Rahmawati 1
The Complicated Relationships of the Characters in
Only a Girl:
A Post-colonialism Criticism
THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan
Nanda Putri Rahmawati 112010007
ENGLISH TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE SATYA WACANA CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
Rahmawati 3
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
This thesis contains no such material as has been submitted for examination in any course or accepted for the fulfillment of any degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and my belief, this contains no material previously published or written by any other person except where due reference is made in the text.
Copyright@ 2014. Nanda Putri Rahmawati and Danielle Donelson-Sims, M.A.
All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced by any means without the permission of at least one of the copyright owners or the English Department, Faculty of Language and Literature, Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga.
Nanda Putri Rahmawati:
Rahmawati 5
The Complicated Relationships of the Characters in Only a Girl:
A Post-colonialism Criticism
Nanda Putri Rahmawati
“….POSTCOLONIALISM, invites you through a slightly larger door into the next
stage of history, after which you emerge, fully erect, into the brightly lit and noisy
HYBRID STATE.”
(Frantz Fanon)
Abstract
This paper analyzes Only a Girl, written by Lian Gouw, and draws on Post-colonial theory through the lens of one of the most important Post-Post-colonial thinkers, Homi K. Bhabha. Post-colonial criticism examines the relationship
between the subject and the marginalized. Using Homi K. Bhabha‘s works about
mimicry and ambivalence, this paper is going to explore how the Chinese characters survive in Indonesia at that time. Homi K. Bhabha, in his theory of mimicry, examines how the marginalized mimic the subject. In Only a Girl, the Chinese family, as the inferior, tries to adopt the Dutch tongue and culture, which the marginalized consider as the superior ones. But on the other side, there is also ambivalence, or a love-hate feeling that the Chinese characters experience. Applying the theory to the novel will make readers think not only about mimicry and ambivalence as it exists in the novel, but also how and why those actions happened in the past and perhaps continue to happen.
