The events in setting influencing Nancy’s personality in Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are The Children

ABSTRACT

As one of human creative products, literature is of course closely related to human being because it reflects their behaviors, attitudes and personality. Personality is the study of individual differences, in other words, how people differ from each other. Anxiety is a state of easiness or tension whose cause is unknown. Therefore, setting is the time and place of the story; it is when and where the action occurs. In large sense setting refers to condition or total environment, physical, emotional, economic, political, social, and psychological in which the character live.

This study contains the influence of setting that the major character face. Related to this case, the problems of the study can be formulated; (1) What is Nancy’s personality before losing her children? (2) What is Nancy’s personality after losing her children? (3) How does the event in setting influence Nancy’s personality?

This study is categorized as literary criticism, where the writer does analysis, interpretation, and evaluation in conducting the study. To criticize the object of the study, the writer applies the psychological approach which is used to find our aspect of psychology in the novel Where Are The Children because psychology concern with aspect of human life. In other words, this approach is an attempt to study in literary through the analysis of the major character.

In this study, the writer finds that the personality of Nancy before she was losing her children such are she is merciful or charitable, smart, persistence, attractive and interesting. However, after losing her children she becomes sensitive, introvert, overprotective. The writer also finds two events in the different setting that make Nancy’s personality change; that is event in London, when she went to college and married to Carl Harmon who used to be her lecturer and the big incident faces her until she has been in prison for seven years. The last is event in Cape Cod, where she begins her new life with her new family but she is also run away and denies from the reality. She always combines the incident in the past with her present day so she cannot actualize herself and reach her ideal self. She makes some defenses such as she would cut her hair and dyed it sable brown.