Oppression toward women in George Eliot’s The Mill on The Floss

ABSTRACT

People have functioned literature as the way to experience the world around them through their imagination, because literature often presents a documentary picture of life. It describes the real life of another world. By reading literary work, especially novel, people can enrich their emotion and also enrich their experience about life reality, including women oppression reality that is often presented in the literary work.

This study proposes to describe: (1) kinds of oppression that faced by Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s Novel The Mill on the Floss (2) Maggie Tulliver struggle against the oppression. The researcher hopes that this study will be able to contribute some findings or information to the study of literature especially on George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss. Besides, this study is also expected to be useful as an alternative scientific material for deeper or further study on the same work.

This study is a literary criticism. The approach applied is feminist approach since the researcher analyzes oppression toward women and the struggle against it. The data are collected from the original text of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss. As the result this study shows, Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss contains several oppression that oppress women and the major character’ struggles against it.

Through the analysis in this study, the researcher finds out that Maggie Tulliver oppressed in education and gender. In educational aspect: Viewed that prohibition of going to school, resistance to educated women, women incompetence in reading, inequality in learning Latin, and shallow in doing Euclid. In gender aspects are: Pregnant women, women’s discrimination, bridled women, and dependent women. They, as the member of patriarchal society, consider women as objects and possessions which do not have values or rights to be respected. They put men as priority and put women asides. The major character’s struggle against the oppression appear in several acts, they are: In educational aspect, the child Maggie becomes educated women, competent women, capable in geography, knowledgeable in Latin, proficiency of the history of Roman Empire. In gender aspects are: Renunciation of job division and Maggie becomes unrestrained women