The Scarlet Letter Arthur Dimmesdale's Psychological Identity

Psychological Identity

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, ‘The Scarlet Letter’, Hawthorne demonstrates the physiological impact that others and our own person can make on us. He uses his psychological standpoint to make a character in power who comes to be psychosomatic and has a general phobia to conform to the pure society he thinks he knows; this unconscious motivation, eventually leads to his demise. But he also makes a character that is the opposite (In many different ways) to show the correlation effect that actions can have on one's self. The women fights and does not conform, she has to change the way she thinks and see many different things to compensate what is missing in her life, and what was taken from her. The actions taken by these characters in the book determined many physiological factors attributing to them as a character.

Arthur Dimmesdale is one of the main characters in the book that can be looked at in a variety of ways physiologically. In this quote “While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part

She shows the embodiment of the later meaning of the scarlet letter “Able”. She has to overcome the same adverse situations that the Reverend has to, but has a different outlook because she sees the sin in everybody “purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s” (Ch 5) and this made her physiological outlook unchanged after she was discommunicated from society in a way. She had to make herself see everything differently so she could do the right thing in her eyes, not everybody