Cherie Bennet’s novel Life in the Fat Lane, aims to describe the representation of idealized women and to reveal the construction of idealized women in the text. The research employs deconstruction theory to reveal the presence of opposition and close reading strategy to collect and analyze the data. The finding shows that the representation of idealized women in the novel Life in the fat Lane is the women who are thin. Thin means beautiful, popular, adorable, loved and perfect while fat means ugly, not popular, hated, not perfect and undesirable. The construction of beauty is mainly concerned with body or physical appearance. The idealized women are constructed by the institutions of society. The institutions of society in this case are including family, peer group, school, mass media especially advertisements, industries (cosmetic and diet industry), government institutions through its beauty pageants. The size of body gives certain status to someone. The text presents depiction of fat women and thin women successfully. The readers are invited to see how thin and fat women are respected in different ways by the society. However, the text is not deconstructive because at the end of the story, the main character, Lara, accepts her condition as being fat wisely. Lara decides to take an action contradicted to the society. Lara believes that being thin, beautiful and perfect looking do not guarantee the happiness.

This is a good example for feminism theory. We can explore the roles woman in this novel. This novel describes the figure of perfect woman, such as white skin, body slim, and long hair. Body fat is not represented the beauty of woman in this story. I think, it is an irony that describing the figure of woman is viewed from the physic as if the woman should appear beautifully.

Pahrurozi (0608188) non-dik B 2006