It is a general truth that our society, despite the fact that women’s movement has already acknowledged by the world, still has its root deep on the male supremacy values. It means that every aspect of life including beliefs, values, norms, policies, etc. are based on what men have approved with. As the result, this causes the inequalities for women’s party. Based on this fact, this study discussed about the inequality issues experienced by a woman character in Titanic movie, Rose character who lived in a male supremacy society. This study used Beauvoir’s feminist criticism on the ideas of male supremacy and independent woman to find out the types of inequality issues experienced by Rose character and her efforts in overcoming those inequalities. This study also used Mahon’s supporting explanation on Beauvoir’s two ideas to get a thorough understanding of the theory itself. This study was a qualitative research with content analysis as its approach. Words (narrations and dialogues) related to the objectives in this study were taken from Titanic movie script.
This study found that Rose character experienced two types of inequality issues and chose to be an independent woman to overcome the two inequalities she experienced in Titanic movie. The two inequalities experienced by Rose character were the burden of marriage and set up expectations. However, these two inequalities were successfully overcome by Rose character when she chose to be an independent woman through two stages: defensive and aggressive. Thus, the conclusions of this study viewed Rose character, regardless coming from the royal
class in society, was inevitable to experience the inequality issues due to the fact that her society was a male supremacy one and the way to get one self freed from the inequalities was by becoming an independent woman. The implication of this study provided another view in seeing Titanic movie (besides its romantic-tragedy story) as the portrayal of the way male supremacy attempted to control women as their objects.
Key words: woman, feminist criticism, male supremacy, inequality issues,