ABSTRACT
Literature as a medium of reading involves many kinds of writing which expresses and communicates thoughts, feeling and attitude toward life. We can enlarge our knowledge by reading a literary work in Daisy Miller’s novella by Henry James as a modern literary fiction. This final project is aimed at analyzing a hedonistic lifestyle existing in this novella and how to know the implementation of hedonistic lifestyle in the present generation.
The object of this study is Henry James’s Daisy Miller. The data of the study are in the form of words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. They were collected by doing the following steps: reading the novella carefully for many times, identifying the data related to the problem, inventorising the data, classifying the data, selecting the data and at last reporting the data into appendixes. There were several techniques to analyze the data. They were exposing, explaining, interpreting, comparing and last one was concluding. The interpretation and the explanation are done from the point of view of sociological theory.
Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that there were two characteristics of hedonism. They were normative and motivational hedonism. The characteristics of normative hedonism were glamorous lifestyle, luxurious lifestyle, consumerism, having affair, free sex, and having courier expressed by the American travelers. Also, the characteristics of motivational hedonism belong to ‘desire for pleasure’ theory, ‘egocentric for pleasure’ theory, and ‘past enjoyment values’ theory. Meanwhile, hedonistic lifestyle is also practiced in the present generation. Indonesian celebrities are the example of hedonic people.
On the basis of the result of the study, there were conclusions and suggestions. Miller’s family as the newly rich people from America made a social phenomenon like hedonism during the Victorian period in Europe. Therefore, hedonism tends not to be a good lifestyle so that we should not believe that pleasure as the main aim of our life and do not follow this lifestyle.
