The Study of Gender Role Socialization Between The Major Female Characters in Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie

According to Feminism Theory the society has been dominated by patriarchal ideology, an ideology which positioned men as the superior group and women as the subordinate group. Women in society mostly have been positioned as inferior almost in every institutions such as social, economic, law, education, health, and religion. Due to literature is a product of the society, feminists believe that a literary work has a possibility in adopting patriarchal ideology and provides important proves on the process of patriarchal ideology socialization within the society. The Glass Menagerie as one canon in literary work, written by Tennessee Williams during 1940-1941, has a possibility to carry the idea of gender concept as one product of patriarchal ideology. There is a tendency that the author has adopted gender values and socialized its to the society by using the description of gender role socialization process between the female characters in his work. This literary work has been chosen since this study aims to find out and analyze the possibility of gender role socialization process within a mother-daughter relationship as been described in this work. This study has used gender analysis, a gender perception that emphasized that motherhood can be the primary institution in patriarchal society in socializing patriarchal ideology and its values in form of gender roles, which caused the differentiation of societal roles between men and women. Feminism approach here is used since this approach has focused on the gender analysis on women in literary study. As a result, it is proved that there is a description of gender role socialization within mother-daughter relationship, that Amanda has been socialized certain gender roles explicitly to Laura, by using specific ways in socializing those gender roles