Arthur Dimmesdale In The Scarlet Letter

In The Scarlet Letter Arthur Dimmesdale’s sin of concealment leads to his downfall. Arthur Dimmesdale had an excellent reputation in town as a Puritan minister, however Dimmesdale himself bore a lot of guilt because he was keeping his sin, his affair with Hester Prynne, a secret. Dimmesdale and Hester had a baby. Hester was punished as an adulterer, however she refused to say who the baby’s father was. Dimmesdale knew that his reputation would be ruined if the Puritan people found out his sin.

In the 21 century adultery is not considered unacceptable . However in a 16 century Puritan society adultery is a very bad and serious sin. In the novel, The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale is a powerful religious figure in town. Arthur Dimmesdale is a Puritan preacher that committed adultery with Hester Prynne. Dimmesdale went through the whole novel, over the course of seven years, without confessing his sin and it was mentally killing him. Dimmesdale changed from accusatory to Hester to remorseful to god, this change is showed by his use of diction, his purpose of each speech, and his use of appeals.

He cowers in confidence by refusing to expose his sin and torments himself through starvation and whippings. The carving of the scarlet letter is a self-induced punishment manifested by the shame he feels and desires to release. The inscribed A signifies "the effect of the ever-active tooth of remorse." Dimmesdale and Hester are equally guilty of the same crime, yet denied his responsibility and left Hester to bear the blame of his punishment at "which the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit."(ch. 18) As Hester was able to confront her sin and become ostracized from the Puritan community, Dimmesdale continued to be the respected minister. His selfishness, deteriorating health, and cowardice actions reflected the secrecy of his

Dimmesdale and Chillingworth both keep a secret, but these secrets affect them differently. Chillingworth keeps his identity and quest of revenge a secret, while Dimmesdale keeps his sin a secret. Chillingworth’s appearance turns more dark and evil in accordance to his secrets, while Dimmesdale punishes himself for his. Dimmesdale grows more and more delusional and rather insane as the story progresses, however only Chillingworth seems to notice, and speaking of, Chillingworth seems to revel in discovering Dimmesdale’s secret, for he seems to have found his

Dimmesdale is the character I chose, because he deals with his private child while being the minister in the town. This private sin is especially hard for him to come out with, because of his leadership and role in the town. The situation is eating him up inside, to the point where he starts beating himself, and doing several other things to harm himself. It not only took a toll on him, but also on pearl, the baby, and the mother, Hester. It had a worse effect on Hester than Dimmesdale, because Dimmesdale just let Hester take all the backlash for Pearl's birth.

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, proves to be a sinner against man, against God and most importantly against himself because he has committed adultery with Hester Prynne, resulting in an illegitimate child, Pearl. His sinning against himself, for which he ultimately paid the

Dimmesdale instead keeps his scarlet letter close to his heart. “‘But why does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?’” (Hawthorne, 150) Pearls asks Hester in the forest. He doesn’t wear it outside his bosom because he has not revealed his sin to the members of the community. Dimmesdale’s health deteriorates since the moment he does not reveal his sin. Roger Chillingworth says “In such case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature” (Hawthorne, 126). Dimmesdale wishes that he could show his sin like Hester “‘Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly on your bosom! Mine burns in secret!’” (Hawthorne, 154) It is indeed his “secret pain” that kills him in the

Arthur Dimmesdale has continually suffered because of the sin he has committed. He is tortured by his only friend who is really his enemy. He grows weaker day by day because he will not confess his sin. He starves himself and whips himself. He has a daughter but no one can know. People look up to him and he does not want to let them down. If only people knew that he committed adultery with Hester Prynne. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's, The Scarlet Letter, the author writes, “While standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation, Mr.Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at the scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth was, and there had long been,

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it is about a young woman named Hester Prynne, who has committed adultery and gave birth to a daughter named Pearl. As a punishment, Hester has to wear a cloth with a scarlet letter ‘A’ on her chest that stands for ‘Adulteress’ for all her lifetime. Meanwhile, Hester’s husband, Roger Chillingworth, who has been missing for two years come back and decides to take a revenge on Hester’s lover. Throughout the novel, Chillingworth has discovered that a young minister named Dimmesdale is a Hester’s lover. Dimmesdale is the worst sinner than Chillingworth because Dimmesdale doesn’t have moral, he is a coward that decides to keep his secret, and he doesn’t have responsibility.

How do you view yourself? Do you have high or low self-esteem? If you do something that is wrong, do you confess it or keep it to yourself? Matters like these are presented in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book, The Scarlet Letter. In Hester Prynne, we see an example of a person whose sin is known to everyone. In Arthur Dimmesdale, we see an example of a person whose sin is kept to himself. He suffered daily from the guilt of his secret, and yearned for it to be publicly exposed. Though they both experienced great shame, Dimmesdale’s situation was likely much worse than Hester’s, because the way in which people saw him was not the truth. Thus, in Chapter 24, Hawthorne proclaimed that we should “be true,” and “show freely to the world, if not

According to Plautus, an ancient roman philosopher, “Nothing is more wretched than a guilty conscience”. Throughout the course of The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne seems to further attest to this idea by illustrating the effects of living under the weight of a guilty mind through the life of Arthur Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale commits adultery, a crime that is usually punished by death, before the novel even beings. Due to his high rank in the community, he decides to save his image and keep this mistake a secret. By not coming forward with the other accused sinner to confess their crimes, he is forced to live out the rest of his days followed by the shadow of his sin Due to the fact that his underlying guilt gets progressively worse as each

In the Scarlet Letter there are characters that are important to the novel; however there is one specific character that relates to the topic of the story is Arthur Dimmesdale. The character Arthur Dimmesdale is a respected minster in Boston. However even though, Arthur Dimmesdale is a minister and preaches against sin to his congregation, he commits the ultimate sin with a young married woman named Hester Pryne. For punishment Hester Pryne becomes pregnant and shunned from public society, Dimmesdale is forced to live with guilt and later in the novel dies from the same sin within his body. Critics that have read the Scarlet letter would argue that Dimmesdale is a weak or ennobled character because he didn’t tell the community of his sinful crime. Another characteristic that critics would agree on is that Dimmesdale was a hypocrite. Arthur Dimmesdale is a character that is weak and hypocritical to his own belief.

While Hester is scrutinized by the public for her role in the affair and haunted with a scarlet letter to adorn her breast, Dimmesdale is not punished at all since he does not reveal his part in the affair. This plunges Dimmesdale into a spiral of guilt and suffering that confirms that he is less faithful than his own lover Hester, although he is a religious figure in the community and she is seen as a repulsive sinner. The first time that the reader can see that Hester is more faithful than Arthur Dimmesdale occurs towards the beginning of the text, when she selflessly bears the whole weight of the affair while Dimmesdale selfishly owns up to none of the consequences. At this point in the plot, Hester is penalized for contradicting one of the the ten commandments and forced to wear a flaming scarlet letter to represent her status as an adulteress. Hester dons this letter while standing on tall scaffolding; confronting the glares of her repulsed peers who viewed her with extreme contempt.

Puritan society is also portrayed in a negative light when observing its effects on Dimmesdale. Arthur Dimmesdale is praised by many in his community as a holy figure and thus a leader, however, he is just as much a sinner as Hester, since together they committed adultery. The fact that he hides this secret in order to preserve this false image of himself shows how much he cares about how he is viewed by society. While many would argue that he does this out of his own free will, there is no doubt that he feels pressure from society to keep his past hidden and maintain this holy facade. Once Dimmesdale dies, some townspeople “affirm that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance … by inflicting a hideous torture on himself” (Hawthorne 230). When they see the letter branded on Dimmesdale, they are shown how he has been tortured by himself and by Chillingworth, as a result of the agony society put him through in hiding his secret of having committed sin. This instance shows how, in a deterministic society, even those viewed as the

By revealing this small, hidden regret, he exposes Hester’s tortured state of mind. Unable to reach salvation in the town she desired to live in, she regretfully decided to leave and abandon her sorrows. The burden society placed on her with the scarlet letter was too demanding for her to handle any longer. Similarly, Arthur Dimmesdale was distressed from his ignominy. Afraid of societal repercussions, Dimmesdale had been “overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast” (102). Society’s extensive honor toward him exacerbated his pain, thus causing society to trap Dimmesdale; this prevented him from revealing his dark secret and reaching salvation. Additionally, he began to picture his surroundings as an obstacle designed to hinder his path to redemption. His shortcoming to reach salvation agonized Dimmesdale to the point where he was incapable of recalling “[any] text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immorality of