Female major characters social position in Jane Austens Sense and Sensibility

ABSTRACT

God creates human being into kinds of sexes, males and females. Both of them have the same rights and chance to gain their potency and there are no differences between them. However, they just understand a bit about woman rights. Many women cannot get their rights. A woman often gets oppression, marginality and subordination from a man. Women have been in an inferior position in the society. Women always struggle to get the same position as man’s position. They struggle to get the same status and they are taken in proper place. They struggle against the same position limitless in one aspect. They also struggle to get the same position in family and society.

Sense and sensibility contains woman position that the female major characters in their family and society face. Related to this case, the problems of the study can be formulated (1) How is the position of female major characters in family and society described in Sense and Sensibility and (2) How does the man control woman’s position Sense and Sensibility. Then the purposes of that study are to find out position of the female major characters in family and society, and to see the way of the man control the position of woman in Sense and Sensibility.

In this research, the researcher uses feminist literary approach as her research design to conduct the research because feminist literary criticism is the research design that is directly related to this literary works. The researcher uses feminist literary criticism because it is very suitable to find out women’s position in this novel.

From this research, there are two findings can be stated. First, the position of female major characters in the family and society that is described in the novel indicates that women are considered inferior community and became the second position. Men are in as superior position and women are in inferior position. Second, the way of man control woman’s position by limiting their activities, breaking the engagement as man’s likes, taking self decisions without considered woman’s decision, and also leaving girl to another girls as man likes after bored and never responsible to woman.

From this research, the researcher hopes that this research can enrich the understanding about literary criticism about women’s perspective in general, and specifically woman’s position. The researcher also expected that this research can contribute to other researcher who focuses on this topic about woman in the field of literature can analyze deeper, and the findings can be used as a reference. This research is so far from perfection, so the researcher hopes that the reader can give correction in order to make this research to be a good research.