Patriarchy in Emily Bronte’s wuthering heights

ABSTRACT

Patriarchy describes the structuring of society on the basis of family units, in which fathers have primary responsibility for the welfare of these units. The equality on the right between a man and a woman does not exist in the real life. In patriarchal system, a man has more power to dominate, exploit, determine and control of a woman's life aspects in the society. Of course those all make women oppressed in patriarchal society.

Actually, feminism is a response from the women who have been dominated by men in the real life. They realize that they are placed as a second sex in any aspects of life. Based on the phenomena, there are some scientists try to reveal or give more attention to solve the phenomena. Furthermore, there are some approaches in literary criticism applied to cover and analyze these phenomena.

Related to the phenomenon above, this study is aimed at answering two following questions: the first is what kind of patriarchy which is portrayed in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and the second is how the patriarchy happens in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

This research is a literary criticism. And feminist literary criticism which focuses on the patriarchal family can be applied in this study because this study talks about how a man as a head of the family dominates and discriminates a woman whom considered as a second sex in the family life. The data source of this study is the novel Wuthering Heights written by Emily Bronte. The data of this study are all sentences in the form of written dialogues, monologues and expression, which are collected from novel Wuthering Heights.

After analyzing the data, the researcher finds several points about patriarchal system which is applied in family life. They are: the domination toward woman in marriage: such as a woman has to agree with her father's choice in marriage. And also the domination of a man to a woman in the marriage life such as a woman is always kept at home. The last analysis in this novel is about the life of the new generation of the characters especially a woman is always dominated by a man in Wuthering Heights. The domination of a man toward a woman is one of the forms of patriarchal system that we see in the real life. Those phenomena can be seen in the novel Wuthering Heights which men character always dominate all of woman members in family.

Finally, the researcher hopes that this study can give a new contribution to the readers, especially the students who are interested in feminist discourse. Furthermore, it is hoped for further researchers to conduct the research, which is not only focused on the patriarchal family aspects but also on the other aspects for example, economic, religion, politic etc.