Dimmesdale And Chillingworth In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a study of the effects of sin on the hearts and minds of the main characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Sin strengthens Hester, humanizes Dimmesdale, and turns Chillingworth into a demon.

18th century’s perception of the Puritan Society was that Puritans were a zealous community of people that lived with strict moral standards which allowed them to live in perfect harmony. However, the truth is Puritans were overly zealous whose values created paranoia and intolerance for other views. Through the characters Dimmesdale and Chillingworth who are also falsely perceived, Hawthorne suggest they are representative of the dour living of Puritan society that is hidden by the puritan’s tranquil and utopian outlook.

Hester's shame does become very influential in her life making her unable to express herself freely. "Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt at moments as if she must needs to shriek" (52-53). Hester's guilt has surfaced fully because when she wants to simply express herself, she is prevented from doing so due to her guilty conscience. She wants to take revenge on everyone that has passed judgment on her by giving them a disdainful smile, but she is fearful that she might start feeling guilty for doing such a thing. It seems Hester can live without any consequences of sin if she is able to suppress her anger, but she is actually being slowly isolated from the world. Living peacefully for Hester is slowly isolating her because she acts kind to others to avoid confrontations, which shows that she is afraid of the world and is actually trying to hide from it. Guilt is still the consequence that causes Hester to become isolated from the world around her, but there is another larger consequence which she is reminded of everyday.

Mr. Dimmesdale commits a sin but does not confess for fear of humiliation and hatred. By not confessing, he pays the price physically and emotionally. By physically hurting himself, he presumes it replaces the conflict of not exposing his true self to the community. He is held accountable for his actions at a personal degree of suffering. On the other hand, the community and townspeople are accountable for a high degree of the reverend’s actions. On the scaffold the night Mr. Dimmesdale stood with Pearl and Hester, he rejected holding his daughter’s hand in public because “...all the dread of public exposure that had so long been the anguish of his life had returned upon him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction...” (Hawthorne 149). He feels like he has to conform to society to be accepted, and it results in the failure of taking Pearl’s hand in public and divulging the truth. The townsfolk are more responsible for Dimmesdale’s actions because they create a life where wrongdoing is the ultimate sin, and forgiveness is omitted.

Dimmesdale has a largely different approach to dealing with his sin. Arthur Dimmesdale handles his terrible guilt by concealing it to himself. To overcome it he would whip himself, and take long walks into the forest. Dimmesdale’s act of concealing his guilt shows that he is not brave enough to tell all and there for he must live fearfully and cowardly. This guilt he has chose to endure is much worse than any shame he would have felt had he just confessed his sin of adultery with Hester. Since he was a moral leader in his town he felt an obligation to keep it a secret but like in many cases where guilt is concealed, the sinner eventually reasons enough to confess. Dimmesdale does the same and confesses his sin to the townspeople. “He longed to speak out from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell his people who he was.”

In the world of The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I Hester Prynne have been forced to assign relative blame to Chillingworth, Dimmesdale and myself. It is distasteful for one of us to assign blame to all seeing as though we would all approach it differently and I can never know the true feelings of my counterparts. The blame I shall assign is who among us is most responsible for the misconduct in the puritan society we lived in.

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, is set in Puritan times, following the lives of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth after Hester’s crime of adultery. While Hester Prynne successfully processes her emotions and refuses to cave in on herself, the men in the novel resort to revenge. When one devotes themselves to vengeance, they become consumed by it. Reverend Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth both spend the novel taking revenge on themselves and someone else, respectively, leading to their decline of life and character.

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

Reverand Dimmesdale is a beloved Puritan minister who's Hester's paramour and father of Pearl. He was a man of hypocrisy whom couldn't endure the deception of preaching from his sins. Dimmesdale wished to reveal himself as Hester's lover, yet she refuses. The concealment of their crime psychological affects him since it's morally weakening him and a direct violation of the Ten Commandments. However,

The final three chapters of the story are when things start to intensify. Chapter twenty-two opens on the ceremony when Dimmesdale is telling the best speech of his career, but he doesn’t look one eye at Hester. Did he not mean what he said in the woods? Does he not really love her? Somehow Master Hibbins finds out about Dimmesdale crimes and tells Hester that he has been marked internally. At the end of his speech Dimmesdale calls Hester and Pearl up to the stage. Finally, he confesses his sin and undying love for Hester and Pearl, I feel as if he has finally come to peace with his guilt and that he can finally live his final days in peace and with a free conscience. Unfortunately, his final days do not last but a few minutes and he dies.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a great piece of literature. It explores problems in society that still occur today. It is fascinating to see how the Puritans punished adultery then and the lack of punishment of adultery in our society now. It shows how all the characters affect Hester and what everyone does in the community. It shows that no one is exempt from any type of crime in that town. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, he analyzes the characters of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Pearl.

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, contains alternating views of sin, morals, and guilt. Society classifies Hester Prynne a sinner for committing adultery while her husband was gone. Although the town does not punish her with death, for the slight possibility that her husband might be dead, their treatment of her is grave and cruel. Although Hester has suffered for her crime, Reverend Dimmesdale, the father of Hester’s child, has not confessed to his crime resulting in his mental and physical deterioration. Hester was isolated from society and shunned, but Dimmesdale torture was based on the hypocrisy of his nature since he faced no punishment form society, which revered him as a holy figure, but from himself, for not accepting

The town had honored Dimmesdale for all of his sermons. This sense of being well loved caused Dimmesdale even more pain, because he felt that he did not deserve all of their praise. He felt that he had let down all of the town for making the mistake of not telling everyone what he had done. In consequence, Dimmesdale decided that he would punish himself with his nightly vigils. At these vigils Dimmesdale says prayers, fasts, and scourge himself. This shows that the guilt has pushed him so far that he has decided to hurt himself so he can amend the guilt from sinning with Hester. On one of these nights he goes to the scaffold, where Hester was publicly shamed, and stands there imagining that he was being scorned by the whole town. When Dimmesdale

The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne occurs in Massachusetts, Boston. Hester Prynne committed adultery and is ridiculed for it, and the citizens of the town are to ponder the father of Pearl. Dimmesdale is the father of Pearl, and Chillingworth makes it his destiny to publicly shame him and torment him for the rest of his life.