The divorce of Lillian Roth in I’ll Cry Tomorrow by Lillian Roth

Literature is human’s expression. Literary work is a result of human being thought which tells about life that deals with feeling, ideas, experience, ambition, imagination and problem. Novel is one of literary work. Novel is a book-length in prose, whose author tries to create the sense of actual life. Through reading novel, the readers can get enlargement of experience and a life interpretation. On the other hand, investigating novel gives the readers better understanding on many things to be investigated specifically. In this thesis, the writer focuses on the divorce of Lillian Roth, the main character in the novel “I’ll Cry Tomorrow”.

This research deals with two objectives of the study: to describe the cause and effects of Lillian Roth’s divorce in I’ll Cry tomorrow, and also explore the similarity between the content of the novel and the real life of the writer.

The research design which is used in this thesis is literary criticism as an academic activity should be viewed as the expression of the writer's point of view of what is happening to the text of I'll Cry Tomorrow novel written by Lillian Roth. The writer applies biographical approach which insists on finding the references of the author’s life, education and socio-cultural environment in a literary work, because the events of the story that are to be described are the causes and effects of Lillian Roth’s divorce. The biographical approach is, then, eligible to be applied in this study since it reveals the reflection of the causes and effects of divorce of Lillian Roth's in I'll Cry Tomorrow

As a result, this analysis shows that there are social and personal causes of Lillian Roth’s divorce. The personal causes are: poorly prepare for marriage, children of divorce or unhappy parents, childless marriage, couple who cannot tolerate differences, and poor quality of sexual relationship. The social cause of Lillian Roth divorce is changes in gender roles, especially the participation of woman in labor force. Moreover, this thesis also shows that there are personal and social effects toward Lillian Roth’s life. The personal effects of divorce to Lillian are psychological difficulties such as; depression, alcoholism and loneliness, besides, she got financial hardship. The social effects are: altered family structure and social dislocation. And the last result it is no wonder to say that the story of the novel truly reflect the real life of Lillian’s not only in term of the causes of the divorce but also in term of its effects upon Lillian.

From this analysis, the writer realizes that this study is far from being perfect. The writer hopes that there will be other researchers who concern to this topic and explore the conflict faced by the main characters more details. Hopefully, this thesis will be useful for everyone who is interested in studying of literature.