Students' textual and socio-cultural responses toward Shaw's Pygmalion

People are interested to enjoy literary works because beside involving feelings, spirit, belief, and imagination, the readers may know another reality beneath the fact. The interesting this that every reader may have different interpretations toward them. This is the main concern of reader response approach (Davis and Womack, 2002) in analyzing a literary work. Hence, the writer chose to analyze the reader responses toward Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, because the drama is still related into daily life in 20th century. There were 19 participants in this study who answered four questions related to textual (plot, character and setting) and socio-cultural responses toward the drama. Thus, the problems are formulated as : “How do readers respond to the questions regarding the main element of Pygmalion Play?; How do readers respond to the question regarding the contextualization of Pygmalion Play into Indonesia’s socio-cultural situations?”. In analyzing the content of the reader response, the writer applies the principle of content analysis (Marshall and Rossman, 1989) which seeks the objective, systematic, and qualitative description of the manifest content of communication. The study shows that there are varieties of responses to textual understanding toward Pygmalion in terms of plot, character and setting. In analyzing the climax of the drama, most participants can identify that the climax was when the Eliza knew that she became the bet between Dr. Higgins and Colonel Pickering. However, some of respondents was confused of determining the climax because they were difficult to differentiate between climax, which also meant the turning point in a story and the rising action. When the participants were invited to respond to the character of Mr. Higgins, there were a lot of responses about the negative traits rather than the positive traits. In answering the question related to the setting, they predominantly gave responses straight to the point but some of the respondents still missed other aspects of setting. In term of responding to the social aspect of the drama, most participants had similar responses that people tend to look down others from ‘weak’ social status and even gender since it was also common to have that point in Indonesia’s culture. From the responses, the writer concludes that the responses commonly produce the same readings because the respondents were culturally and socially live in Indonesia which also give impact to the responses given. However, there are also some different reading but some of them sometimes were not valid and justifiable enough. The study has opened a new horizon of research in literature conducted by students of the English education department of Widya Mandala Catholic University. It encourages more researchers to explore more literary words using the reader response approach