This final project concern in psychological development of Hester Prynne’s as the main character of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. She commits adultery with clergyman in Boston. The purpose of this study is to analyze anxiety and defense mechanism of the main character according to psychoanalysis theory by Sigmund Freud.
This study used descriptive qualitative method. This method used two types of data which were primary data gathered from The Scarlet Letter Novel and secondary data from international journal, books, articles, thesis, and essays, that related to the research. The data of study are collected in the form of word, dialogue, and monologue. The data are gathered on several steps by reading the novel, identifying, classifying, and reducing the data.
The result of this study Hester suffered three kinds of anxiety they are, realistic anxiety, neurotic anxiety, and moral anxiety. Those anxiety happened when society ridicule Hester because she using ‘A’ letter as the symbol of sinner. Whereas the defense mechanism acted by Hester are denial, displacement, sublimation, reaction formation, and regression. In the analysis, the defense mechanism acted by Hester when she tried to protect herself from threatening.
Keywords: Anxiety, Defense Mechanism, Psychoanalysis.