In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale commits a mortal sin by having an affair with a married woman, Hester Prynne. As a man of the cloth in Puritan society, Dimmesdale is expected to be the embodiment of the town’s values. He becomes captive to a self-imposed guilt that manifests from affair and his fear that he won’t meet the town’s high expectations of him. In an attempt to mitigate this guilt, Dimmesdale acts “piously” and accepts Chillingworth’s torture, causing him to suffer privately, unlike Hester who repented in the eyes of the townspeople. When Dimmesdale finally reveals his sin to the townspeople, he is able to free himself from his guilt.
Even though only one person that he knows of, Hester, knows his sin, he still is going insane from the misconduct he did. Dimmesdale cannot be freed of his private guilt that is driving him crazy. Dimmesdale is noticeable being damaged by the suffering of keeping his guilt private. After Hester and Dimmesdale discuss their plans to runaway together, in the woods, Dimmesdale returns to the town with a new attitude. He grasps the
While everyone around Dimmesdale thinks he is a kind and sensitive sweetheart, Dimmesdale is obviously a jerk from the way he treats Hester. Dimmesdale constantly received compliments about how godly and good he was, and highly respected by the townsfolk. He had “a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like tile speech of an angel.” He therefore knew he had enough power over the town in order to allow Hester not to wear the Scarlet
However, in reality, Hester's infamy was strengthening her, while Dimmesdale’s self-humiliation was weakening him. Although it may seem that his hesitance towards confessing his sin was killing him, it can be seen as the only thing keeping him alive. Hester may have been tormented by her mistake but she ended up being
“And the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system” (Hawthorne 174). In The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale serves as the holiest person many people meet in their moral lifetime, and as the purest embodiment of God’s word. However, Dimmesdale has a wounding secret, a cancer, that tears his soul apart throughout his time in America. Dimmesdale falls prey to sin in a moment of passion with Hester, resulting in her condemnation by the townspeople, and the birth of their child, Pearl. For years, Dimmesdale’s life is defined by an internal conflict - his job demands his purity in the eye of the townspeople, but he desires the acceptance of herself that Hester achieves through her sin being made public.
Relationships–they make us, and they break us. They give us life and can also kill us physically and emotionally. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, relationships are the antagonist and protagonist. One in specific–that of Hester Prynne’s and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s–creates the major drama within the plot, after the appalling sin of adultery is committed in seventeenth-century Puritan society. Hester must stand upon a scaffold and face the punishment of shame in front of the whole town, and is also sentenced to wearing a woven scarlet letter A on her breast to remind others that she is an adulterer.
In The Scarlet Letter, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a young woman, named Hester Prynne, committed adultery due to her theory of her husband was dead. Hester was thrown in prison and given the letter “A” symbolising “adultery” which she has to wear on her bosom for the rest of her life. The narrator starts the novel with Hester’s trial on the scaffold after her time in prison. Then, the audience meets Roger Chillingworth, who is Hester’s husband from England. In the novel, Roger Chillingworth is the most villainous.
The narrator states, "Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but dared not to speak" (Hawthorne 138). Nevertheless, his moral development continuously stays at Stage 1 "Obedience and Punishment Orientation" because yet again his actions are selfish. He is more considerate about his
In “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a central theme established throughout the story is how sins negatively affect the people who commit them. There are many instances of this in the story, as two of the main characters, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, are related to each other through a sin (adultery) and both suffer because of it. However, Prynne displays her sin publicly in the form of a scarlet letter while Dimmesdale hides it from the public in order to maintain his reputation as a respected minister. This hidden sin crushes Dimmesdale mentally and physically throughout the story, but it is in one scene in Chapter 17 that the effect of his hidden sin on him becomes especially evident. By showing the internal conflict of
Although it is not stated in the text, Dimmesdale, similar to which is further elaborated on by Mary Diorio. She discusses the issues that Dimmesdale faces, such as how being a preacher and a man of God is pulling him down. Diorio demonstrates the challenge Dimmesdale must face, ultimately deciding that “His fear of losing his good reputation is greater than his love for Hester. (Diorio
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne exposes the blindness of the Puritan people through the treatment of Hester, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale’s external characters. Hester Prynne is labeled as an adulteress and mistreated by society because of their unwillingness to see her true character. Chillingworth, the husband of Hester, leads the town to believe he is an honorable man and skillful doctor, when his true intents root from his vindictive nature Finally, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s lover and the father of her baby, acts as the perfect man therefore the town views him as an exemplar model, while he is truly a sinner. In the novel, Hawthorne portrays Hester as a strong, resilient woman, though the members of her community
Hester and Dimmesdale each are equivalent in the sin that they commit, but their lives and fates are different because Hester had to repent for her crimes while Dimmesdale bottled up his guilt inside. The indirect result of Dimmesdale’s concealment of the truth was Chillingworth’s torture, which played a large role in Dimmesdale’s untimely death. Chillingworth snapped when Hester did not reveal Dimmesdale’s crimes. Hester, in part, helped Dimmesdale in
In his novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays two Puritans that have opposing experiences in the theocracy. The people of New Jerusalem claim Arthur Dimmesdale to be a gift from God. In contrast to Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne becomes undesired in the eyes of The City Upon a Hill. Due to their diverse exposures in the rigid Puritan society, Dimmesdale and Hester do not belong together. To begin, the people of the Massachusetts Bay Colony embrace Reverend Dimmesdale as one of their own.
This only made his guilt worsen. Dimmesdale does not feel passionate when he is trying to do job. The people are only imagining getting help because his tainted soul could not possibly redeem other souls. He feels as if he is cheating those people in their faith. Hester then tries to rebuttal by saying “Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people's eyes.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, a famous American author from the antebellum period, notices the emphasis on individual freedoms in the works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists during his residency in the Brook Farm’s community. In response to these ideas, Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter, a historical novel about Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale’s lives as they go through ignominy, penance, and deprecation from their Puritan community to express their strong love for each other. Their love, even though it is true, is not considered as holy nor pure because of Hester past marriage to Roger Chillingworth, and thus Hester gained the Scarlet Letter for being an adulterer. Hawthorne utilizes biblical allusions, such as the stories of
