CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
of the Study
It is obviously understood that in our lives,
family is so worthy.
Family, as a child’s first environment, sets the pattern for her/his attitudes
toward people, things and life in general. As Teagarden (1946),
has pointed out that “all manners of
attitude deviations can be and often are, accounted for by the subtleties of family relationships”. Therefore, the
writer
concludes harmonious family
relationship depends on the attitudes settled between them.
Freud as cited by Hurlock (1956: 499) states
that “there have been marked
changes in attitudes toward children”. Freud contents that too much “parental tenderness” accelerates sexual maturity,
“spoils” the child and makes him unable
to be satisfied with a smaller amount of love in later phase of life. This attitude toward too much love and interest in and affection
for the child was echoed by
one of American Psychologists, J.B. Watson (1928: 499). He was the one who sounded the loudest warnings
to parents to beware of too much mother love because of the harmful effects on the personality development of the child.
There are many kinds of parental attitudes established by researchers, and the most commonplace
are permissiveness, overprotectiveness, submissive, rejection, domination, acceptance, and submission to a child (Hurlock: 1956). Those
parental attitudes influence
children’s emotion. According to Warga (1983: 219), there are five basic emotions, i.e. fear, love, anger, sorrow,
and joy. In line with Warga, Ekman and Friesen (1971: 5) suggest that “there are six basic biologically programmed emotions:
happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust”. To be more specific, Hurlock (1956:
226) in his book Child
Development divides
children’s emotion into seven, i.e. fear, anger, worry, jealousy, joy, affection and curiosity.
As cited from Serayawati’s book, Reading Poetry (2000:
1), Murdoch defines literature as “a sort of disciplined technique
for arousing certain
emotions”. The writer concludes that by reading any kind of literary
works, the reader will also
learn about the emotion that comes up through its characters. Furthermore, Rees defines literature into two, broad (general) and narrow (limited) sense. The former
means anything written,
e.g.
newspapers,
travel
brochures, literature about washing machines/computers, advertisements, textbooks, etc. The later
means writing expressing a writer’s
feelings/emotions, thoughts,
ideas, attitudes towards life and the world, and having
permanent values. The examples are poetry, dramas, prose fictions,
essays, and auto/biographies. Short story itself is a kind of prose fictions.
Like any other prose fictions, there are many elements of short story,
i.e. setting, plot, characters, point of view,
and theme. One of them is character. As cited from an article Short Story
Elements
in
the
Internet
online
on
http://
hnsbstaff. ednet. ns.ca/ engramja/elements.html, there are two meanings for the
word character. First, it means the person in a work of fiction,
and the second, the
characteristics of a person. Characters themselves can simply mean people told in
a story created through an author’s imagination. According
to Eller (1963:5) as quoted by Zaedasih
(2000: 2), “through
understanding characters, readers become more tolerant and are able to satisfy curiosity
about others”. Here, understanding
the characters aimed to learn more about
children’s emotion as reflected by the character of
daughter in the story.
Mother and daughter
are the main characters told in this story. Both of them have
different kinds of emotional
characteristics. Mother, as one who cares for the
daughter much, seems to be a perfect
mother. Her full attention
and care are not
only shown by her gestures
but also by her powerful sentence “I love you”, said in
every condition that they both had, even when they were in conflict. Malek in his
article Family Conflict accessed on http:// v4.crinfo. org/
CKEssays/ ckfamilyconflict. jsp?nid=2207, states that “no matter how loving a family is, all
families go through conflict”. As happens to both of the characters, the conflict is about
the different point of view between the mother and the daughter in the age of dating and the dating partner
itself.
The mother wants her daughter not to have a
date before sixteen.
“You could have been killed!
And who is this Joe? You know you’re not allowed to date until you’re sixteen,
and that’s still four months away! You could have been killed” (p.3)
The mother also refuses when her daughter proposes
her dating partner, Joe, to be her future husband.
“Honey, can’t we talk about this? You know we don’t entirely trust Joe; he’s been in trouble with the law…” (p.4)
As the daughter does not get what she wants, it makes her to protest against her
mother,
“No, no boys, Mother.
For your information, I’m practically the only girl in
the whole universe that doesn’t
have a steady boyfriend. It’s all because
of your stupid rules, not letting me date until I was sixteen and having a stupid curfew and being forced to tell you
exactly where I’m going to be at any given moment.”
“AAAAAAH! Fine, fine! Probably around midnight! Geez, I’ve gotta be the only girl on the planet who still has
a curfew!”(p.4)
and even does something rude to her.
“I hate
you.” Door slams. (p.4)
Both of the examples above show the daughter’s emotion, which are reflected in her behavior. The daughter’s climax behavior is when finally
she prefers to choose
Joe and decides to flee from home. From the condition
above, it can be
inferred that the daughter is a rebellious
person toward her mother. She likes to be against what her mother wants and says.
“I’m getting
the hell out of here and Dad can’t stop me!”
“We’re not trying to, we just want to know where
you’ll be so we can call
you.”
“So you can keep tabs on me? NO THANKS! You’re done calling the shots, Mom. Joe’s taking me out of this stupid town and I’ll be the one deciding if I call or not.” (p.4)
Despite all of the conflicts told in previous, in fact, the writer sees that the tie relationship between the mother and her daughter positively occurs. It is showed
when the daughter has lost her baby. She wants her mother to come along.
“Mom, could you
come?” “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“Mom, I
need you. I lost the baby.” (p.4)
Based on the story above, in this study, the writer feels interested in analyzing
daughter’s emotion, as being a rebellious person against mother also happens to us sometimes. By using Freudian psychoanalysis theory,
the writer is expected to find the daughter’s id, ego, and superego reflected in her behavior
towards her mother, so that the characteristics of the daughter’s
emotion in this short story can be caught easily.
Hence, the writer uses a short
story entitled Conversations with my Daughter as the object of the study, which tells the core of human’s experience, especially the mother’s
experience in treating
children by understanding their emotion. It is worth
discussing for anyone
who wants to be involved more in their family
relationship, especially for a mother and a daughter,
based on children’s emotion as well.
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