Female Representation in Legenda Tangkuban Perahu: A

Transitivity Analysis

Jeanyfer Tanusy

, Eva Tuckyta Sari Sujatna

, Susi Yuliawati

and Trisnowati Tanto

Fakultas Ilmu Budaya, Universitas Padjajaran, Jl. Raya Bandung Sumedang KM 21, Bandung, Indonesia

Fakultas Bahasa dan Budaya, Universitas Kristen Maranatha, Bandung, Indonesia

Keywords: Transitivity, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Indonesian Folktale, Representation, Gender, Corpus

Linguistics.

Abstract: Legends and folktales are inherent in every culture as it is one of the ways to impart wisdom and the ways of

life to the younger generation. One of the issues that seem to be present in these stories is gender

representation. This paper attempts to examine the representation of female in a popular legend from West

Java, Legenda Tangkuban Perahu. This study applies the mixed method approach that combines the

quantitative and qualitative approach to analyze the processes and the participant roles connected to the

portrayal of the female character in the story using the Transitivity System and Participant Roles theories. The

finding suggests that despite having been assigned to active participant roles, the main female character is still

represented as passive in the story and thus establishes the view of a more traditional gender role in the society,

a finding which is quite different from a previous study done on female characters archetype in Indonesian

folklores. The result of this present study is believed to be the ground for developing the younger generation’s

understanding and establishment of our traditional culture and helps to build the sustainable development

goals in terms of gender and intergenerational issues.

1 INTRODUCTION

Folklores have been around for centuries and are

considered an innate part of every culture. Defined as

“customs, superstitions and sayings of the people”

(Thomas, 1846, in Gilbas, 2018, p. 57), folklores hold

cultural values and beliefs of a certain culture, making

them unique to the cultures where they belong.

Legends and myths are two genres of folklores that

Gilbas (2018) considers as “effective vehicles in

explaining and/or validating the nature of an

individual in relation to his ethnic group” (p. 57) since

they capture and illustrate the traditions of the people

in a certain place at a certain time.

There are numerous legends and myths in

Indonesia, being a country which is culturally diverse.

Each culture has its own legends and tales of old,

some are popular, and some are known only to the

people in the particular culture. One of the most well-

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known legends in Indonesia comes from the Province

of West Java; it tells the lore of creation of Mount

Tangkuban Perahu in the northern part of Bandung,

the provincial capital City of West Java. The legend

revolves around a young man named Sangkuriang,

who accidentally created the mount when he, out of

anger, kicked the boat he was making until it flew

away and fell upside down in the northern part of

Bandung. As Sangkuriang was a man of magic, the

boat then transformed into a mount; hence the name

“Tangkuban Perahu” (in English, literally, “upside-

down boat”). This legend has been very popular and

has been adapted into a live-action television series in

the early 1990s (Supriadi, 2012).

Despite its popularity, the legend of Mount

Tangkuban Perahu does not seem to be an interesting

source of data for many literature and linguistics

researchers as is shown by the sparse number of

academic articles written about it. From the literature

Tanusy, J., Sujatna, E., Yuliawati, S. and Tanto, T.

Female Representation in Legenda Tangkuban Perahu: A Transitivity Analysis.

DOI: 10.5220/0010742400003112

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Emerging Issues in Humanity Studies and Social Sciences (ICE-HUMS 2021), pages 5-9

ISBN: 978-989-758-604-0

perspective, the research subject is quite limited to

analyzing the moral value of the story (Supriadi,

2012; Sofa, 2020), while some analyses in the

linguistic perspective include the analysis of affixes

(Pauzan, 2016) and lexical error in translation (Andre

& Jurianto, 2015). When the characters are discussed,

Sangkuriang—the main male character—seemed to

be the focus of attention. There are even articles about

him from the perspective of visual communications

(e.g., Iskandar & Nurusholih, 2019; Woelandhary,

2019).

On the other hand, there is rarely any mention of

the main female character, Dayang Sumbi, in any

published scholarly articles in spite of her importance

in driving the plot of the story. It is believed that

without this character, most of the events in the story

would not have unfolded at all. This being said,

nonetheless, a study by Rosliana (2013) has

attempted to examine the archetype of the main

female characters in three Indonesian folklores,

namely Legenda Tangkuban Perahu, Nawang Wulan,

and Bawang Merah dan Bawang Putih. The research

leans towards the psychological approach of literary

interpretation, basing the portrayal of the female

characters on Jung’s five classifications of female

archetypes in a narrative. The result of this study

shows that compared to the female characters in

Western folklores, the three female characters

analyzed here (i.e., Dayang Sumbi, Nawang Wulan

and Bawang Putih) are shown to have more agency

and are more assertive.

In this present study, our aim is to examine

whether one of the female characters used in

Rosliana’s study is truly portrayed as more assertive

and active by focusing only on its representation in its

original culture without comparing it with different

cultures as we believe that it may have a different

result.

Hall (1997) suggests that representation is not

absolute; it depends on the way the producer of the

text creates meaning for them through language. This

creation of meaning can be observed through the

participant’s involvement with experiences around

them (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). There are two

types of experience; the ‘outer’ and ‘inner’. Outer

experiences include processes like: (1) material

process, the process of physically doing something;

(2) mental process, which involves the participant’s

feeling, thought, and perception; (3) behavioral

process, the combination between material and

mental processes; and (4) verbal process, which

involves the use of language to symbolically signing.

On the other hand, inner experience is realized

through the existential process, which simply states

the (non-)existence of something, and the relational

process—the process of assigning a quality and/or

identity to the participant(s).

Aside from observing the processes, Toolan

(1998) mentions that the role of the participant(s) in

the clauses can also reveal how they are represented

in a text; especially the participants in the material

processes. For this purpose, he creates a further

classification of the doer and done-to participants

(termed ‘actor’ and ‘goal’ in Halliday’s (1990)

categorization). A human actor can be classified into

an ‘agent’—a human participant who intentionally

does an action—and a ‘medium-initiator’ (medium-

i), a human participant who initiate the process

volitionally. Meanwhile, a human ‘goal’ may be the

‘recipient’ of an action or the ‘medium-target’

(medium-t), the human target of the process. By

nature, the agent is considered the most powerful in

the human participant category, and the medium-t is

the least powerful.

2 METHODS

In order to obtain the most comprehensive

representation of the female character, this research

uses the mixed method research design, a method

combining into a single study the techniques and

methods of both qualitative and quantitative research

(Creswell, 2014). This type of methodology has been

widely used nowadays in linguistics research—

especially in the field of Corpus Linguistics. Corpus

linguistics is usually associated with the quantitative

analysis of a large number of data, and it generally

uses a computer software as a tool for data collection

(Biber & Repen, 2015; Yuliawati, 2018). In this

research, the quantitative analysis has the role of

providing more comprehensive and accurate data

before they are interpreted further using other

linguistic tools, which is the qualitative analysis part

of the research. This method of analysis is in

accordance to McEnery and Hardie’s (2012) opinion

about the nature of corpus-based approach which sees

the corpus as a source of empirical data to give model

of language through the application of other

linguistics theory.

The source of data, the Legend of Tangkuban

Perahu story, is taken from a public domain on the

internet, with the size of a total of 993 token—the

total words in a corpus (Cheng, 2012). This corpus is

considered a specialized corpus (Cheng, 2012) as it is

only aimed to represent a particular kind of language

and thus is homogeneous and smaller in size. The

collection of data uses the help of the corpus software

ICE-HUMS 2021 - International Conference on Emerging Issues in Humanity Studies and Social Sciences

AntConc, with which the data is sorted through the

module of concord in two ways: (1) by the span of

five words to the left and right of the node, i.e., the

search word, and (2) by clause boundaries. The

concordance analysis helps to examine the word(s) in

question in its own textual environment and context

of sentence (Sinclair, 1991).

After the data are collected using the software,

they are then categorized into the different processes

types based on the Transitivity System in Systemic

Functional Linguistics. This process of categorization

uses the descriptive qualitative approach, one of

which characteristics is the interpretation of data by

applying the researcher’s own perceptions and

conceptual orientation regarding the data (Miles &

Huberman, 1994). Having been assigned to its

respective process types in the initial step of data

identification, the participants of the clauses are

categorized into their roles in Toolan’s participant

role categorization ranked by the degree of active

before being interpreted qualitatively to find the

representation of the main female character of this

story.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

There are a total of 176 clauses in the text.

Nevertheless, only clauses relating to Dayang Sumbi

are analyzed in this research. The concordance

analysis using several nodes as the main search word

(“Dayang Sumbi”, “ia”, “nya”, “dia”) finds 65

clauses in which Dayang Sumbi is the participant,

both as the subject and object of the clauses. This

number is quite insignificant compared to the total

number of clauses in the story (only 36.93% of the

whole text). The majority of the clauses in the text

focuses on the main male character, Sangkuriang, and

other minor characters, for instance, Dayang Sumbi’s

father the king. At a glance, the imbalance seems to

bear no weight; especially because Sangkuriang is

considered the main hero of the story and thus

warrants him a more thorough description. However,

as has been mentioned before, Dayang Sumbi’s role

as the propeller of the story plot is very crucial in the

story. Hence, by only assigning a small proportion of

the text to portray her, it shows that Dayang Sumbi is

not seen as an important character in the story. This

finding is not out of the ordinary; on the contrary, it

is in accordance to previous studies which have

shown that female characters are often marginalized

and given inadequate representation in literature (e.g.,

Barry, 1995; Lippa, 2002, among others).

Table 1: Process types and occurrences.

Process T

e Number of Occurrences

Material 31

Mental:

- Affective

- Cognitive

- Perceptive

Behavioral 2

Verbal 13

Existential 1

Relational:

- Attributive

- Identifying

From the classifications of the 65 clauses into

their process types as can be seen from Table 1 above,

we can see that the material process is the most

dominant process of all with the percentage of

occurrence of 47.69%. Material process is the process

that is concerned with physical activities, like

running, eating, and reading. Based on this finding

without taking into account the rest of the text, it can

be drawn that this story wants to put an emphasis on

the actions of its participants, or in other words what

the participants do. This is in line with Eggins’ (2004)

opinion which states that a text with a lot of material

processes wants to focus on physical events involving

the participants. In this case, it can be said that the

writer of the legend wants to focus on the physical

activities done by Dayang Sumbi, thus making her

represented as an active character. Conversely, as the

clauses belong to a larger text, it is impossible to

disregard all the other clauses in the text completely.

When compared to the clauses in which Sangkuriang

and other characters are the main participants of the

material process type, the percentage drops steeply

from around 40% to only about 18%. As a result,

Dayang Sumbi cannot be determined as an active

character who does a lot of physical actions in the

story. Again, this is not something that is unusual in

the work of literature as female characters are

oftentimes portrayed as passive and submissive (Holt,

n.d.).

The representation of Dayang Sumbi in this story

is also revealed through the analysis of her participant

role in the clauses. Due to space constraint, this

research only focuses on Dayang Sumbi’s role as a

participant in the clauses which process type is

material. Table 2 shows that Dayang Sumbi appears

in all four categories of human participant roles based

on Toolan’s classifications. There are 19 instances

where she appears as the agent, that is the human

participant who deliberately initiate a physical action

(Toolan, 1998). This means that in isolation from the

larger context, Dayang Sumbi is seen as a character

Female Representation in Legenda Tangkuban Perahu: A Transitivity Analysis

who is in control and domineering; she is active and

powerful. Still, from the perspective of the whole text,

the agentive role of Dayang Sumbi is comparatively

lower than her counterpart, Sangkuriang—the main

male character.

In addition to analyzing the most dominant

process, the representation of Dayang Sumbi can also

be observed through assigning the role she has in the

clauses, especially the clauses with material process.

Toolan’s classification proposes four different human

participant roles in this process type, in which the

‘agent’ is considered the most active as it refers to the

person who does an action intentionally while the

‘medium-t’ is seen as the least powerful done-to

participant (in other words, the person to whom an

action is directed). The result of the categorization

suggests that Dayang Sumbi is an active character,

seeing that her role as an agent of a clause occur the

most frequently, as can be observed from Table 2

below. Yet, from the perspective of the whole text,

the agentive role of Dayang Sumbi in the story is low

compared to Sangkuriang, the male character.

Table 2: Occurrence of participant roles in material process.

Participant Role Number of Occurrences

Agent 19

Medium-i 3

Reci

ient 1

Medium-t 8

Further, Dayang Sumbi’s representation is

established by the action verbs found in the 19 clauses

which she is the agent of. The analysis of collocation

shows that the word that collocates with Dayang

Sumbi and other pronouns relating to her character is

the lemma makan (in English, ‘eat’); this word and its

variations (makan, memakannya, dimakan) appear

four times while other verbs appear only once. As

eating is a basic human need, it can be considered into

a necessity; not something that requires one’s

physical fitness or effort. Therefore, it is a neutral

word which cannot add to either the negative or

positive representation of Dayang Sumbi.

The other verbs, nevertheless, show that Dayang

Sumbi embodies the stereotypes of women:

submissive, emotional, and a homemaker (Datesman,

Crandall, & Kearny, 2014). Most of her actions in the

clauses are related to things that women traditionally

do—weaving (‘menenun’), cooking (masak), giving

birth (melahirkan) and even combing her lover’s hair

(menyisir). Looking at the verbs used to represent

Dayang Sumbi, it can be concluded that in spite of the

high percentage of her agency status in the material

type clauses, the actions assigned to her are those

which conform to traditional portrayal of women: a

domestic character whose works are restricted to

house chores.

In a previous research regarding the role of

women in this legend, it is mentioned that Dayang

Sumbi is considered as an active character due to the

fact that she “passes […] moral and […] social value

to her son” (Rosliana, 2013, p. 26). However, it is of

our opinion that her activeness in this event only

further establishes the fact that Dayang Sumbi is

represented to be a traditional woman who is

expected to manage their household and rear children

(Stralton, 1990, by Peter, 2010). This shows that

Dayang Sumbi is indeed active and assertive, but she

is only portrayed as so in what has always been

considered as a female domain, i.e., around the house.

4 CONCLUSIONS

There are two things that can be drawn from the

analysis above. When analyzed exclusively, the

character of Dayang Sumbi can be established as an

active character—the high occurrence of her

participant role as an agent proves so. However, when

the whole text is taken into account, this activeness

and dominance is paled in comparison to the

representation of the male character. Moreover,

Dayang Sumbi in the story is only shown to be active

in the domestic setting of the house; she does things

that are typical to women’s activities and leaves the

more active works of doing activities outside the

house to the male characters. This leads us to believe

that the writer wants to represent Dayang Sumbi as a

traditional woman who abides to what the society

expects from her. In a nutshell, it is believed that in

terms of representation, Dayang Sumbi is a passive,

powerless character.

Nevertheless, this conclusion is based on the

analysis of only specific aspects of the text. There are

details that are overlooked due to the space and time

constraint in which this research is done and therefore

we cannot claim any generalization of the result. We

believe that the use of a different theory or approach

may be useful to arrive to a more comprehensive and

general conclusion. Moreover, it is also suggested to

compare the different versions of the legends as it can

help in determining whether the female character of

the story is always represented traditionally.

ICE-HUMS 2021 - International Conference on Emerging Issues in Humanity Studies and Social Sciences

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Female Representation in Legenda Tangkuban Perahu: A Transitivity Analysis