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IDEOLOGY IN CHICK LIT AS SEEN IN JANE GREEN’S JEMIMA J, LAUREN WEISBERGER’S THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA AND HELEN FIELDING’S BRIDGET JONES’S THE EDGE OF REASON
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
HAYU PRIMA INDRASTUTI
Student Number : 014214059
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2009 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
IDEOLOGY IN CHICK LIT AS SEEN IN JANE GREEN’S JEMIMA J, LAUREN WEISBERGER’S THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA AND HELEN FIELDING’S BRIDGET JONES’S THE EDGE OF REASON
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
HAYU PRIMA INDRASTUTI
Student Number : 014214059
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS FACULTY OF LETTERS SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2009
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After a while you learn, That the circumstances and the environment have influence upon us, But we are responsible for ourselves. You start to learn that you should not compare yourself with others, But with the best you can be. You discover that it takes a long time to become the person you wish to be, And that the time is short. You learn that it doesn't matter where you have reached, But where you are going to. But if you don't know where you are going to, Anywhere will do. You learn that either you control your acts, Or they shall control you. And that to be flexible doesn't mean to be weak or not to have personality, Because it doesn't matter how delicate and fragile the situation is, There are always two sides.
a poem by Veronica A Shoffstall.
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Dedicated to
Mom and dad... finally, I keep my promise to finish it...
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LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI KARYA ILMIAH UNTUK KEPENTINGAN AKADEMIS
Yang bertanda tangan di bawah ini, saya mahasiswa Universitas Sanata Dharma :
Nama : HAYU PRIMA INDRASTUTI Nomor Mahasiswa : 014214059
Demi pengembangan ilmu pengetahuan, saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma karya ilmiah saya yang berjudul :
IDEOLOGY IN CHICK LIT AS SEEN IN JANE GREEN’S JEMIMA J, LAUREN WEISBERGER’S THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA AND HELEN FIELDING’S BRIDGET JONES’S THE EDGE OF REASON beserta perangkat yang diperlukan (bila ada). Dengan demikian saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma hak untuk menyimpan, me- ngalihkan dalam bentuk media lain, mengelolanya dalam bentuk pangkalan data, mendistribusikan secara terbatas, dan mempublikasikannya di Internet atau media lain untuk kepentingan akademis tanpa perlu meminta ijin dari saya maupun memberikan royalti kepada saya selama tetap mencantumkan nama saya sebagai penulis.
Demikian pernyataan ini yang saya buat dengan sebenarnya.
Yogyakarta, 16 Agustus 2009 Yang menyatakan
(HAYU PRIMA INDRASTUTI) PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A thesis is not only a piece of work presented as requirement to obtain the bachelor degree, but more than that, thesis is a representation of how we keep our commitment, to our parents, our university and more over, to ourselves. This acknowledgment is dedicated to those who help me to keep my commitment and my promise.
First of all, I would like to thank Almighty God for answering my prayer.
Once again, You always have a unique way answering my prayer although sometimes it surprises me. Thank You for opening all the doors that I can reach.
Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to my major sponsor Fajar Sasmita,
S.S, M.Hum, who has guided and supported me especially for the precious time which he has spent for guiding me in writing this undergraduate thesis. I am grateful to have Dewi Widyastuti, S.S, M.Hum as my academic advisor, thank you for always remaind me to finish my study.
With lots of love, my special gratitude goes to my dearest family. I thank them for their love, prayers and financial support. They are my dearest father, Drs.
G.M. Sukamto, M.Pd, M.Si, thank you for understanding me, giving me the freedom to grow as I want to be and my dearest mother, Dra. Suwarti, thank you for supporting and trusting me, this thesis is specially dedicated to you mom. My dearest aunt and uncle, Endah Widyasari&Amadeus Abi, thank you for all the support, the coffee and the place to take a rest for a while.
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A special dedication goes to Martina Novi Irawati, thankyou for precious time and friendship, we may take different path but our heart will always find each other. Special thanks to Anne Yunita Diyen, Sarah Yesi, Mery Tio, Meyra, Mia and
Citra Kerina Tarigan who have shared crazy and amazing days with laughter, chats, trust honestly, happines, madness, pain and tears, now it is your turn. I also thanks to
Maria Pulkeria Ratih and Anggraini Rahmaniasari, thank you for remind me for not quit, no matter hard it is.
I also thank Lia Hariningtyas, my companion to finish study, thank you for answering every messages that I send, I know sometimes it bothers you. I also thank to Dina, Nana, and Sista, thank you for the precious moment I spent in English
Letters Sanata Dharma, without all of you I would be lost. I also thank for Michaela
Credo and Kelik Priharyanto for giving me the spirit to finish my study.
At last, I would like to thank to anybody not mentioned here, who has given me many supports and enormous assitance in the process of finishing this thesis.
Thanks for understanding and supporting me, it has been a precious experience in my life. May the Almighty God bless you.
Hayu Prima Indrastuti
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE ...... i APPROVAL PAGE ...... ii ACCEPTANCE PAGE ...... iii MOTTO PAGE ...... iv DEDICATION PAGE ...... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vi TABLE OF CONTENT ...... viii ABSTRACT ...... x ABSTRAK ...... xi
CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION ...... 1 A. Background of the Study ...... 1 B. Problem Formulation ...... 7 C. Objectives of the Study ...... 7 D. Definition of Terms ...... 7
CHAPTER II : THEORETICAL REVIEW ...... 9 A. Review of Related Studies ...... 9 B. Review of Related Theories...... 11 1. Theory of Character...... 11 2. Theory of Representation...... 16 3. Theory of Semiology...... 18 4. Theory of Ideology...... 22 5.Woman Culture in America...... 25 C. Theoretical Framework ...... 26
CHAPTER III : METHODOLOGY ...... 28 A. Object of Study ...... 28 B. Approach of the Study ...... 30 C. Method of the Study ...... 31
CHAPTER IV : ANALYSIS ...... 33 A. The Characters of Chick-Lit Novels ...... 34 1. Jemima J...... 34 2. Bridget Jones ...... 40 3. Andrea Sach ...... 45 B. Representation of Women through The Characters ...... 51 C. Ideology depicted in Chick Lit ...... 59
CHAPTER V : CONCLUSION ...... 60
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 61
APPENDICES...... 63
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Appendix 1 ...... 63 Appendix 2 ...... 64 Appendix 3 ...... 65
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ABSTRACT
HAYU PRIMA INDRASTUTI (2009). Ideology in Chick-Lit as seen in Jane Green’s Jemima J, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil wears Prada and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s The Edge of Reason. Yogyakarta : Departement of English Letters, Faculty of Letters, Sanata Dharma University.
Chick-lit as new genre in women novel has become a phenomenon because it has been sold out in great number and has been translated in many languages. As novels, chick-lit also stated has become the mirror of women in 1990’s. With the theme single working woman in their middle ages, chick-lit is dealing with the issues and problem faced by women. But, chick-lit as popular culture is not purely portraying the life of woman. Chick-lit also has a message that want to be delivered to their reader. This message translated into an ideology, an idea behind chick-lit novel. The main characters are selected in order to understand the mind of the author, including the ideology put by the author. I choose three chick-lit novel in order to give a representation chick-lit novel. From many chick-lit novel that has been published, I will used Jane Green’s Jemima J, Lauren Weiberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones; The Edge of Reason as the source of my research. In this undergraduate thesis, I will analyzise three main problem. The first is the characterization of the chick-lit characters from the three novel, the second is the representation of women in 1990’s that depicted in chick-lit characters and the third is the ideology behind chick-lit that depicted through the representation of women in 1990’s. To analyze the problem above, I used cultural studies approach as a tool to understand chick-lit novel. Cultural studies approach is an approach which combine many theories to give a full understanding about culture phenomenon. This research is using library research with the novel as the main source. There are three main result gained from the analysis. The first is the characterization of chick lit character, the second is the representation of woman in 1990’s depicted in chick-lit’s main characters, they are represented as working, naive and materialistic women. While the third result, the ideology depicted in chick-lit is ideology of capitalism. Chick-lit as popular culture is sustaining the ideology of capitalism through the characters that characterize in chick-lit. Women are represented as consumer for industrialism in order to gain the ideal role model.
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ABSTRAK
HAYU PRIMA INDRASTUTI (2009). Ideology in Chick-Lit as seen in Jane Green’s Jemima J, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil wears Prada and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s The Edge of Reason. Yogyakarta : Jurusan Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma.
Chick-lit sebagai genre baru dalam novel wanita telah menjadi sebuah fenomena karena berhasil mencetak angka penjualan yang sangat besar dan telah diterjemahkan ke dalam banyak bahasa. Di sisi lain, chick-lit juga menyatakan sebagai gambaran wanita masa kini. Dengan temanya wanita single dan bekerja berusia menengah, chick-lit mengangkat masalah-masalah yang dihadapi wanita. Namun, sebagai budaya populer chick-lit tidak secara murni memotret kehidupan wanita. Chick-lit juga menyimpan pesan yang ingin disampaikan kepada pembacanya. Pesan ini telah diterjemahkan sebagai sebuah ideologi, sebuah ide yang diletakkan dibelakang novel chick-lit. Karakter utama dipilih dengan tujuan agar dapat memahami pemikiran sang pengarang, termasuk ideologi yang ingin dimasukkan oleh sang pengarang. Saya memilih tiga novel chick-lit sebagai representasi dari chick-lit novel. Dari sekian banyak chick-lit novel yang telah diterbitkan, saya akan menggunakan Jemima J karya Jane Green, The Devil Wears Prada karya Lauren Weisberger, dan Bridget Jones; The Edge of Reason sebagai bahan dari kajian saya. Dalam skripsi ini, saya akan menganalisis tiga masalah utama. Yang pertama adalah karakterisasi dari karakter dalam ketiga novel chick-lit, yang kedua adalah potret wanita masa kini yang digambarkan oleh karakter-karakter chick-lit dan yang ketiga adalah ideologi di balik chick-lit yang tergambar melalui potret wanita masa kini. Untuk menganalisa masalah di atas, saya menggunakan pendekatan kajian budaya sebagai alat untuk memahami novel-novel chick-lit. Pendekatan kajian budaya adalah pendekatan yang mengkombinasikan berbagai teori untuk memberikan sebuah pemahaman yang menyeluruh mengenai fenomena budaya. Kajian ini menggunakan kajian pustaka dengan novel sebagai sumber utama. Ada tiga hasil yang didapat dari analisis. Yang pertama adalah karakterisasi dari karakter chick-lit, yang kedua adalah representasi wanita di tahun 1990’s yang tergambar dalam chick-lit karakter adalah wanita bekerja yang naive dan materialistik. Sementara, hasil yang ketiga adalah ideology yang tergambar dalam chick-lit adalah ideologi kapitalis. Chick-lit sebagai budaya populer menjaga kelanggengan ideologi kapitalis. Wanita direpresentasikan sebagai konsumen dalam industri untuk menjaga keberlangsungan industri.
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of Study
Two hundred years ago, women worked alongside with men in all sorts of laboring work. However, as the industrial revolution began to require fewer workers, gradually women were pushed out of the industrial workforce and the beliefs grow that the proper place for a woman was in the home. Feminist sociologists have argued that what was happening here was really a battle of the sexes and the males won, banishing women to the home.
At the turn of the century, less than 30 per cent of the workface was female.
However, the First World War (1914-1918) took away the bulk of young men to fight. Women were recalled to the factories where they did all the work men had done. But with the war over, the jobs were returned to the men. The same thing occurred in the Second World War.
In the 1960’s, however, the number of women in the workforce began to increase. This reflected the changing attitudes of women themselves. They began to fight against the idea that once they had children they ought not to work; instead they began to seek work as soon as the youngest child attended school. Allied to the changing attitude of women was the growth in ‘service industries’ (those which do not actually create anything but provide a service) and the growth in ‘light; electronic industries (such as stereo or computer construction) which preferred women because they were cheaper to employ than men. They were also supposedly more nimble than
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men and because they were prepared to work part time they were more flexible to employ. In short, female employees were attractive to employers. That was the beginning of women’s stories as a worker. Nowadays, women write their own stories as worker through chick-lit.
“The Story of Women from Heaven”, title in Kompas, one of the largest newspaper in Indonesia to describe chick-lit (http://www.kompas.com/kompas- cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972525.htm). According to Rende (2008:3), chick-lit is a newly contrived style of writing. Marketed as a ‘for women, by women, about women’ genre, the chickerati (authors of chick-lit) have benefited financially and profesionally by writing about ‘the feelings of women in a drawing-room’ (or maybe just the living room of a Manhattan apartment), and the ‘everywoman-type-heroine, complete with dieting woes and dating insecurities’. The genere has even been inducted into the prestigious pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, which offers a simplistic definition of the novel as ‘a type of fiction, typically focusing on the social livers and relationships of young professional women, and often aimed at readers with similar experiences’. While semantically, the name of the genre itself remains questionable in that it joins two terms with negative conotations: chick (the slang reference for a woman) and lit (the shortening of “literature” to “lit” typically denotes frivolity or insignificance) (Rende, 2008:3). While Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary is credited with sparking the genre, and granted the momentous honor as being the first chick-lit novel. First used by Cris Mazza and
Jeffrey DeShell (1995:18), chick-lit was ironically used as the title for an anthology on postfeminist fiction composed of “courageous, wry, honest, intelligent, libidinous PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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and unapologetic” text. The phrase was mockingly used in an article by James
Wolcott, “Hear Me Purr”, refering to the girlish style of writing used by female journalist in newspaper columns. At the end, Mazza and DeShell (1995:18) described chick-lit as books flaunting pink, aqua and lime covers featuring cartoon figures of long-legged women wearing stiletto heels.
The raise of chick-lit as a new genre has been followed by a serious debate.
Moreover, chick-lit comes as a phenomenon. From the first time published in the middle of 1990 with Bridget Jones’s Diary, chick-lit has a hilarious success record.
In Britain, the place where chick-lit born, chick-lit has been sold many copies and has become best seller novel. Ferris (2006:32) reported that chick-lit reader are eating it up at a price of $71 millions, just in 2002 alone. Not only in Britain, chick- lit is also spreading all over America and all over the world. The success of chick-lit in America and Britain has lead many publishers from all over the country to translate and publish chick-lit in their countries. Not far from Britain and America, chick-lit also made success and become best seller in many countries. Chick-lit also success in inspiring the born of other subgenre such teen lit and mom-lit.
(http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972521.htm).
Chick-lit is claimed to be the novel that represents women in 1990’s which are depicted to be single and working in their middle age. One of the key success of chick-lit is the representation of woman nowadays with their issues and problems as worker through the stories and the characters of chick-lit.
Lalu, kenapa novel-novel chick lit ini mendapat sambutan baik di pasar? Menurut Intan Paramaditha, pengamat sastra dan budaya, pembaca PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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chick lit umumnya adalah para perempuan seusia tokoh-tokoh dalam novel tersebut. Menurut Paramaditha, para perempuan tersebut melihat refleksi diri melalui tokoh yang coba memaknai hidup di tengah pergulatan dengan isu-isu perempuan modern. Isu-isu tersebut berkisar seputar pilihan karier, mencari jodoh, bentuk tubuh (body image-Red), dan keuangan. Pendapat serupa diungkapkan oleh Ibnu Wahyudi, pengajar di Fakultas Ilmu Budaya. Menurut Ibnu Wahyudi, mengapa pasar begitu antusias menyambut novel-novel chick lit tersebut, tak lain adalah karena para pembacanya-para perempuan dewasa-merasa seolah-olah terwakili. Lebih jauh lagi, para pembaca juga dikatakan akhirnya merasa mampu mengaktualisasi diri sebagai bagian dari kehidupan modern yang memang diangkat di dalam chick lit.
http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972521.htm
However, the success of chick-lit is not only being emphasized but also being questioned by other women. Chick-lit was born during the era of modern woman in which feminism and gender equality has become a ‘taken-for-granted’ ideology. The writers and the readers are women whose mother are used to dealing with the ideology of feminism and gender equality, both are the issues that they life with.
Nevertheless, it still being questioned, whether chick-lit is further step of feminism or it was a backward of feminism. Some critic put chick-lit as post feminism, but the definition of post feminism and how post feminism stands against feminism are still questioned (http://www.kompas.com/kompas-cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972525.htm).
Feminism or not, chick-lit is a symbol of woman culture and culture phenomenon.
Chick-lit is culture phenomenon because it has been touch the life of thousand women as their readers. As the symbol of woman culture, what or whom chick-lit represent?
Chick-lit is put as popular culture because according to critics chick-lit is too light and popular as novels that makes chick-lit only suitable for entertaining. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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Popular culture will lead to the description of culture by F.R. Leavis. Leavis define culture into two categories, high and low culture. High culture refers to the culture of bourgeois while the low culture refers to the culture of the proletarian, the working- class (Bessnet, 1997:7). Popular culture is defined as low culture, a culture of the working-class. Suitable with the description, working class is also become the background of chick-lit stories and the reader of chick-lit. While it also refers to three important themes, first concerns with what or who determines popular culture? Does it emerge from the people themselves as an autonomous expression of their interest and modes of experience? Or is it imposed from above by those in position of power as a type of social control? The second is the influence of commercialization and industrialization upon popular culture; does the emergence of culture in commodity form mean that criteria of profitability and marketability take precedence over quality, artistry, integrity and intellectual challenge? The third is the ideological role of popular culture, to indoctrinate the people, to get them to accept and adhere to ideas and values that ensure the continued dominance of those in more privileged positions who thus exercise power over them? Or is it about rebellion and opposition to the prevailing social order? (Strinati, 2004:2).
Chick-lit has been stated to be popular by scholar. Since the very beginning, the term chick-lit as a genre has been put chick-lit into an industry. While chick-lit as popular culture cannot be separated from ideologies. Ideologies, as the site of struggle from many interest has become a drive that lead chick-lit readers (read: women) into certain knowledge. It also can be stated that chick-lit as woman culture is not pure reality as it is. As mentioned by Hall, reality is something constructed and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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ideology in the media message has been able to make the message appear as natural and spontaneous presentation of reality. Chick-lit as reality is not resistant from the effect. Chick-lit also contains some message which will influence the readers, but what the effect of chick-lit toward modern woman as their reader?
The question cannot be answered without understanding the ideology behind chick-lit. Ideology critically examines the ideas, feelings, beliefs, values, and representation embedded in, and promoted by, the artifact and practices of a culture or a group (Leitch, 2001:45).The ideology will be revealed through the characters of chick-lit. The characters are chosen because through the characters we can pop up into the head of the writer. Through the characters reader can read almost all the message of the novels including the ideologies behind it.
In order to make the nearest representation of chick-lit novels, the research will choose three novels of chick-lit. The first is Jemima J by Jane Green, the second is The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger and the third is Bridget Jones II, the
Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding. The three novels will be analyzed using cultural studies approach. Cultural studies are chosen because cultural studies offer distinctive answers to the two key questions, what is intepretation and what is literature. First, literature consist of popular, mass and minority genres as well as elite cannonical works. It includes a wide array of discursive materials, from writings in standard literary genres to rap lyrics, blue poems, oral legends, diaries, magazines, movies, posters, romance, soap operas, and so on. With a different population or in another time or place, literature would be differently defined. The is one constant in this culturally relative definition: literature is symptomatic of the state of its society. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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Second, interpretation employs institutional analysis, ideology critique, and field- based research, as well as textual explication, exegesis, aesthetic appreciation and personal reponse (Leitch, 2001:45).
B. Problem Formulation
This research tries to answer some questions below
1. How are the characterizations of the main characters?
2. How women in 1990’s represented through the main characters of chic-lit?
3. What is the ideology behind the success of chick-lit novels?
C. Objectives of the Study
This study is conducted to find the answers of the questions formulated in the problem formulation. There are two objectives in this literary study, they are:
1. to find out how women in 1990’s represented in the chick-lit novels through
the characterization of the main characters.
2. to find out the ideologies that influence chick-lit as novels genre and support
their success as novels through the representation of women in the novels.
D. Definition of Terms
The purpose of this part is to avoid misunderstanding in certain term.
Semantically chick-lit comes from the word chick (the slang reference for a woman) PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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and lit (the shortening of ‘literature’ to ‘lit’ typically denotes frivolity or insignificance) (Rende, 2008:3). While Oxford English Dictionary describe chick-lit as “ a type of fiction, typically focusing on the social lives and relationships of young professional women, and oftem aimed at readers with similar experiences”. In this study, chick lit is described as a type of fiction’s writing style, typically focussing on the social lives and relationships of young working women.
Ideology comes from the word idea and logos (science), while idea itself envisages meanings something individuals think up for themselves
(Edgar&Sedgwick, 2005:189). The definition of ideology based on Hall definition is a site of struggle from many interests (Turner, 2003: 172). Ideology also has function to construct ‘false conciousness’ of the self and of one’s relation to history (Turner,
2003; 19). While Karl Marx defined ideology not as consciousness of people that determine their being, but, on the contratry, their social being that determines their conciousness. Further, Marx and Engels in “The German Ideology” developed an account of ideology in terms of economic base and ideological superstructure. If a person’s class position is determined by his or her economic position in relation to the mode of production, then this individual will share an ideology representing the economic class they belong to (Easthope&MacGowan, 1998:169). Based on the definition above, ideology in this study described as the idea that chick lit writer think up and wrote behind the story of chick lit novels which contains of many interest representing the economic class they belong to. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
CHAPTER II
THEORETICAL REVIEW
A. Review of Related Studies
The evolution of the world not only affected the world of reality but also influence the world of imaginary. Women novels, as part of the world of imaginary has been giving birth to chick-lit, as the proof of the influence of the world change. Chick- lit has been receive compliment as novels which giving the new color of women novels.
Chick-lit has been develop a new style of writing which has not been used before such as telling a story through diaries or email which has become one of the trend of writing since chick-lit published in the first time (http://www.kompas.com/kompas- cetak/0404/17/pustaka/973634.htm)
According to Glasburgh (2006:18), the sudden explosion of chick-lit genre in the market because the literature has few ideas : Mabry (2005:27) suggest that as traditional romance reader age (their average age is about forty-five), publishers are honing in on the next generation of female readers. These younger readers are looking for something sassier, funnier, and with more romantic choices than the traditional romance formula has to offer. Others liken it to a return to consumerism: chick-lit’s preoccupation with shopping and fashion compounds its relationship with mass culture and legitimazes the reader’s own assumed preoccupation with “these indispensable features of the feminine universe” (Radway, 1984:193). It is safe to say that there is some reader interest in consumerism as no one is completely immune to the powers of mass marketing.
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Chick-lit is also mentioned to be ‘zeitgeist’ or the representation of the age, as chick-lit is the novel wrote by women and for women then can be summed that chick-lit is the representation of women nowadays
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19donadio.html). The novels also titled to be the picture of women from heaven although all their heroine is not the perfect women in the world. It is mentioned to be the picture of women from heaven because although they are story about women but they faith is far much different from women nowadays. Their luck and their serendipity are giving some dream that feminist never able to give (http://www.kompas.com/kompas- cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972521.htm).
The third wave feminism is not the end of feminist movement. Some critics put post feminism as the following chain of feminism. Chick-lit which aimed for women has been said as the post feminism novel. Novel which born from the second-wave- feminism women, they born from mother which whispering feminism as story before sleep, they are not fighting for equal rights anymore nor they are not understand either the struggle of their mother for equality. They see equal right as something which given taken for granted but not something which has been fight for by their mother. They see feminism as something they already have and have been make them fighting for something else. Some critics have been seen chick-lit as degradation of feminism. They consider chick-lit did not support the struggle of many women which has been fight for equality in some third world country. They see the women characterized in chick-lit as women which fighting for something too simple. Post feminism is not seen as next chapter, but a backward of feminism movement. (http://www.kompas.com/kompas- cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972521.htm) PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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Not all women agree with the opinion of Diane Goodman, from Allegheny
College. Post feminism can be seen as the following or the regression of feminism, it depend how people see. For Gadis Arivia, one of Indonesian feminist, post feminism is defined as feminist movement which not fighting for equality, but fighting for something more particular and plural, the struggle which did not have any relationship with ideology but still become women’s problem. Women aimed by chick-lit are they who step onward from feminist movement which make them consider that women not only facing the problem of equality, but also other simple problem. Intan Paramadina, literature and culture critics, put critics as novel which down-to-earth, the heroine which not perfect has been put chick-lit has close relationship with the reader and put the reader identified themselves with chick-lit character (http://www.kompas.com/kompas- cetak/0404/17/pustaka/972521.htm).
B. Review of Related Theories
1. Theory of Character
A character is the creation of the novelist who becomes important in the novel because it is necessary for a novelist to make his or her works interesting. Characters are very significant because in order to understand the novel, the reader need to understand the character.
In order to understand the theory of character, we need to explain the word character itself. According to Stanton in An Introduction to Friction, the word character has two meaning. The first meaning is the individuals who appear in the story and this leads to the question of “how many character are there in the story?”. The second PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
12 meaning is the mixture of interest, desire, emotion, and moral principles that make up each of these individuals. This also raises the question of “how would you describe his character?”. (Stanton, 1965:17)
A theory of character is needed in analyzing a novel, which relates to the character and her background. Barnet explain that the author presents his/her own character in his/her own work (1988:712). It means that it is a must to have a character or characters in fiction. Abraham in his Glossary of Literary Terms defines character as the persons who are presented in a narrative and dramatic work who reveal themselves in what the say (dialogue) and by what they do (the action). A character’s speech or action may reveal some of the author’s ideas (1971: 20-21).
E.M Forster in his book Aspect of the Novel (1974 : 46-51) divides character into two kind, flat and round character : a. Flat Character
Forster states that a flat character is built around “a single idea or quality” and is presented in outline and without much individualizing. A flat character is characterized by one or two traits. Forster call this kind of character flat because we see only one side of him.
There are two advantages of flat character. One great advantages of flat character is that he is recognized easily whenever he comes. He is recognized not by the visual eye which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name, but by the reader’s emotional eye. It means that by seeing a part of a person’s character, the reader can get the description of the whole character. The second advantage is that a flat character is easily remembered by the reader. It is because from the very beginning of the story until PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
13 the end of it, the character stays the same (unchanged). He remains in the reader’s mind as unatterable for the reason that he is not changed by circumstances. The character can be summed one or two words.
b. Round Character
A round character is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtle particularity. Forster says that we remember him in connection with the great scenes. It indicates that we do not remember him so easily for the waxes and wanes and has many facets like human being. Therefore he is as difficult to describe with any adequacy as a person in real life, and like most people, he is capable of surprising us.
On the other hand, Henkle in his book Reading the Novel (1977: 87-97) states that character can be described as major and secondary ones.
1. Major character
Major character is the most important and complex character in a novel. Major
character can be identified as such through the complexity of his characterization,
the attention given to him (by the author and by the other characters), and the
personal intensity that seems to transmit. It is the major character who deserves our
fullest attention because he performs a key structural function, that is upon him we
build expectation and desires which “in modification” shift or establish our values. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
14
2. Secondary character
Secondary character is character that performs more limited functions. He may be
less sophisticated, therefore his response to the experience is less complex and
interesting.
In order to understanding the character, according to Barnet,Berman,&Burto in their book Literature for Composition, there are some factor to be considered when we want to see the character involved in a story (1988: 712), those are : i. What the character says.
What the character says can give a clue how the author describes him, for instance,
whether he is a kind or bad person, educated or uneducated person, etc.
ii. What the character does.
By seeing what the character does, we are able to know whether he is from upper or
lower class, he is kind or bad person. iii. What other character say about the character.
What other characters say about the character is needed to get an additional
information and clear description about his character in the story. iv. What others do
The action of others may help to indicate what the character could do but he does
not do. It is very important to know his character such as lazy, wicked, careless
person, etc. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
15
While M.J. Murphy’s in Understanding Unseens : An Introduction to English Poetry and the English Novel for Overseas Student (1972: 161-173) said that there are nine ways in which an author attempts to make his characters understandable to and come alive for his reader.
1. Personal description
Personal description means that the author can describe a person’s appearance and
clothes in the story.
2. Characters as seen by another
Instead of describing a character directly, the author can describe him through the
eyes and opinions of another.
3. Speech
It is important way that may be used to describe of character. The author can give us
an insight into the character of one of the persons in the book through what the
person says. Whenever a person speaks, whenever he is in conversation with
another, whenever he puts forward an opinion, he is giving us come clues to his
character.
4. Past life
By letting the readers learn something about a person’s past life, the author can give
them a clues to events that have helped to shape a person’s character. This can be PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
16
done by direct comment by the author, through the person’s thought, through his
conversation or through the medium of another person.
5. Conversation of other.
We can take clues of a person’s character through the conversations of the other
people and the things they say about him. People do talk about other people and the
thing they say often gives us a clue to the character of the person spoke about.
6. Reactions
Through the person’s reaction to various situations and events, the author can also
give us a clue to know a person’s character.
7. Direct comment
The author can describe or comment on a person’s character directly.
8. Thoughts
The author can give us direct knowledge of what a person is thinking about. It this
respect, he is able to do what we cannot do in real life. He can tell us what different
people are thinking.
9. Mannerism
The author can describe a person’s mannerism and habit which may also tell us
something about his character.
2. Theory of Representation PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
17
Theory of representation is based on the major theorist of postmodernism which proposed by the contemporary French writer Jean Baudrillad. Baudrillad is associated with what is usually known as ‘the loss of the real’, which is the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV and advertising has led to a loss of the distinctions between the real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. The result is a culture of ‘hyperreality’, in which distinctions between these are eroded. His propositions are worked out in his essay ‘Simulacra and
Simulations’. He begins by evoking a past era of ‘fullness’, when a sign was a surface indication of an underlying depth of reality (‘an outward sign of inward grace’). But what, he ask, if a sign is not an index of an underlying reality, but merely of other signs?
Then the whole system becomes what he calls a simulacrum. He then subtitutes for representation the notion of simulation. The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series of steps (Barry, 1995: 87).
Firstly, the sign represents a basic reality. The example of this is the representations of the industrial city of Salford in the work of the twentieth-century
British artist L.S. Lowry. Mid-century life for working people in such a place was hard, and the paintings have an air of monotony and repetitiveness – cowed, stick-like figures fill the streets, colors are muted, and the horizon filled with grim factory-like buildings.
As sign, then, Lowry’s paintings seem to represent the basic reality of the place they depict (Barry, 1995: 87).
The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts the reality behind it. As an example of this, the glamourised representation of cities like Liverpool and Hull in the painting of the Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw. These paintings show the cities at night, wet paverments reflecting the clouds, and a forest of ships’s PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
18 masts silhoutted against the sky. Life in these places at that time was presumably grim, but the painting offer a romantic and glamourised image, so the sign can be said to misrepresent what it shows (Barry, 1995: 88).
The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath. To illustrate, take a device used in the work of the surrealist artist Rene Margritte, where, in the painting, an easel with a painter’s canvas on it is shown standing alongside a window: on the canvas in the painting is painted the exterior scene which we can see through the window. But what is shown beyond the window is not reality, against which the painting within the paiting can be judged, but simply another sign, another depiction, which has no more authority or reality than the painting within the painting (which is actually a representation of representation)
(Barry, 1995: 88).
Another example the third stages is Disneyland. In one way, it is a sign of course, it a sign of the second type, a mythologised misrepresentation of the United
States. But, Disneyland is actually a ‘third-order simulation’ (a sign which conceal an absence). In a word, Disneyland has the effect of ‘concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle’. Within postmodernism, the distinction between what is real and what is simulated collapses : everything is a model or an image, all is surface without depth, this is the hyperreal as Baudrillard calls it
(Barry, 1995: 89)
The fourth or the last stage for the sign is that it bears no relation to any reality at all. As an illustration of this stage we have simply to imagine a completely abstract PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
19 painting, which is not representational at all, like one of the great purple mood canvases of Mark Rothko, for instance (Barry, 1995: 88).
3. Theory of Semiology
Semiology is the science which build base on the theories of language by
Saussure. Saussure suggests the establishment of a science which would study the life of signs within society’ and semiology was to be the mechanism for applying the structural model of language across all signifying systems and for providing a method of analysis that would be ‘scientific’ and precise (Turner, 2003: 13). Semiology not only influence by Saussure but also by the writing of the French critics and semiologist,
Roland Barthes. Through his ‘Mythologies’ and ‘Writing Degree Zero’, he constructs some theories about interpreting popular culture.
Semiology argues that material reality can never be taken for granted. It is always constructed and made intelligible to human understanding by culturally scientific systems of meaning. This meaning is never ‘innocent’, but has some particular purpose or interest lying behind it, which semiology can uncover. Our experience of the world is never ‘innocent’ because systems of meaning make sure it is intelligible. There is no such thing as a pure, uncoded, objective experience of a real and objective world.
The latter exist but its intelligibility depends upon codes of meaning or systems sign, such as language. These codes and signs are not universally given, but are historically and socially specific to the particular interest and purposes which lie behind it.
According to Barthes, it is manufactured out of historically shifting system of codes, conventions and sign, that is why Barthes called it as the process of signification.
Cultural meaning are not universal, nor are they divorced from the social condition in PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
20 which they are to be found. Rather, they present themselves as universal when they are really historically and socially fixed. As Barthes writes in Mythologies, the function of myth is to ‘transform history into nature’ (Strinati, 2003: 98).
Barthes explained further through his analysis in French classicism and
‘Writing Degree Zero’. According to Barthes, the French classical style is rhetorical in character, motivated by the ‘permanent intention to persuade’. It is the style of the law courts and political campaign, aimed at changing opinions and ensuring the acceptance of the bourgeois view of the world. It has thus not simply been a reflection of reality but an attempt to shape conception of reality. It has not been neutral and universal, nor natural and inevitable, but historically specific and socially constructed, rooted in a particular set of class interests. Its meaning has not been given but produced, not
‘innocent’ but ‘guilty’. French classicism is another ‘myth’, which tries to transform the historical into natural in the interest of the bourgeois class (Strinati, 2003: 99).
Barthes argues that the emergence of new class interests and conflicts in the nineteenth century results in the breakdown of the classical style. Thus, he mentioning
‘Writing Degree Zero’ as a style developed in order to reject the idea of politically committed writing. It values writing which is colorless, transparent and neutral, blank and impersonal. It pretends to be as asocial and historical as possible. In a way, it is not a style at all. But this is not possible according to Bathes. For him, all writing is a form of fabrication or style. Furthermore, all writing is ideological and cannot avoid being so.
Writing is never just an instrument of communication, an open way of addressing people. It is rather a product of certain social and historical circumstances and certain power relation, and cannot escape their influence. Non-ideological writing which PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
21 presents itself as being beyond ideology, is for Barthes shown to be an illusion by his investigation of French classicism and ‘Writing Degree Zero’. (Strinati, 2003: 99).
Barthes carried his ideas further through his explanation in ‘Mythologies’. Myth is a system of communication, that is a message. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message. Barthes notes that any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified, a distinction elaborated by Saussure. There is also a third term, the sign itself. He explained through the example of a bunch of roses. The roses are a signifier of a signified, which is passion, something signified by the roses sent to a loved. The bunch of roses can thus be analytically if not empirically broken down into a signifier, the roses, a signified, passion and a sign which combines and is not separate from these two components, the roses as a sign of passion. Here, the passion is the process of signification. This attribution of meaning- the roses signify passion and not a joke or a farewell – cannot be understood simply in terms of the system of signs, but has to be located in the context of the social relationship in which the attribution of meaning occurs (Strinati, 2003: 101)
Barthes suggest that the study of myth needs to avoid confusion. Therefore, the signifier becomes ‘form’, the signified ‘concept’ and the sign ‘signification’. Another example the picture of the black soldier saluting the French flag, we have the form of the black soldier saluting the French flag, the concept of French military strength and the signification of the grandeur and impartiality of French imperialism. But through the semiological analysis, Barthes argues that myth works through the relationship between form, concept and signification. The form of this specific myth of French imperiality, the black soldier, is taken from one system, his real history, which gave him his PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
22 meaning and placed in another system, that of the myth, which denies his history and culture and thus the real history of French colonial exploitation. What motivates this
‘impoverisment of meaning’ is the concept of French imperiality, which gives another history to the soldier, that of the grandeur and impartiality of French colonialism. The soldier is now made to function as a sign of French imperiality. As Barthes puts it, it is emphasizing the process of signification: ‘The French Empire’? It just a fact : look at this good Negro who salutes just like one of our boys.
Barthes notes that ‘if one wishes to connect a mythical schema to a general history, to explain how it corresponds to the interest of a definite society – in short, to pass from semiology to ideology, one has to become a semiologist and understand ‘the very principle of myth : it transforms history into nature. As with his analysis of French classical writing, Barthes argues that myth has to be understood by how it transforms the socially (the interest of the bourgeois class) and historically specific (the structure of capitalist societies) into something which is natural and inevitable when it is really a historically specific structure of imperial power. Barthes is therefore emphasize and led to the conclusion that myth thus facilitates the task of bourgeois ideology and represent the interest of bourgeois class (Strinati, 2003: 105).
4. Theory of Ideology
Every sign is ideological. Yet it is hard to give a relatively objective and impartial account of the concept of ideology, one that is not tendetious because the question of ideology is so deeply bound up with politics, domination and issue of power. (Easthope&MacGowan, 1998). The term of ideology was coined at the end of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
23 the eighteenth century by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy, to refer to a science
(logos) of idea. Such a science would be based in analysis of human perception, conceived itself as a sub discipline of biology, and the ideologus sought to reform educational practices on the basis of it. (Edgar&Sedgwick, 2005:189). Definition of ideology have spread in widening circles, begins with a sense of ideology as conscious and deliberate then develops increasingly to regard ideology as permeating lived experience, subjectivity and even the conscious. A base-line definition of ideology would contrast with the notion of ideas. While the term ideas, envisages meanings something individuals think up for themselves, ideology specifies meaning in so far as they are social collective. Karl Marx defined ideology not as conciousness of people that detemine their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their conciousness (Easthope&MacGowan, 1998:169).
Further, Marx and Engels in “The German Ideology” developed an account of ideology in terms of economic base and ideological superstructure. If a person’s class position is determined by his or her economic position in relation to the mode of production, then this individual will share an ideology representing the economic class they belong to (Easthope&MacGowan, 1998). Marx itself, separated people into two class into two class, the bourgeoise and the proletar. The bourgeosie represent the capital owner which has become the ruling class. In other, the proletar represent the labour which described as people without capital power. Marx stated that in order to win the battle of power, the bourgeois not only had to win the capital, but also winning the battle of ideas. They did so through performing two manoeuvers, the first was to represent its own sectarian, class interest as universal and of democratic value, the second was to step aside from the religious ideology of feudal epoch. At the bottom PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
24 line, Marx emphasize that ideology is gigantic masquerade which consist of ideas in the service of class interest (Easthope&MacGowan).
Other side opinion, although almost similar comes from cultural studies.
Ideology, even though has been out of fashion from cultural studies, but it cannot be separated from cultural studies. As mentioned by James Carrey in Turner (2003) British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies for they assimilate, in a variety of complex ways, culture to ideology
(2003: 167). Turner then explained the function of ideology as ‘to misrepresent “the real” and to mask any political struggle: for cultural studies ideology can be summarize as a site of struggle, emphasizing what has been developed by Marx through the battle of ideas.
Ideology, according to Gramsci cannot be separated from popular culture, even he defined ideology as a site of particularly vigorious contestation, and the popular culture as a source of considerable resistance to hegemonic relation. Popular culture is seen in two side of money, the first, it is seen as a rebellion from the hegemony. A new ideology which carried in order to be a sign of struggle. In opposite, the others is seeing popular culture as the process of naturalization,a process to maintain hegemony through giving a new ideology which particularly following the hegemony. Hegemony speciefied ideology as ways a ruling group, block or class must rule by winning consent in conjuction with the thread of force, the effectiveness of hegemony depending on how rarely force, always present, has to be used (Easthope&MacGowen, 1998).
The process of naturalization is process that according to Hall (1996) aim to winning the ideological war, once again, the battle of ideas. Media, as part of popular PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
25 culture, has become the site for the battle. Media has big influence in shaping the culture though ideological process. Hall (1996) mention two process that involving the ideology to shape the culture. The first is the elaboration of ideology in language and the second is the articulation of ideology in the social formation.
Hall (1996) then refers to Sausurean which put language as the symbol of hegemony. Meaning in things is not given or taken-for-granted, but according to
Sausurrean, a meaning is attributed culturally. Hall (1996) put it as politics of signification, how a meaning won over the other. Media, as the site, use their power to signify meanings in a particular way. This process is a prove of the battle of ideological power, ideology becomes a site of struggle and a prize to be won, nor a permanent possession of dominant group and this process structures the most basic system of cultural organization. Another effect of ideology in the media message is to efface itself, allowing the message that has been sent to appear as natural and spontaneous presentation of reality. Hall (1996) mentioned it as the ‘reality effect’ while Althusser
(1970) prefer stated as false consciousness. Althusser stated that what represented in ideology therfore not the system of the real relation which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relation in which they live.
5. Woman Culture in America in 1990’s
With the rise of American industrialization after the Civil War, single women were pushed and pulled into the labor force in ever greater numbers. The changing nature of domestic work, the decline of agriculture and, in some families, poverty were PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
26 among the push factors. The pull factors included causes as varied as the division of labor due to new technology, the use of women as strikebreakers – and also, from the women’s point of view, the independence that comes with having one’s own, earned income. This independence was enhanced for working single women who lived away from their families. It cites several turn-of-the-century surveys that showed that working single women living away from home usually retained most of their earnings and over two-thirds of them retained 100 percent whereas those who lived at home while working usually remitted most or all of their earnings to their parents. Even then, women enjoyed the benefit of having a greater say over how family finances were distributed (Cvrcek, 2007: 12).
So strong, in fact, was the desire for independence that many single women had a clear preference for factory work over domestic service even though servants usually received free board and might command a higher pay. By 1930, the proportion of single white women working as domestic workers collapsed to between a quarter and a third of what it had been in 1860. Operative employment, on the other hand, was consistently above 30% and only went out of favor after 1910 as new occupations, promising not only higher salaries but also shorter hours and cleaner work environment, emerged.
These were professional, clerical and sales jobs. Domestic service simply entailed too strong a curtailment of the women’s freedom including, it seems, the freedom of social and dating life. Department stores, on the other hand, presented ample opportunity to meet prospective dates. Indeed, so great was the attraction for both the woman employees and the male customers that some stores implemented policies to discourage the practice because it had the potential for adverse publicity (Cvrcek, 2007: 12).
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27
D. Theoretical Framework
Chick-lit which born in the middle 1990’s is the symbol of woman culture.
Although, it still doubtful whether they exaggerate or simplified the life of woman nowadays, but they have become the mirror of woman nowadays. Thus, interrelatedness between the characters and the readers, have been made the novels seems to be closes to the fact, though still, a work of literature is absolutely not the real fact that can be found in the real world. During the research, the exploration will be focus in the ideologies behind chick-lit stories which also entering chick-lit into great success.
There are five theories applied in this research. The theory of characters will enable the writer to explore the characteristic of the main character, how the character reacts to the problems in life, how she solve it an she see herself as part of the society since the first step of the study that will be done is on the character. Theory of representation will help to explore the main characters of chick-lit as the representation of reality. While the theory of semilogy will help to explore the sign that represent through the characters and both theory will help to potrait the representation of woman nowadays in chick-lit characters. The woman culture in America will help and enrich the the representation of woman nowadays, woman culture will help to give a real portrait. The theory of ideology will explained the ideology that depicted in chick lit character through the representation woman depicted in chick-lit.
The conclusion will be taken the result of the analysis in order to give clear understanding of chick-lit as women culture and popular culture through the ideologies behind it. The conclusion will help to develop an understanding the real war that women face in the future, especially the ideological war which cannot be avoid. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
A. Object of the Study
The object of the research is chick-lit novels, especially the three novels that has been chosen. The three novels are Jemima J by Jane Green, The Devil Wears Prada by
Lauren Weisberger and Bridget Jones II, The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding. The three novels are chosen randomly from many tittle of chick lit novels.
The first novel is Jemima J by Jane Green which was published in 1998 by the
Penguin Books. Jemima J is one of chick-lit that first published. Wrote by Jane Green, a novelist who has been published five other bestseller novels. Before wrote Jemima J,
Jane Green wrote Straight Talking in 1997. She has been written three other novels after
Jemima J, they are Mr. Maybe (1999), Bookends (2000), Babyville (2001).
Written in the first person point of view, we can pop inside the head of Jemima
Jones, the main character of Jemima J. Jemima J is a story of ‘ugly duck’ who turn into a swan. Jemima was describe to be a young woman who has weight problem. Her struggle to reduce her weight and become the girl she always wanted to has become the main story of the novel.
The second novel is Bridget Jones; The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding. This is the second novel of the Bridget Jones Diary. The first novel has been making a success and it has become the reason why the second come. The success of Bridget Jones not only seen through the novels, but Bridget Jones as movies also made a successful record. Made in 1998, Bridget Jones Diary with the staring of Rene Zellweger has reach
28 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
29 box office movie. While Bridget Jones Diary; The Edge of Reason as the sequel of the first one, even though not as successful as the first one but still made a box office.
Bridget Jones is a story of women in their thirties. In the first novel it was describe
Bridget Jones as a women with all her imperfectness. She was not describe as
‘stereotype women’ like slim, beautiful, smart and successful instead she was described as fat, not married yet (even though she is 32), did not like her job, a smoker and alcoholic. Bridget went through her life with all her imperfectness and her biggest aim is finding “Mr. Right” in her life. Since Bridget Jones Diary was influence by ‘Pride and Prejudice’, that’s why the story of finding Mr. Right was also colored with many prejudice before she finally could see the truth. Even the Mr. Right also named from the novel ‘Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy. The second novel tells the story after Bridget
Jones is finding Mr. Darcy. Not many changes from Bridget life, she still has the same job, but what makes different only she and Mr. Darcy now live together. All the trouble comes when two different people put in the same place. Many problems come and like the first novel, it is full of prejudice. The story of the second novel is about the struggle of Bridget Jones dealing with her prejudice toward Mr. Darcy as her couple.
The third novel is The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger which was published in 2003. The Devil Wears Prada is chick-lit which publish after the success of the other chick-lit series. Although it was published in the glorious age but The Devil
Wears Prada also records its own success. Wrote by Lauren Wisberger, a writer who graduated from Cornell University, The Devil Wears Prada has become one of New
York Times Bestsellers for six months. The Devil Wears Prada also has been published in twenty seven countries and translated into many languages. The success of the novel is also followed by the success of the movies. With Mery Streep and Anne Heathaway PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
30 as the movie star and made by Fox 2000 Pictures in 2006 the movie was hilarious, not only because they made box office but also was supported by many best and famous designer in the world.
The Devil Wears Prada is claimed to be the novel who open the gate behind the fashion industry. Different from two other chick-lit, The Devil Wears Prada told the story of working for the boss who liked devil in a fashion magazine. Lauren
Weisberger is a Vogue veteran, so she describe the fashion industry just like the way it is.
The three novels tells about the same topics, they tells the story of woman. Even though they have different backgrounds, different countries and different stories but they share one things in common, they are the picture of woman that life in 22 centuries. All the stories will be discussed further in the next chapter and understand further about chick-lit.
B. Approach of the Study
For this study, the writer used a cultural studies approach. Cultural studies approach combines theories of culture, feminism, and hegemony to reveal the ideologies behind the novels. There are many ideas that constitute cultural studies.
Turner (2003:9) said that cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field where certain concern and method have converged; the usefulness of this convergence is that it has enable us to understand phenomena and relationship that were not accessible through the existing disciplines. While Cuerin (1999:239) mentioned cultural studies as a set of practice that composed of elements of Marxism, new historicism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, studies of race and ethnicity, film theory, sociology, urban PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
31 studies, public policy studies, popular culture studies and postcolonial studies; those fields that focus on social and cultural forces that either create community or caused division. Almost the same with Cuerin, Sparks in Storey(1996:15) mention that cultural studies can be defined as a veritable rag-bag of ideas, methods and concerns from literary critisism, sociology, history, media studies, etc, that are lumped together under the convenient label of cultural studies. Not far from all the definition, Edgar and
Sedgwick (2005) described in two definition, the first is a multi-disciplinary approach to culture, drawing not merely on the orthodox approaches derived from social science, but also on more radical approaches suggested by, for example feminism, Marxism and semiotic. And the second definition, which not much different from the first one, an approach to culture that is explicitly opposed to the celebration of high or elite culture, as represented, for example, in the canonical texts studied in English Literature, or the subject matter of traditional musicology, and an approach that is more positively derived from the social sciences, and particularly from cultural anthropology and the sociology of culture. All the combination will be used to analyze the characters, especially the main characters.
Cultural studies are chosen because cultural studies offer distinctive answers to the two key questions, what is intepretation and what is literature. First, literature consist of popular, mass and minority genres as well as elite cannonical works. It includes a wide array of discursive materials, from writings in standard literary genres to rap lyrics, blue poems, oral legends, diaries, magazines, movies, posters, romance, soap operas, and so on. With a different population or in another time or place, literature would be differently defined. The is one constant in this culturally relative definition: literature is symptomatic of the state of its society. Second, interpretation employs PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
32 institutional analysis, ideology critique, and field-based research, as well as textual explication, exegesis, aesthetic appreciation and personal reponse (Leitch, 2001).
C. Method of the Study
The study on chick-lit is conducted by the library research. The writer used the novels itself as the primary source and collected some books as the secondary sources regarding the criticism on chick-lit and cultural studies. Turner’s British Cultural
Studies, An Introduction and Strinati’s An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture,
Easthope&MacGowen’s A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader are the most important sources mostly used in the analysis, in which the writer was able to find some theories of cultural studies to analyze the novels. Furthermore, the writer also found some additional information from the Internet and the national newspaper to support the analysis.
The primary source, that is, the novel, was read several times. Later on, when the focus was firmly established, that is, the analysis on the main characters as the medium for revealing the ideology of chick-lit novel through the three novels chosen.
The writer then tried to collect as many sources as possible in order to understand more about the characters, who might convey messages or sign that represent through the characters. From the charcters, it will give an understanding the representation of woman in chick-lit. The representation of women in chick-lit will give an understanding the ideology behind it. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
CHAPTER IV
ANALYSIS
Since 1960’s the number of women in the workforce began to increase and working has become common activities. This reality reflected the changing attitudes of women themselves, the problems they face have been widened, not only domestic area, but has been enlarging into workforce and industry. Chick-lit as new genre has been dedicated for women nowadays. As zeitgeist, their stories are made from and for women nowadays, it would be suitable and close connected with women in this age.
The characters also build based on the life of women nowadays. Single and working in their late 20 and in the beginning of 30 has become the theme of chick-lit novels.
As novels, chick-lit is not purely portraying the life of women nowadays, but they also send some messages (unconsciously or not) through each character depicted in the novels. Noted by Hall that reality is not something natural, but they are constructed to be seen natural, then chick-lit as the reality of the word imaginary is also constructed with all the hidden message and interest. Jemima J, The Devil Wears Prada and Bridget
Jones; The Edge of Reason are three novels chosen to be analyzed. Each novels telling different stories, depicted different characters but naturally they share something in common as chick-lit novels. They share the same interest and send the same messages although through different type and size. This research will be looking forward for the hidden messages and interest which will be translated into the hidden ideologies behind chick-lit. The hidden ideologies will give clear picture the aim of chick-lit novels toward their reader. How they lead their reader to think and judge their life which finally will unconsciously affect their attitude. The characters of chick-lit would the gate
33 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
34 for further discussion of message and interest while all the discussion will be started below.
A. Characterization of the works
Characters depicted in the novels, as mentioned before, would be the main entrance to the following discussion. As stated by Abrahams in his Glossary of Literary
Terms, a character will reveal some of their author’s ideas through their speech of action. Constructing a character of a novel is also equally constructing the author ideas.
The first character which would be discussed is the character of Jemima Jones from Jemima J by Jane Green. The second would be Bridget Jones from Bridget Jones;
The Edge of Reason. And the last is Andrea Sach from The Devil Wears Prada.
1. Jemima Jones
The novel which takes the setting in London has been put the name of the main character as the title of the novel. Jemima Jones, the main character, is a single working woman which works as a journalist in the local newspaper. The major theme of the novel is a Cinderella story of woman’s struggle to be slim. Since little girl Jemima is overweight, this has been her major problem in her life and drive her to obsess with a good shape. In her opinion, people around her is stare at her with pittyness everytime they see her eating. According to her condition, eating is a mistake, while overweight is the result of her mistake. Because Jemima is considering it as a mistake, then she feels that she needs to make a reason to reduce her guilty feeling and to attract people sympathy. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
35
“Because, tough as it is to admit to a total stranger, I, Jemima Jones, eat a lot. I catch the glances, the glares of disapproval on the occasion I eat out in public, and I try my damnedest to ignore them. Should someone, some ‘friend’ trying to be caring and sharing, question me gently, I’ll tell them I have a thyroid problem, or a gland problem, and occasionally I’ll tack on the fact that I have a super-slow metabolism as well. Just so there’s no doubt, just so people don’t think that the only reason I am the size I am is because of the amount I eat.” (Green, 1998; 2)
Her hobby is collecting model’s picture which she gets from cutting the magazines.
She collect and gather them in her drawer, she has been projecting her disable toward eyeing those pictures. Jemima grow with understanding that physical image is very important and losing her weight is her life aim. It seems that losing her weight will solve all her life problems.
“And before you think I’m some kind of closet lesbian, I’ve already told you one thing I would wish for if I rubbed a lamp and a gorgeous, bare-chested genie suddenly appeared. If I had one wish in all the world I wouldn’t wish to win the lottery. Nor would I wish for true love. No, if I had one wish I would wish to have a model’s figure, probably Cindy Crawford’s, and I would extend the wish into having and keeping a model’s figure, no matter what I eat.” (Green, 1998;3)
Raised by her mother, Jemima was growing up with her mother as her role model. While instead of loving and caring her daughter no matter her condition,
Jemima’s mother is ashamed with Jemima existence as fat girl. She wants to hide
Jemima from sight of people. Jemima’s mother is a woman who dreaming her glorious youth. She was slim and beautiful when she was young, but after Jemima’s father leaving her, she keeps putting her weight. She was projecting her obsession toward her daughter. But, what she wants is not what she gets, Jemima is not a slim girl and her mother’s feels that Jemima has been arousing people pityness toward her. She has been put the stereotype of slim and beautiful woman in Jemima’s head.
She has been educated Jemima that slim is number one and being fat is something PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
36 shameful. Jemima has been learning from her mother and she also learns that the love of her mother is also based on her appearance.
“Because at this moment in time Jemima’s mother tries her damnedest not to take her daughter shopping. She tries to avoid the pitying stares of shopkeepers, the humiliation of having to shop in outsize stores, of people staring at them walking down the street. Jemima’s mother loves Jemima, deeply, as only a mother can love her daughter, but she wishes Jemima looked different.” (Green, 1998; 140- 141).
Physical image also has been throwing Jemima self esteem. She understands that she is a lovely person, but she put it aside. She sees the world as the physical world and she also has been put aside by the world because she is not fulfilling the world’s expectation. She believes and she runs her life with the belief that she is not worth enough because what people see is the fat.”So here I’m now, at twenty-seven years old, bright, funny, and warm, caring and kind; but of course people don’t see that when they look at Jemima Jones. They simply see fat.” (Green, 1998; 3).
How Jemima see herself is how she sees the world. Jemima works as the writer of TipsTop Column in Kilburn Herald, one of the local newspapers in London.
Jemima is talented to handle words, as journalist it is a gift that make her existed in her world. She often helps Geraldine, her collegue in her office, and even sometimes
Jemima who does the article because Geraldine’s writing is very awful. Jemima’s boss did not see her talent, instead giving Jemima a chance to prove herself; he gives the chance to Geraldine although at the end it is Jemima who will finish the job. The jobs are given not based on the competencies of the employee but based on the appearance. Geraldine is slim, beautiful and model’s look, Jemima feels that her boss prefer Geraldine rather than her because of it. As woman, Jemima feels insecure with the existence of Geraldine. She feels that she is not worthy because she compare PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
37 herself toward Geraldine. Instead of pushing herself further to explore her talent with words and moving her life, Jemima is giving up and taking for granted every times her boss refuse to give her a chance to write an article.
“It is not that I’m completely cynical, but with her gleaming blonde hair in a chick bob, her tiny size 10 figures into the latest fashion, Geraldine may not have an ounce of talent, but the men love her, and the editor thinks she’s the biggest asset to the paper since, well, since himself…. Geraldine is the woman I wish I was. “(Green, 1998; 9).
As a woman, Jemima also naive, although she knows that she has become the subject of industrial product, but she is still following it. The stereotype of slim girls is build in order to sell the diet pills, to make the industry running, to gain the aim they have been made the stereotype. Although she is aware with the marketing of the industry, but because she is grown up with the understanding of beauty based of physical appearance, being discriminate and underestimated by other people, she gives up and using all the diet pills.
“And diets don’t work, how can they? It’s a multi million-dollar industry, and if any of the diets actually worked the whole caboodle would go down the toilet… You name them; I’ve been the idiot that tried them.” (Green, 1998;4)
The evolution of Jemima begun not from herself but with the force of other.
When Jemima is starting her online course, she meets someone through the internet.
For Jemima, it is a new experience because she never feels the attention of a male before, she never feels being in love and loved by a man, this exhilarating experience has been make Jemima try her hardest to keep the relationship although it is in cyber world. They started to chatting, then sending an email and at the end they start exchange picture. Jemima is in doubt to send her picture; she did not feel confident enough to send her real photos. She was afraid being rejected by Brad, she afraid that PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
38
Brad would be disappointed when see her as fat girl just the way her mother and other people surround her. With the help of Geraldine, Jemima changed and switched the picture of a model in magazine with the picture of her face. Successfully, Brad likes the picture that Jemima has been sent. But at the end, Jemima was trap by her own trick; Brad is falling in love into her and asks her to come to America. Jemima, being too excited, cannot avoid it, she said yes. The war between Jemima and fat has begun; she started to visiting gym in order to be as slim as the picture she sends toward Brad. Jemima work so hard to get the body she wants, three months later she gets what she wants.
The revolution of Jemima is also marked with the change of her initial name.
Jemima does no longer exist; she has been changed into JJ. The change of Jemima’s initial name is like a process of baptizing, the new name has become the new symbol of new person, Jemima has been reborn into JJ with all new appearance, with all new looks and new sight of life. Jemima gets the respect from people surround her, she gets the looks from some guy, the shop assistant did not look her with filthy look, it seems emphasize what she believes is right. All of her changes has been proves that physical appearance has become the determiner of a person value. No matter how good or how smart you are but the ultimate goal is physical appearance.
“Life I now realize, is certainly different when you’re thin. Even the gym has now become a place of exciment, for wonder of wonders, I seem to have been welcomed into the crowd of beautiful people...” (Green, 1998;222)
The change of JJ’s point of view is also proven through her meeting with Brad assistant. Jenny, Brad personal assistant has been remind her of the old her. She is fat, just the same like the old Jemima. Jenny has been refused the friendship that JJ PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
39 has been offer to. She refuse to shake JJ hand, she looks JJ with unfriendly looks.
Just like the old Jemima, Jenny is feeling threatening with the existence of JJ as slim and beautiful. Once again, it emphasize that what fat girls are fuelled with the feeling of envy toward other people, they are filled with diffident. JJ as person who has been in Jenny’s place put her sympathy toward her, but all her action is stopped till that moment. Instead of giving Jenny support and make her comfortable, JJ insisted that things would better for Jenny if she lost few stones.
“ … while I take a good, long look at the girl, partly to try and work out who she is, and partly because, and it’s a hell of shock to see it, partly because the girl standing in the doorway looks an awful lot like the girl I used to be. She’s small with dark, glossy hair and I can see that she would be pretty, she could be pretty, and all she has to do is lose a few stone. Because this girl I huge, she two, no three chins. She is wearing a smock-type shirt to hide the halk bulk of her breast, she has her arms crossed to hide as much of her body as she can, and she has that slightly wounded look in her eye. She could be me, I think as I carry on staring at her. I could be her… I remember how I felt when someone skinny and beautiful was introduced to me, how inadequate I felt, how I couldn’t look them in the eye and I try desperately to think of a way to make Jenny feel at ease.” (Green, 1998; 271-272).
The enlightenment toward JJ happen when she found out accidentally that
Brad is a kind of guy who fond a big size lady. JJ found out some picture and magazines about big size lady and eventually she found out that one of Brad’s photo collection is the picture of Jenny, Brad’s assistant. JJ realizes that being slim and skinny did not guarantee her life to be happy. She realizes that she has been changed after she lost her weight, she loves people attention toward her, she got the confident, but she is also hiding the old Jemima inside her. JJ has become someone that Jemima never know before. Through the pictures she find out that although the women she sees in the pictures overweight but they still attractive toward some people.
Ironically, after she is slim, the guy she has been spending time with prefers the big PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
40 size ones. When Jenny was explaining that she and Brad have a romantic relationship and JJ has only become the girlfriend trophy for Brad because people cannot accept the relationship between Brad and Jenny, it is uncommon for someone as handsome as Brad having a girlfriend oversize like Jenny, they were expected Brad to have a girlfriend like JJ, slim and beautiful.
The incident has been hurt Jemima much. Jemima realizes that the world is full with superficial looks, but she thinks that she cannot do anything. She decided to leave, she leave Brad and continue her life with all her rule and all about the world.
She finally moving out and living with some friends because she cannot afford a ticket back to London. Although the incident has been changed Jemima, but it did not changed her much. Jemima finally met Ben, the love of her life when she was in
London.. Just like a fairy tale, Jemima finally back to London and live happily ever after with Ben. The best progress that she achieved is her understanding that being slim is not a guarantee of happy life.
2. Bridget Jones
Bridget Jones depicted in Bridget Jones; The Edge of Reason is the same character from the first book, Bridget Jones’s Diary. Helen Fielding, the author, even stated that Bridget Jones is still the same through her sub title “Same Bridget, brand new diary”. As a character, Bridget Jones is a unique person. Bridget is not someone special with good behaviour, remarkable beauty or even a glorious achievement but instead she is an ordinary person, not too successful, and not astonishing but she has been pursuit the readers with all her imperfectness. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
41
Bridget Jones is a woman in her beginning of twenty, has a relationship, and has alcoholic problems and work as a journalist in a local TV station. Bridget lived in
London, having three best friends and spending her spare time with visiting her parents and hanging out with her girlfriends. When the first book was telling the story of Bridget as single working woman trying finding Mr. Right, then second story is telling about how she keeps her relationship which full of prejudice and misunderstanding.
First impression toward Bridget is how insecure she is. Reading her diary, the reader will be given the statistic of Bridget condition such as how many calories she has, how many times she smokes, and how much she drunks. Bridget looks like someone who put too much worries about small thing in her life for example thinking about the fat and calories each days she wrote her diaries. Every single event has been influencing her physical condition, such as calories and fat.
Monday 27 January 9st 3 (total fat groove), boyfriends 1 (hurrah!), shags 3(hurrah!), calories 2,100, calories used up by shags 600, so total calories 1,500 (exemplary). (Fielding, 1999; 1)
Tuesday 28 January 9st 2, cigarettes smoked in front of Mark 0 (v.g), cigarettes smoked in secret 7, cigarettes not smoked 47 * (v.g). *i.e nearly smoked but remembered had given up so specifically did not smoke those particular 47. Number is not therefore number of cigarettes in entire world not smoked (would be ridiculous, over-large-type number). (Fielding, 1999; 29)
Although insecure, but Bridget is loveable and caring toward others. Bridget is loveable because she is being honest. She honestly admit in her diary how awkward PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
42 and ridiculous she is, instead of arousing filthy looks, Bridget has been make them feels sympathy. She is caring with other and can show her empathy when one of
Mark Darcy’s friends is having trouble with her wife. Bridget, although she is not close with him but she can comfort him and makes him feels better.
As a friend, Bridget is a loyal person toward her friends, Sharon, Jude and
Magda. They have been close for a long time and have been keep their friendship through keeps meeting regularly. The loyalty of Bridget is also shown through her guilty feeling of spending too much time with Mark Darcy, her boyfriends. She feels that she has been betrayed them just because between Sharon and Jude, she is the only one who have a boyfriends. While with Magda, she shows her loyalty through keep in touch with her and keep her feeling accepted because Magda is often feel depressed because she is the only one who did not going to work and just living at home taking care of children.
“Oh God, feel guilty with Jude and Sharon now I have boyfriend, almost like traitorous double crossing side-switching guerrilla. Have arranged to see Jude tomorrow night instead, with Shaz, and merely talk through everything again in phone tonight, which seemed to go down O.K. Now, had better quickly ring Magda and make sure she doesn’t feel boring and realizes how opposite-of- glamorous job is.”(Fielding, 1999; 13)
In her thirties, women are not only asked to be career women, but they are also demanding to get married or at least having a relationship. Even having a relationship for a single woman has become a must, it makes them feels secure and feel save from the society expectation and other people, especially those who have been getting married. Bridget and her two best friends, Sharon and Jude, have different title to describe different kind of person. They divided women in London
(or in the world) into two categories, the first is ‘Singleton’, a working woman which PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
43 still single in their beginning of thirties, has trouble or having an impermanent relationship and spending their leisure time with their boyfriend or their girl friends.
The second is ‘Smug Married’ girls for those women who in their end of twenties and beginning of thirties, married, and having children. According to Bridget and her girl friends, the two categories although life in the same world but the run different rules and different sight of life. They cannot get along together because they are different each other. The singleton sees the smug married as a dull adult which did not know how to having fun, since that they were avoiding the ‘Smug Married’.
Feeling bond with their title as Singleton, Bridget, Jude and Sharon are depending each other, as friends and also advisor. Bridget is a person who easy to get influence, especially with her best friends. They share some problems and giving advice to each other, but for Bridget her friends advice is dogma, she taken it-for-granted and doing it without even thinks about the consequences. She is in the position of addicting her friends’ advice until it looks like she cannot live and stand without the help of her friends. For her own problem, Bridget cannot think and solves it without asking her friends advice. Although her friends are also as loyal as Bridget, they are ready every time Bridget needs her friends, but Bridget is over depending toward them until she cannot decide anything for herself, especially about her relationship with Mark
Darcy.
Bridget is kind of character who did not confident with her own thought, feels inferior toward other and depending. It was proven to her addiction toward self-help books. Both Bridget and her two singleton friends are depending and addicting with self-help books. They believe and taken-for-granted all writings and advice in the self-help books and also applied in their life, especially in their love life. They read PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
44 almost all the self help books although some of them are opposite one another.
Bridget even consider that self-help books as a new religion which can be replaced if the other is failed solving their problems.
“But they are! They are a new form of religion. It’s almost as if human beings are like streams of water so when an obstacle is put in their way, they bubble up and surge around to find another path.” “Bubble up and surge around, Bridge?” “What I mean is if the organized religion collapses then people start trying to find another set of rules. And actually, as I was saying, if you look at self-help books they have a lot of ideas in common with other religion.” (Fielding, 1999; 76)
When it has anything to do with her job as journalist, Bridget is the worst. She is a foolish and cannot do anything correctly. Bridget is described as a lousy journalist and a regular employee; she was remembered not by her achievement but with her clumsy accident during her jobs. The ‘ordinary person’ is depicted through the picture of Bridget as ‘regular employee’ with her habit of coming late to office, pretending that has been coming from other department to cover her fault, feeling enslave by her boss, and having personal telephone from friends during office hours while pretending it is business conversation. While her foolish accident as a journalist is shown through her failure interview, as TV journalist or as newspaper journalist. When she was asked to interview a famous actor, Colin Firth, as a test for her new job as a newspaper journalist, Bridget has successfully ruined it. Colin Firth is an actor who plays as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice the movies, a movie which
Bridget and friends see thousand times. During the interview, instead of asking his latest movies Bridget keep asking about her performance in the Pride and Prejudice, especially the scene when Colin has to dive to the lake. Thing get worse when after PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
45 the interview, limited by the deadline, Bridget still did not write any article about her interview with Colin Firth. As the result, they not publish the article but they publish the transcript of the interview which full with questions about the act of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
Influence by Pride and Prejudice, Bridget romantic relationship is also full of prejudice. Bridget is not an optimist person, in fact, she is negative thinker, and her friend’s advice and the help of self help books have been make her problem worst.
Her relationship with Mark Darcy has been ruined with the prejudice of third person.
Being too emotional, Bridget is narrow minded and did not considering other alternative and consequences when she is doing something. It has been proved when she and Mark Darcy broke up because she is being influenced by her friends to be not afraid to break up just to give Mark Darcy a lesson. Instead of feeling released,
Bridget is regretting it.
The character of Bridget, as mentioned before, also did not change in the second book. Until the last chapter Bridget is still full of prejudice and narrow minded. She finally resolves her problem when Sharon told her that Mark Darcy has been released her from death sentence punishment in Thailand because she is being accused to be a drug smuggler.
3. Andrea Sach
Andrea Sach is the main character in The Devil Wears Prada. Andrea is fresh graduate from Brown with her major in English and dreaming to be a journalist.
After graduating, Andrea decided to make a tour to India and she return home with PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
46 amoebic dysentery. Recovered, she leaves her home in Avon, Connecticut and heading for New York City. For a while, she was living in her old friend apartment,
Lily who now is doing her postgraduate studies in Russian at Columbia.
Andrea is typical of fresh graduate which comes from small town with a bunch of idealism. She is dreaming to be New Yorker Journalist and during her college years she has been trying to building a block for her carrier through her journalistic activities. She never dreaming to have a career in fashion industry, even fashion industry has been excluded from her intellectual and creative activity, which she learn from her college years.
“And college!Well, thas was a world of sophistication after high school. Brown had provided endless activities and classes and groups for every imaginable type of artist, misfit, and computer geek. Whatever intellectual or creative interest I wanted to pursue, regardless of how esoteric or unpopular it may be been, had some sort of outlet at Brown. High fashion was perhaps the single exception to this widely bragged-about fact.” (Weisberger, 2006)
When she finally invited to work in Runaway Magazine in Elias Clark
Building she never thought that she is going to enter a fashion magazine. At the beginning, Andrea was in doubt because she saw that the whole building is fulfilled with ‘the clacker’. The clacker is a term that has been used by Andrea to describe the fashion girls who use the high-heels shoes and walking like a snob. She finally agrees to accept the jobs because she is convinced that “it is a job that million girls would die for” and it is a stepping stone to her dreams. She agrees to be the junior assistant of Miranda Priestly, the chief editor of Runaway Magazine. From the moment, she did not realizing that it would be a great suffer for her. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
47
Andrea’s jobs is doing personal errand for Miranda, who sometimes mistakenly and sometimes deliberately calls her Emily, after her predecessor who is now the senior assistant. Miranda, her boss, is described to be a selfish and mean, she never gives enough information or time to comply her demands. Despite her cruelty,
Miranda was famous for her godlike influence toward fashion industry. She is the genius from fashion industry who stated where the fashion should go.
Andrea is depicted as a nice, smart, suburban girl which describe as a good daddy little girl. She was born in a warm and caring Jewish family, who worship The
New Yorker and the hobbies are playing Scrabble for relaxation with her father. The scrabble is explaining the level of intellectual that Andrea and her family has. From the background, it is clearly understandable Andrea allergic toward fashion. It implies that a girl as smart as Andrea would consider fashion as something important. This also has been put into understanding why Andrea cannot understanding Miranda’s demands because she thought as something ridiculous such as Miranda’s demand toward her coffee, she insisted her coffee to be in certain temperature no matter how hard Andrea must struggle to run from Starbuck to her office and have to re-order it again when it has been cold.
Andrea is described to be humanized person rather than the other person in Runaway. Andrea is the first assistant who bought sandwich for Miranda’s driver and she also the only one who able to keep relationship with Eduardo, the guardian of Elias Clark, who have been described to someone unimportant. How human
Andrea is also described through her relationship with her family and friends.
Although it comes too rarely at the moment she works with Miranda, but Andrea seems to be the only one who has a social relationship. Through her eyes, Andrea PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
48 sees that everybody worships fashion as their first commitment and seems to be did not have social relationship beside with people from fashion industry itself.
Andrea, from fashion hatred, after few weeks has become one of fashion girls. In Runaway as the assistant of Miranda, Andrea has the access toward the fashion designer clothes freely. Unconsciously, Andrea has become a fashion girl; she started aware with all fashion brand and start to joining the socialite party.
Andrea has been changed into a fashionholic although she still cannot understand
Miranda.
The devotion of Andrea toward her job as Miranda assistant has been influence her relationship with people around her. Her relationship with her parents become cold since she did not have much time to visit or even calling her parents.
While, her friendship with Lily and her romance with her boyfriend were also in the same condition. Since become Miranda’s assistant, Andrea did not have enough time to spent with her friend and her boyfriend. Miranda has been asked to be Andrea’s first priority for 24 hours and 7 days a week. Andrea’s job has taken her social time also.
It is getting worse when Andrea has to cancelled her vacation with her boyfriends to celebrate their anniversary. Andrea has to replace Emily to go to Paris fo Annual Fashion Show that Miranda usually attend. It is a big event because The
Annual Fashion Show will determined the fashion line for the next following years.
Miranda, as fashion editor, is involved to decided what kind of fashion will be trend in the following years and she will decided through the event in Paris. While Emily,
Miranda’s first assistant has been prepared herself for attending the event a year before. But, the accident that happen toward Emily just a week before has been make PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
49
her canceled the trip. Andrea, as the second asisstant, eventually has to replace Emily
while acctually she has been planned her trip with her boyfriend. This has been put
Andrea and her boyfriend into a huge fight which finally ended with broke up their
relationship. Andrea thought her boyfriend did not understand her job, while her
boyfriend accused her has been changed.
In Paris, unconsciously Andrea thought about her life. When her parents
called her and told her to go home because Lily, her bestfriend has been found closed
to die because alcohol overdose. Lily has a problem with alcohol since she has a
problem with her study. This has been make Andrea thought about her life, between
career and friendship. At the end, Andrea had a fight with Miranda because Miranda
has been asked something that over her ability and refused her permition to go home
to see Lily’s condition. Andrea realize that Miranda did not care about her at all and
about her career. This experience has been enlighted Andrea that her career has been
put her away from people that she loved.
B. Representation of women nowadays through the Characters
The distinction between fiction and real, between imagination and real life is separated by thin lined. It hard to stated whether the fiction represent the reality or the reality is influence by some fiction. Baudrillad in theory of representation was noted that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of image from film, TV and advertising has led to a loss of the distinctions between the real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth (Barry, 1995; 87). It is also hard to stated wheter chick- lit characters represent woman in real life or woman in real life is influence by chick-lit.
Women in chick-lit depicted through three main characters, Jemima J, Bridget Jones PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
50 and Andre Sach. They have different life, different story, but as women they share same pictures which stated as the pictures of woman nowadays.
1. Working
All of characters in chick-lit are workers. Since the rise of American
Industrialization after Civil War, single women were pushed and pulled into labour force in ever greater number. One of the pull factor from the women point’s of view is gaining an indepence that comes with having one’s own, earned income (Cvrcek, 2007;
12). Chick-lit characters, although the historical background is around 90’s, but all of them have the same opinion about working or as a workers. Through working, they all have their own income, which means they have their economic independency. Working is a sign of economic independency.
Jemima J, although working as journalist of TipTops column, but it has been put her gained her independency economically from her parents, especially from her mother. While Bridget Jones and Andrea Sach also gained their independency economically from their parents. Economic independency also means that they can arrange their life without any interference from their parents.
According to Barthes, codes and sign are not universally given, but are historically and socially specific to particular interest which lie behind it. It was manufactured through the process of signification (Strinati, 2003;98). Working toward woman is forced by economic condition which finally force woman to enter the laboring force. Chick-lit woman is not potraying working woman as the result of economic condition, but far beyond it, chick-lit is portraying working woman as part of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
51 every woman’s life. Working is beyond earning money, but far than that, working is representation of their social life (Tilly&Scott, 1989; 223). Working as a sign is signified woman identity. Identity become very important because identity has become an identification of woman existance toward her social life, an recognition of her .
Jemima working as journalist. She see her job as a journalist as part of her existence as a woman. From what she said, “I’m a journalist, for God’s sake. Surely that’s a glamorous, exciting existence?”(Green, 1998; 5). Jemima see her job not only as her living, but beyond that, she see it as part of herself. A part of her self that can proud her and make her able to stand although she feels that she has weaknes because she has a large body.
While for Bridget, working has been put her higher than the other women who become a housewife. It has been represented through her relationship with one of her friend, Magda. Magda is a housewife which often feels neglected because her friends rare contact her. Magda also feels depressed because she thought taking care children as part of her duty as a housewife is dull and often depressed rather than working in the office like what Bridget has been done. “ Now, had better quickly ring Magda and make sure she doesn’t feel boring and realizes how opposite-of-glamourous job is” (Fielding,
1999;13). From the line, it is obvious that Bridget trying to make Magda comfortable by putting a job as boring as possible while she, herself, see her job as glamorous rather than as housewife.
Andrea as personal assistant of Miranda Priestly also see her job as part of her identity. She found herself to be proud because she can get the job that “million of girls PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
52 would die for”. Although Andre feels that she did not fit with the enviroment, but because having a job is very important as part of her identity, she insist having it.
“It was at this point that I began to want the job most desperately, in the way people yearn for things they consider unttainable. It might not be akin to getting into law school or having an essay published in a campus journal, but it was, in my starved-for-success mind, a real challenge- a challenge because I was an imposter, and not a very good one at that. I had known the minute I stepped on the Runaway floor that I didn’t belong. My clothes and hair were wrong for sure, but more glaringly out of place was my attitude. I didn’t know anything about fashion and I didn’t care. At all. And therefore, I had to have it. Besides, a million girls would die for this job.” (Weisberger,2006)
Working and woman according to Baudrillard is in the first step of the notion simulation (Barry, 1995; 87). The sign represent basic reality, the portray of working woman is depicting what happen in woman nowadays. Working in the life of woman nowadays has become something common. The history about woman being forced into the labour world has been changed, they are not forced anymore but willing to work for their own satisfaction or their existance.
2. Naive
Naive, according to Oxford Advanced Dictionary is described as showing lack of experience, wisdom or judgement or foolishly ready to believe what one is told.
Woman depicted in chick-lit always have the characterization as naive person. Jemima J as a woman is being naive through using some diets pills. Jemima Jones as women realizes that she has become the victim of the industry. Industry has been stereotype beautifull women, such as slim, long hair, fashionable and beautifull. Jemima as women who overweight realizes that because she is not slim, then she cannot included into PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
53 beautifull woman. Although she realizes that diet pills did not work, Jemima foolishly still using it.
“ And diets don’t work, how can they? It’s a multi million dollar industry, and if any of the diets actually worked the whole caboodle would go down to the toilet. If anyone knows how easy it is to fail it’s me. The Scarsdale, the High Fibre, the F-Plan, the six eggs a day diet, Slimfast, Weight Watcher, Herbalife. You name them, I’ve been the idiot that tried them. Athough some have, admittedly, been more succesful than others.” (Green, 1998)
Bridget Jones characterization is a woman which having trouble because of her own prejudice. Bridget is breaking her relationship with her boyfriend Mark Darcy because she is thinking that Mark having an afair with her friends. Without any explanation or proof, just based on what has been said by self-help books, she broke up with her boyfriend. Prejudice itself is a part lack of wisdom of judgement. Based on her characterization, Bridget itself is a naive person. She easily believe what has been said by her friends or books without further thinking about it. Even Bridget is thinking that self-help book is a kind of new religion which can be pop up for each problems that she has.
“But they are! They are a new form of religion. It’s almost as if human beings are like streams of water so when an obstacle is put in their way, they bubble up and surge around to find another path.” “Bubble up and surge around, Bridge?” “What I mean is if the organized religion collapses then people start trying to find another set of rules. And actually, as I was saying, if you look at self-help books they have a lot of ideas in common with other religion.” (Fielding, 1999; 76) Andrea Sach is also characterize to be a naive person because although she understand that she did not fit with fashion industry, she keep believe that she will be able to conquer fashion industry. She is insisting to change herself eventhough it means PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
54 she is denying herself. She also keep believing that being Miranda’s assitant would be a stepping stone for her to entering the jurnalism world like her dreams.
Woman is depicted to be a naive person which also signified as “not smart enough”. As depicted in chick-lit character, woman is seen to be a person that easily influenced by other. In the chick-lit character they are easily foolish by other person or by their condition.
3. Materialistic
Materialistic, according to Oxford Advanced Dictionary is described as a person or theory or society which have a tendency to be more interested in material possesion, physical comforts than in spriritual value. Woman in chick-lit depicted to be interested only in physical rather than spriritual. In chick-lit, materialistic depicted through their attention toward physical appearance. Being part of beautifull woman has become very important toward their existance as a woman.
The characterization of Jemima J obviously shows Jemima as materialistic.
Jemima depicted as woman who put physical appearance as top priority in life. She become obsessed with beautifull lady until she has a unique hobby to collect model’s picture.
“And before you think I’m some kind of closet lesbian, I’ve already told you one thing I would wish for if I rubbed a lamp and a gorgeous, bare-chested genie suddenly appeared. If I had one wish in all the world I wouldn’t wish to win the lottery. Nor would I wish for true love. No, if I had one wish I would wish to have a model’s figure, probably Cindy Crawford’s, and I would extend the wish into having and keeping a model’s figure, no matter what I eat.” (Green, 1998;3) PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
55
She feels that when she lose her weight she would be beautifull. “I could be
beautiful, she tells herself every morning. If I lost weight I would be beautiful.”(
Green, 1998; 18). Jemima believe when she is slim then her life would be totaly
different. And when she is slim, she turn out everthing that can remind her of her past.
She change her hair, her clothes even she change her nick name. It seems that being
slim is glorious which will be ruins by her history in the past. It clearly seen how
woman is obsessed to be beautifull until they are willing to do anything to make it
come true.
Bridget Jones, almost the same with Jemima is worrying about her
weight and her appearance. She counts every callories and fat that entering her body.
Different with Jemima which put her inabilities into her hobby collecting model’s
pictures, Bridget put her dissabilities into her addiction toward self-help books.
Andrea, who feels that she was not fashionable, also has been excluded from
the groups of beautifull women. At the very beginning, Andrea was not as fashionable
as her friends in her office.
“... Whatever intellectual or creative interest I wanted to pursue, regardless of how esoteric or unpopular it may have been, had some sort of outlet at Brown. High fashion was perhaps the single exception to this widely bragged-about fact. “ (Weisberger, 1998)
She has been working hard to be as fashionable as she can because she want to be accepted in her office. Working in fashion industry has been demanded Andrea to be fashionable although being fashionable for her is just like selling her soul.
“And so after three months, I surrendered. I just got too tired. Emotionally, physically, mentally, the daily wardrobe ordeal had sappped me of all energy. Until, that is, I relented on the three-month anniversary of my day. It was a day like any other as I stood with my yello “I love Providence” mug in one hand, the PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
56
other hand rifling through my Abrcrombie favorites. Why fight it? I asked myself. Simply wearing their clothes wouldn’t necessarily mean I was a total sellout, would it? And besides, the comments on my current wardrobe were becoming more frequent and vicious, and I begun to wonder if my job was at risk. “ (Weisberger, 2006).
In fashion industry, a brand is a must, it just like part of identity. If you are not wearing it, it means that you humiliated yourself. This has become the lesson that Andrea learn from the fashion industry.
“ I didn’t explain that wearing Nine West instead of Manolos or jeans they sold in Macy’s junior department but not anywhere on Barney’s eight floor of couture denim heaven had been my own attempt to show everyone that I wasn’t seduced by all thing Runaway. Instead, I just nodded noticing that he looked supremely uncomfortable having to tell met that I was humiliating myself every day. “ (Weisberger, 2006).
Woman is presented to be a materialistic. They pursue the eksternal value, they appearance it the public. The three characters are shown to give their best effort to be beautiful woman, to be accepted in circle of popular people. Until, they are willing to change everything they have. Change into a totally different person in order to be accepted.
Woman depicted to be materialistic in order to obtain what aimed by the industry. Woman is willing to do anything in order to be categorize as beautifull. While the term beautifull itself is determined by the industry. As noted by Baudrillard that image in media, such as TV, film and advertising has been led to a loss of the distinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. He also noted that a sign, which presented through the character of chick-lit, was a surface indication of an underlying depth of reality (Barry, 1995; 87). The illusion of beautifull PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
57 woman that depicted by the industry has been tranform into reallity until it is hard to separate between real and illusion.
This is what Barthes called as Myth. Myth is a system of communication, that is a message (Strinati, 2003; 99). The industry is telling the message of beautifull woman.
Beautifull woman is a signifier, while the signified is environment acceptance. The message that conveyed through the characters of chick-lit is when you are beautifull then you are guaranted to be accepted. That’s why they turn into materialistic in order to fullfil the message.
The message has been neutralized. As noted by Barthes : it transform the history into nature. Barthes argues that myth has to be understood by how it transform the socially ( the interest of burgeois class) and historically spesific (the structure of capitalist society) into something which is natural and inevitable (Strinati, 2003; 105).
The interest of industry through depicting the picture of beautifull woman is unconsciouly has been tranform into natural. The concept of beautifull that has been tranformed is no longer recognized as the concept that historically produces but it has been naturally received as inhereted from the ancestor.
C. Ideology depicted in Chick-lit
Ideology critique critically examines the ideas, feelings, beliefs, values, and representation embedded in, and promoted by, the artifact and practices of a culture or a group (Leitch, 2001). Ideology, according to Gramsci cannot be separated from popular culture, even he defined ideology as a site of particularly vigorious contestation, and the popular culture as a source of considerable resistance to hegemonic relation. Popular culture is seen in two side of coin, the first, it is seen as a rebellion from the hegemony. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
58
A new ideology which carried in order to be a sign of struggle. While the other see popular culture as the process of naturalization, a process to maintain hegemony through giving a new ideology which particularly following the hegemony (Hall, 1996).
Chick-lit itself as popular culture is also one of the medium to the process of naturalization. The process that has been held in order to sustain the following ideology.
Further question would be, what kind of ideology that going to maintained throught the characters of chick-lit?
Marx noted if a person’s class position is determined by his or her economic position in relation to the mode of production, then this individual will share an ideology representing the economic interest of the class they belong to
(Easthope&MacGowen, 1998). The characters depicted in the chick-lit are the character of working women. Working has been the signified the economic independency and also as identity. It can be conclude that chick-lit represented the working class women which described by Marx as the proletar. Marx define power based on the capital they own. As women and as working class, it can be said that they do not have any power.
Although they have capital through their mind and their sallary, but, their position are not in the position of the ruling class. As stated by Marx, the ruling class in every epoch are the rulling ideas then it means that they have been governed, not only through their capitals, but also through their ideas.
According to capitalism, human’s value is determined through the capital they own. The bourgeoise is sustaining their hegemony through winning the battle of ideas.
As the owner of capital which can be seen as the owner of industry, the bourgois is sustaining ideology as part of sustaining their industry. It can be said, according to PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
59
Althusser, that conciously industry become ideologycal aparatus. The bourgoise is sustaining the ideas through developing stereotype. This stereotype has been aimed to women because women has become the largest consument of the industry. Women have become the consument of industry. It can be seen from the depiction of woman in chick-lit characters. Woman is depicted as naive and materiliastic. Naive is seen that woman can be easily influenced by others. While materialistic is seen that woman is considering the physical appearance as their first priority. The idea of beautifull woman itself is depicted by the industry.
Chick-lit throught the character has become the unconscious tools from industry in order to be able to sustain the industry itself. The chick-lit readers are not aware that they are made just the way the chick-lit character. Chick-lit character has become the new idol, the new bestfriend of modern women without realizing that it has been build by the hegemony. As noted by Hall (1996) the media has been used as the medium of the ideologycal battle. Chick-lit as novel is the perfect media because through making the character as their idol or the model then unconciously they are sustaining the ideology. Through the characters of chick-lit, the ideology has been made to be spontaneous and as natural as reality. That’s why the chick-lit characters are chosen from the ordinary women because it will give personal attachment which put the relatioship of the ideology deeper and longer.
Althusser noted that the subject of ideology is concrete individual
(Easthope&MacGowen, 1998). Unconciously, through the characters of chick-lit, the aim of the ideology is women itself, women in the real life. The success of chick-lit actually is a prove that the ideological war has been won by the industry. Through depicting the women they want to be, they also won the war. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Chick-lit as new genre has been put into popular culture. Women in chick-lit depicted as single working women with their daily life. Working itself symbolize that women depicted as the second class because according to Marx, working can be classified as the proletar, the class that has been ruled by the bourgeois. From the discussion, it is clear that the ideology depicted in chick-lit is the ideology of capitalism.
The ideology of capitalism is aimed also to sustain the industry. Women have become the subject of industry. Not only as worker, but also as consumer. In order to sustain the ideology, the bourgeoise has been developed women stereotype. All the characters in chick-lit are depicted as women which trying their best to fullfil their requirement asked by the stereotype. Through doing that, women unconciously become the consument of industry.
As noted by Althusser that the subject of ideology is concrete subject then it can be conclude that the aim of chick-lit to sustain the capitalist ideology toward women nowadays. This can be seen through the character of chick-lit itself which depicted ordinary women in order to make a close relationship or uncounciously mirroring the fiction into reality. As the product of industry, chick-lit has been successfull because they can make hillarius succes with their selling number. It means that they also succes winning the ideological battle.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Term. New York: Holt, Rineheart and Winston, 1981.
Barnet, Sylvan., Breman, Morton and Burto, William. Literature for Composition: Essay, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Illionis : Scott, Foreman, 1988.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1995.
Bessnet, Susan. Studying British Cultures: An Introduction (2nd edition). London : Routledge, 2003.
Cooke, Maureen Lynch. “The Great Escape : Modern Women and th Chick Lit Genre”. Thesis. Boston : Boston University, 2006.
Cvreck, Tomas. Three Essays In Economic History. Dissertation. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University, 2007.
Durham, Menakshi Gigi and Keller, Douglas M. Media and Cultural Studies, KeyWorks. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Easthope, Antony and McGowan, Kate. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1998.
Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter. Cultural Theory The Key Concept. London : Routledge, 2005.
Ferris, S and Young, M. Chick lit : The New Woman’s Fiction. New York : Routledge, 2006.
Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones; The Edge of Reason. London : Picador, 2006.
Forster, E.M. Aspect of the Novel and Related Writing. London : Edward Arnold Publisher, 1987.
Glasburgh, Michele M. Chick-Lit : The New Face of Postfeminist Fiction?. Chape Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Green, Jane. Jemima J. London : Pinguin Books, 1998.
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York : W.W. Norton&Company, 2001.
Mabry, A.R. About a girl: Subjectivity and Sexuality in Contemporary ‘Chick’ Culture. New York : Routledge, 2005.
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Mazza, Cris and DeShell, Jeffrey. Who’s Laughing Now?A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre. New York City : Routledge, 2006.
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Rende, Natalie. Bridget Jones, Prince Charming, and Happily Ever Afters: Chick Lit as an Extension of the Fairy Tale in a Postfeminist Society. Chape Hill : University of North Caroline Press, 2008.
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Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, Second Edition. Oxon : Routledge, 2004.
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Kompas. “Kisah Keseharian Perempuan dari Langit”. April 17, 2004.
APPENDICES
Appendix 1 : Summary of Jane Green’s Jemima J
Jemima J is a story about single working woman with problem in her weight. Jemima
Jones is a journalist which working as writer of Tips Top Column in Kilburn Herald.
She is overweight, it is about one hundred pounds overweight. Her problem with her weight has become the major problem in her life. She feels that she has been neglected by her mother just because she is not as beautifull as her mother want her to be. She also feels that she also being neglected by her environment, just because she was not as thin as them. Treated like a maid by her thin and social-climbing roommates, and lorded over by the beautiful Geraldine (less talented but better paid) at the Kilburn Herald,
Jemima finds that her only consolation is food. Add to this her passion for her charming, sexy, and unobtainable colleague Ben, and Jemima knows her life is in need of a serious change. When she meets Brad, an eligible California hunk, over the internet, she has the perfect opportunity to reinvent herself as JJ, the slim, beautiful, gym-obsessed glamour girl. But when her long distance Romeo demand that they meet, she must conquer her food addiction to become the bone-thin model of her e-mails.
Since that, Jemima has been put her best effort to decrease her weight. After three months, she succeded. She has been change from the fat Jemima into a slim-thin JJ.
With the help of Geraldine (they now become a best-friend), JJ turn her life from the ugly duckling into a swan. JJ realize that the environment also change. From the neglected girl, now she become the centre of attention. With full of confident, JJ flew to
California. She find a perfect life, a handsome and eligible hunk who become her boyfriend and holiday style of living in California. The perfect life changed when she found out that Brad actually has a relationship with his secretary. JJ found that Brad
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62 prefer overweight girl rather than the beautifull-slim girl. It turn JJ life into a nightmare.
JJ has been canceled her ticket back to London because she thought that she will getting married with Brad and life forever in California. But, now JJ has been broke up with
Brad and she did not have money to buy ticket back home. Voluntarily, JJ met with
Ben, her collegue in Kilburn Heral who has become a TV reporter. Ben is falling in love with JJ but he has to back to London. JJ did not have any courage to tell Ben that she cannot afford a ticket back to London. With the help of Geraldine, Ben find out that JJ has been broke up with her boyfriend and now JJ is trapped in California. At the end,
Ben send JJ a ticket back to London and JJ realize that physical appearance is not important although she did not want back to be an overweight girl again like Jemima.
Appendix 2 : Summary of Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada
The story tells the profesional adventure of Andrea Sachs. Andrea is the simple and naive girls who just graduated from Brown University with her major in journalism. Her biggest dream is to become a journalist. Andrea is offered to become Miranda Priestly second asistant. During her life, Andrea never consider herself as a fashionable girl.
Entering the fashion industry, Andrea feels that she has been lost. Since the very beginning she realized that she did not belong to fashion industry. But, since it is the first job that offered to her and she was promised that it will be a stepping ladder to her dream as journalist, Andrea is willing to receive the job. Andrea never realize that her boss, Miranda Priestly, editor in chief of Runaway Fashion Magazine is the ruthless and merciless executive but also the most powerfull woman in fashion industry making the experience a living hell for the girl. The environment in the place will be cold and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
63 extremely critical with the physical appearance. Andrea will have to change her simple and plain style, for a more trendy and elegant one. In order to gain the acceptance of her ruthless boss and colleagues, specially Emily, Miranda’s first asistant who consider her job as the most important one. After three months, Andrea realizes that she have to change to keep her job. With the help of Nigel, the magazine’s art directore, Andrea changes her total appearance. Nevertheless, the job becomes extremely demanding because of Miranda’s tough work rhythm and nearly impossible task. It has been demanding Andrea’s social time and leaving her without private life with her family, boyfriend and best friend. The old Andrea has gone, now more peroccupied about her image and her future in the magazine. Andrea’s dilema come when she has to replace
Emily for the annual fashion show in Paris. She is already planned a holiday with her boyfriend, Nate, to celebrate their anniversary. Andrea choose her job rather than her boyfriend. Finally, they broke up. While in Paris, her parents called her, telling her that
Lilian, her bestfriend has been come because of overdose. Andrea asked Miranda permittion to go home for few day just to check Lily condition. Miranda refused her permittion, instead Miranda gave her another impossible task. Andrea realize that
Miranda did not care about her at all, including her future dream to be a journalist.
Andrea decided to quit from her job in the middle of the fashion show. This has been put Miranda into her biggest anger because she feel that Andrea has been embarrased her in front of many people from fashion industry. At the end, Andrea can reconcile her relationship with her family and her bestfriend, achieve her dream to be a journalist although she has been black listed from the fashion industry by Miranda.
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Appendix 3 : Summary of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones; The Edge of Reason
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is a sequel of Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen
Fielding. It begin with Bridget Jones’s adventures after she begins to suspect that her boyfriend, Mark Darcy, is falling for a rich young solicitor who works in the same firm as him. The girl named Rebecca. Rebecca actually is Bridget old enemy. Mark Darcy has been convinced Bridget that he and Rebecca did not have any relationship, but
Bridget did not believed it. Bridget prefer believe what her self-help books telling her rather than what has been said by her boyfriend. They broke up when Bridget see Mark
Darcy having dinner with Rebecca. Bridget did not want to take any reason from Mark
Darcy. The life of Bridget has been changed when she get the opportunity to interview
Colin Firth, an actor who become Mark Darcy in the film Pride and Prejudice. Instead of making an article, Bridget only write the interview. She has been failed to make the interview article. This has been put Bridget into big trouble, she has been fired from her job. To heal her heart, she and her girlfriend take a vacation to Thailand. But, the vacation turn into a nightmare when she was accused to be drug smugler and get a life time punishment. No one can help her back to London, including the British embassy in
Thailand. Suddenly, Bridget released from prison. She thought she has been released because she asked the help of British embassy. But, when she arrived in London, her best friend told her that it was Mark Darcy who give his best effort to release Bridget from jail. Bridget feels that she owed an apology to Mark Darcy. It gives an opportunity to Bridget to fixed her relationship with Mark Darcy. At the end, Bridget back to Mark
Darcy and promise to him to trust Mark Darcy instead of her self-help books