences within the family explains how physiology interacts with experience to influence
personality development. Burman 2008 explains that psychoanalytic approaches feature is used to
highlight how concepts of childhood closely connect with those of dominant cultural understandings of both emotion and memory. Psychoanalytic theory is
used as an interpretive framework to understand what is at stake in the dynamics of child-vieewing and child-saving. Bornstein 2001, in Burman, 2008 explains
that: PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
