Object of the Study

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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents the methodology in this study. It consists of three parts, namely object, approaches, and method of the study. The first part is the object of the study. It explains the discussion of the novel to be focused on. The second part is the approaches of the study. It discusses on the approaches to be applied in this study. The third part is the method of the study. In this part, the procedures of gathering and arranging the data are explained in writing this study.

A. Object of the Study

The objective of the study is to explore more about women’s social roles as portrayed in the novel Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. This novel is one of the Jung Chang’s famous works. This novel published in two editions. The first edition of this novel published in 1991 by Global Flair Ltd. The second edition published in 2003 by Touchstone in New York. This novel won two awards; they are the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year. This novel has been translated into 30 languages and sold over 10 million copies. This study uses the second edition of the novel. Additional information about the writer added to the introduction of the 2003 edition, including author’s note, family tree, chronology, and epilogue. Overall, it consists of 28 chapters and 665 pages. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans is a novel which presents an autobiographical family history. It tells the reader about the development of the characters’ lives of each at different generations in a family. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans is in the genre of historical fiction, and attempts to address by fictional narrative means. Wild Swans’s changing authoritarian portrays the regimes in China in the twentieth century. It portrays regimes authorities of China that influences each character. The story of the novel is portrayed by three characters’ point of views. The novel writer, Jung Chang described the events that happened in the three main characters social life. This study analyses the influences of the regimes authorities on the women’s social roles based on the author’s own experiences and those of her family in facing the political and military turmoil at different regimes. It presents the three Chinese women on different generations struggle in certain context of turbulent events and how each of them is likely positioning themselves as a woman. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans tells the epic story of her grandmother, mother and herself by focusing on their childhood experiences, educational opportunities, family, including love and marriages, social and political roles and some harrowing experiences while living under different political regimes. Jung Chang paints a vivid portrait of the political and military turmoil of China in 20th century China, from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord, to her mothers experience of Japanese-occupied Jinzhou during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and her own experience of the effects of Maos policies of the 1950s and 1960s. Here, this study focuses on two characters’ lives; they are Yu-fang and De-hong.

B. Approaches of the Study