Pustaka Ilmiah Universitas Padjadjaran

Abstrak

Representasi Subjektivitas Perempuan dalam Enam Cerita Pendek Bahasa Inggris

In the Western normative thinking of subjectivity as reflected in the Cartesian idea of mind and body, subjectivity lies primarily in the mind while the body is regarded to be a mere container. Looking at the six short stories of three women writers (Enough Rope, Hair Jewellery, The Blush) and three men writers (Pinkland, Nude on the Moon, A Rose for Emily), only two of which are delineated in this article, we find that subjectivity as represented by the women/”women” characters are not determined merely by the mind. The short stories show that the body plays a significant role in the construction of the subjectivity of the women characters’ subjectivity. We also find that in all novels, all women characters’ subjectivity is always in transformation as signified by the travellling, the clothing, the ever-changing identities and the resistance to the [hetero]normative construction imposed on them. In comparing the idea of women’s subjectivity as reflected in the short stories by the women and men writers, we find that basically there is no “inherent” tendency in picturing women, or those identitified as women as stereotypes in the six short stories that we analysed,. Rather, we find that some men writers are actually capable of writing women in feminist perspective.