Child Abuse Definition of Terms 1. Motivation

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1. Critical Approach

In analyzing a literary work, a novel for instance, we could use certain approaches as basis in understanding the literary work, and furthermore help to make the analysis clear and understandable. Rohrberger and Woods Jr., in Reading and Writing about Literature 1971 said that in order to understand and apprehend the aesthetic values of literary work, the critical approach should be applied p.3. The critical approach is divided into five approaches to analyze a work of literature. Those are “formalist approach, biographical approach, sociocultural-historical approach, mythopoeic approach, psychological approach” p.6. The first one is the formalist approach, “this approach concerns with demonstrating the harmonious involvement of all the parts to the whole and with pointing out how meaning is derived from structure and how matters of technique determine structure” p.6. The formalist approach focuses on examining the object to the literary study itself and the beauty of art in it. The second approach is the biographical approach, “this approach asserts the necessity for an appreciation of the ideas and personality of the author to an understanding of the literary object” p.8. Therefore, it puts an emphasis on the author’s life and background to get a good understanding about a certain literary work because often, the literary work produced by the author is based on the author’s life experiences. The author might share hisher life experience to the reader. 13 The third one is the sociocultural-historical approach, “it investigates the social milieu in which a work was created and which it necessarily reflects” p.9. It emphasizes the use of historical and socio-cultural knowledge in examining literary works. It insists that the only way to understand a work is to refer to the civilization in which the attitudes and actions of a specific group of people is the subject matter. Literary works can therefore be a portrait of events at a certain moment in time. The fourth one is the mythopoeic approach, “it seeks to discover certain universally recurrent pattern of human thought, which they believe find expression in significant works of art” p.11. The universally recurrent patterns are those that found first expression in ancient myths and folk rites. Those are very basic to human thought that they have meaning to all men. They are often related to death and rebirth, guilt and sacrifices, primitive rites, and theological aspect of Christian doctrine, which are found in the ancient myth and folk rites. Through this approach, the mystical relationship in a story can be explained. The last one is psychological approach. It involves the effort to locate and to demonstrate certain recurrent patterns. It draws on a different body of knowledge, “one of the most powerful of the conflicts arising from the interplay of parts of the personality occurs early in childhood” p.13. This approach uses psychological theories to explain human motivation, personality, and behavior patterns written in literary objects. In this study, the psychological approach is employed to analyze the novel, since the analysis is mainly on the characters, the abuse, and the motivations