Racism in Anne Frank’s The Diary of A Young Girl: An Appraisal Analysis

Abstract

Writing a diary has been a common activity in society. Someone who writes a diary may try to express her ideas and feelings about what has already happened, and has given a change of thoughts and life. Appraisal analysis is performed in this thesis. The purpose of using Appraisal is to find out the relationship between the writer and reader‟s evaluation. The selected data consists of 4 diary dates which are collected from Anne Frank‟s The Diary of a Young Girl. It is sampled on racism that is Saturday, 20 August 1942, Friday,3 July 1942, Sunday, 5 July 1942, Friday, 9 October 1942. The data consist of qualitative data and are attested the implication of racial discrimination. Later, it focuses on examining evaluation in the language used by Frank. Under the framework of Appraisal, the racist opinions from the diary text are classified and analyzed with the appraisal features: Attitude, Engagement, Graduation. In term of Attitude, racist opinion performs with judgemental statements. Through the judgements, attitudinal value in Frank‟s diary grows the immanent critics that are expressed by emotion. Engagement is founded to explore an authoritative voice from the writer. The diary is exceedingly to be too authoritative in the side of Jews. Besides, Frank uses many contradictions as the alternative proposition in order to close the dialogic view. The domain of Graduation considers the patern of Attitude and Engagement. The Graduation source tends to intensify the high graded racial statements which heighten the individual voice.