“THE THREE WOMEN” IN SYAIR SULTAN ABDUL MULUK

This article discusses on the characters of three women, Siti Rahmah, Siti Rafeah dan Siti Rahah as potrayed in Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk, Typically, women would carry the roles as daughters, wives and mothers and involved in managing the domestic chores, besides being important supporters to their husbands. In the 19th century, Raja Ali Haji discussed these typical representations of women in his Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk. The three characters and behaviours of each woman resembled were found to be distinctive. The author had given a detail peaceful life of a polygamous marriage between these three women without jealousy and grudges among them. Therefore, this study will be focusing on Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk by Raja Ali Haji, and extends its focus to examine the ways in which how the text had indicated the skettches of female characters through the perspective of a male author. The methodology for this study would be purely text based analysis with a thorough literature search as its main platform. Showalter feminist literary criticism will be used as a reference in analyzing the three women character in Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk. The study has found that the portrayal of the three women characters in this text is perceived to be excessive and awkward from a woman’s point of view. Through this text, it is evident that the three women characters have different identities that are deemed ideal especially when these idealistic characters would fit in with the writer’s creative intentions. The love between the three women was rather disconcerting from a woman’s point of view.