Patriarchy in the main character’s private life in Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek

ABSTRACT

People as creative creature, never stop create something new in their life, it is because they have emotion, feeling, and thought that distinguish them for another creations in literature. It is one way to express their emotion and feeling in a form of words or language. By reading novel, one of literary works, people can enrich their experience about life reality and some aspects of life, including women oppression reality that is often presented in the literary work.

Patriarchy is the system where men dominated all of aspect in life. There is an inequalty and unfair treatment towords men and women so that men have more power to dominate, exploit, determine and control female.

The research is aimed to find out the answers of problems in this thesis, those are: how is the patriarchy in Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek, how is the main character’s private life as woman in patriarchal society described in Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek and Does the main character reflect the Appalachian woman at the early of twentieth century.

In this research, the researcher used literary criticism and the approach applied is feminist approach. Feminist approach and radical feminism theory are used to find out patriarchy in woman’s private life of main character Gap Creek by Robert Morgan.

Furthermore, the reasearcher find out that several form of patriarchy covers Julie’s life, whose husband is the only decision maker, a wife as victim in any condition of the household and no public access for a wife. Julie’s personal life is complex experience before and after marriage which she get many oppression in her life. Before female main character marriage get many oppression in the family by hard worker and she becomes tough girl. In her marriage the problems never end come to the woman’s life even husband, family or her social life. The main character shows that the poor women must be hard workers in Appalachia, the isolated region in America and show the solution of all the problems around her life. The main character that is found the researcher reflect the real condition of Appalachian Women in early twentieth century.