THREE CHARACTERS REPRESENTED MATERIALISM IN JANE AUSTEN’S MANSFIELD PARK

Abstract

Mansfield Park is a novel written by Jane Austen, an English author in 1814. In her novel, Jane Austen wants to show the life of materialistic person. Maria, Miss Crawford, and Mrs. Norris are materialistic characters in Jane Austen’s novel. Maria and Miss Crawford are girls who really want to get rich men to be their husbands. Meanwhile, Mrs. Norris is a stingy woman who always wants to keep her wealth because she thinks that money makes her happy. Those characters have materialism idea because of their society influence. During the time, they are being greedy because they sacrifice everything they love to get money. In the end, the three characters face many obstacles and their life becomes complicated. The discussion aims to analyze the society around the materialistic characters and the materilistic characters. Those goals are accomplished by using cultural materialism. It is used to analyze materialism issue in the novel. Furthermore, cultural materialism theory by Raymond William is used to analyze the causes of characters being materialistic related to the culture. The inductive method is applied to analyze the specific matter in the discussion to obtain general conclusion. Thelibrary research is used to collect data and information which are relevant to the topic discussion. It concerns with material and information which are taken from many books, dictionaries, and references to support the analysis. The data from internet also support to complete the data to make the analysis accurate.