Pearl S. Buck’s Pavilion of Women: A Mimetic Approach

ABSTRACT

The title of this thesis is A Woman’s Sacrifice for Happiness as Reflected in Pearl S. Buck’s Pavilion of Women: A Mimetic Approach. The writer took the novel Pavilion of Women as the object of her study. The purpose of this analysis was to find out the woman’s sacrifice describing by Madame Wu’s sacrifice for happiness for her family and to describe the didactic aspect of the novel. The writer also analyzed each of the elements of the novel including theme, plot, setting, characters, and point of view.

           The study belonged to a descriptive qualitative analysis. The implementation of the descriptive qualitative method was that the data were in the form of words, phrase, and sentences taken from the novel. The data were analyzed in descriptive qualitative ways. In collecting the data the writer used library and literary studies. They are analyzed under the theory of character and characterization by Abrams (in Subhan, 2003) and mimetic approach.

The findings pf the study show that the themes of Pavilion of Women are about woman’s sacrifice, emancipation, and devotion. The plot of the story is presentec chronologically. The story took place in China at the time when there was still discrimination between woman and men. Pearl S. Buck used the third person omniscient point of view to tell the story. The writer found out that her family consisted of the sacrifices for her husband, for her sons (Liangmo, Tsemo, ad Fengmo), and also for her household. Pearl S. Buck also conveys some didactic aspects to enrich our life through her novel Pavilion of Women. The didactic aspects that the writer found in this novel was the struggle of the main character, Madame Wu by breaking down the old fashioned value that woman’s position is less important than that of man’s.