The Harassment and Defense Mechanisms in Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave Memoir

Ricardo, Vincentius (2020) The Harassment and Defense Mechanisms in Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave Memoir. Skripsi thesis, Universitas Widya Kartika.

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Abstract

Harassment is unwelcomed act to offend and degrading a person’s dignity which still occurred frequently in society. The harassment also caused the victim to underwent changes in personality such as developing anxiety. When a person is consumed by anxiety, his conscious will deploy defense mechanism to reduce and cope with it. This research discussed about the harassment suffered by Solomon Northup depicted in the 12 Years a Slave memoir. Because of the harassment and cruel treatments that he suffered as a slave, Northup underwent changes in his personality, including experiencing anxiety. Therefore, he developed defense mechanisms to overcome it. This research used qualitative method and library research with the memoir text as the source of data. After analysing and categorizing the data, it can be found that there are various forms of harassment suffered by Northup in the memoir which impacted and changed his character and personality. In order to cope his anxiety and psychological problems caused by harassment, Northup developed and used various types of defense mechanism. The result of this research shows that harassment can cause negative impacts towards the victim’s personality and psychology. However, it also caused the victim to developing defense mechanism in order to protect himself from psychological problem such as anxiety or other negative emotions caused by harassment.

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