Marriage and courtship in Puteri Gunung Ledang and Kaguya-hime No Monogatari : a sentiment analysis and cultural materialist perspective

Abstract

This thesis examines the portrayal of courtship and marriage in female-centric folktales from two Asian countries, which are Puteri Gunung Ledang from Malaysia and Kaguya-hime no Monogatari from Japan. In these two folktales, Puteri Gunung Ledang and Kaguya-hime perceive marriage as nonessential. This research uses the digital humanities framework through a multimodal sentiment method to study representations of courtship and marriage in each folktale retelling. Alongside the sentiment method, the princesses’ attitudes towards courtship and marriage are analysed based on their emotions and body language, following Robert Plutchik’s Wheels of Emotions (1982), which comprises eight primary emotions that expand into 24 other emotions. The sentiment and emotion analyses are significant in providing insights into Puteri Gunung Ledang and Kaguya-hime’s representations in the retellings, as well as their perceptions of marriage and courtship. Based on the princesses’ representations and perceptions, this thesis explores the cultural relevance of the folktales in portraying marriage that varies among different retellings. This thesis is principally informed by cultural materialism theory, which is used to observe the significance of the princesses’ perceptions of marriage and its relationship in positioning of the women’s roles in marriage. This thesis also aims to identify parallels in the folktales’ use of the suitor test motif and its relationship to the “women-empowering” elements rooted in the histories and societies of Malaysia and Japan.