Dr. Dimmesdale 's Faulty Attributes

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter conveys the war between passion and responsibility, and how it concerns moral duty. Conflicts which Reverend Dimmesdale faces show readers how difficult it can be to come forward and reveal your sins. The circumstances which victimized Dimmesdale made it harder for him to accept responsibility publicly, which is the foundation of much of this novel. Hawthorne uses Dimmesdale’s character to convey the true struggle between passion and responsibility in The Scarlet Letter. While Dimmesdale yearned to face his sins, his passion overpowered him and took over the

The main characters whose lies devastate the characters in the novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, are Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and Hester. Each character has once told a lie either about their character or identity. First, Dimmesdale is well-known in the community as a minister who gives sermons. But the townspeople do not know about the affair between him and Hester. He lies because he does not want to give up his reputation as a minister. The effect of him lying is that he has a guilty conscience, thinks that he “sold himself to the devil”, and ironically, people view him as a saint. (Hawthorne 193). Next, Chillingworth is an old man who is well-known in the community as the town doctor who makes medicine and takes

Guilt, shame, and penitence are just a few of the emotions that are often associated with a great act of sin. Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale, a highly respected minister of a 17th century Puritan community, is true example of this as he was somehow affected by all of these emotions after committing adultery. Due to the seven years of torturous internal struggle that finally resulted in his untimely death, Mr. Dimmesdale is the character who suffered the most throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Mr. Dimmesdale’s ever present guilt and boundless penance cause him an ongoing mental struggle of remorse and his conscience as well as deep physical pain from deprivation and self inflicted wounds. The external influence of the members of

Robert Southey once said, “All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.” It is true, deception can be an art. Deception can become a practice as Southey said, and pass from words into things and people. However, I believe deception is more than that. I believe it is something that one does to fulfill a desire, whether with a good motive or a bad motive. It can be an object of one’s mind, for a noble cause, to fulfill one’s needs or evil desires, or to get something one might want. But ultimately deception is deception, whether the intent behind it is good or bad. Within these short stories, there are a multitude of forms of deception, and the motives

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

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the popular, gifted, young clergyman and in which no expected, was Hester Prynne’s secretive lover. The citizens of Boston saw him as the perfect man, who could do no wrong. Little had they known, his sin was just as bad as Hester’s. Just like Black’s quote stated, Reverend Dimmesdale, acted on his light side, and used his sins to preach his best of sermons. Hawthorne stated on page 131, ‘To the high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed…”. As many can observe, the young clergyman was a tremendous minister. He preached wonderful sermons and truly showed himself to be a man of God. Dimmesdale was a talented young man with a dark side that few people knew of. “…Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must be there” (Hawthorne 131). This shows while he was preaching tremendous sermons, his health started to deteriorate, due to his inner guilt he was holding within himself. Perhaps if his lingering sin had not expended him, he would have been able live a happier, healthier life. However, unfortunately for him, the secret he was keeping was eating at him from the inside out and his darkness was prevailing. Dimmesdale’s sin of keeping the

‘Honesty is the best policy’; ‘Always be yourself”, are common phrases many parents tell their children and as common as they may be, being honest and being true yourself contributes to individual happiness and contentness. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a novel that dives deep into these key themes of honesty and integrity and the consequences of doing the opposite action. One of the main characters, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is a minister in 17th century Puritan New England who has deteriorating health because of his lies and guilt. Dimmesdale commits adultery with a beautiful woman in the town, Hester Prynne, whose husband, Roger Chillingworth, returns from Europe later on. Pearl, who is a product of Hester and

"Life is hard, but accepting that fact makes it easier." This common phrase clearly states a harsh fact that Rev. Dimmesdale, a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, had to face. In this story of deception and adultery set in the Puritan era, Hawthorne introduces Dimmesdale as a weak and cowardly man who refuses to take responsibility for his actions.  The Rev. Dimmesdale is a transitional character in that he is, at the beginning of the novel, outwardly good but inwardly deceitful and by the end of the novel he becomes both outwardly and inwardly truthful.

suffers from cowardly guilt and hypocrisy after he commits adultery in this novel staged in the

In their lifetime, everyone has done something wrong and felt guilt, however, what allows people to get over it often depends on to what extent they want to confess their wrongdoing as opposed to hiding behind or from it. In the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the values of the character Dimmesdale change over the course of the book as a result of the events he goes through. He overvalues social acceptance which causes him distress and imposes heavy guilt on his conscience but finally realizes that the only way to rid himself of that guilt and sin is to confess. Dimmesdale’s values of social acceptance and honesty change as he realizes that it is more important to honor honesty over social acceptance, demonstrating that redemption is only possible through public honesty.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that, “no man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.” In essence, he meant that when in the act of deception, only harm to oneself and inner confusion may result. Although the novel validates as to why this statement is true, the argument of this would be that many humans on a daily basis are able to deceive others as well as themselves by living a double life. As a species, humans have a moral sense that has both blessed and cursed humanity with the ability to choose evil. This trait, wholly unique to humanity, leaves the everyday human with the choice of evil, of deceiving one another. With the trait of moral sense rooted deep with years of evolution, it is almost instinct to deceive one another in some way throughout life and that is inevitable.

A human not facing the truth and living in shame and secrecy is not an honorable being. In the book The Scarlet Letter that theme is revealed to us. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of the book, tried to live in secrecy because of the shame he had on his family. The Scarlet Letter is one of a kind, being one of the first novels written in the 1800s. It teaches its audience that while living in secrecy, fear will become the acquaintance of living time. Just like one of the main characters in the book, Hawthorne had a desire to keep something in secret and did not want to reveal the truth.

Some people can’t accept the truth, it’s as simple as that.” “The truth hurts.” “Ignorance is bliss.” All these phrases attempt to justify the employment of deception. In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the character Charles Marlow deceives multiple individuals on multiple occasions. On some occasions for his personal gain, for others to preserve the feelings of others. His deception directly contributes to and shapes the deeper concepts of the work, in a way that emphasizes the ease in which one can deceive others

Dark Romanticists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne mainly focused on the imperfectness of humans and how they are surrounded by sin. One of Hawthorne’s purposes in The Scarlet Letter is the lasting effects of sin and guilt. Through his novel, he shows keeping your sin and guilt inside you will make it fester and change you for the worse. However, the novel also shows that facing your sin and guilt and revealing it will help you learn and become a better person.

The sin of hypocrisy and secrecy is represented through the character, Arthur Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale, the minister of the town, got a married woman pregnant and concealed the fact that he did from the rest of the townspeople for many years. In the beginning of the novel, the townspeople viewed Dimmesdale’s “eloquence and religious fervor” as bringing a positive innocent man to the town (46). Though he portrays an outwardly goodness about him, he truly is mendacious on the inside. His guilty conscience caused him to become extremely sickly. The townspeople believed that Dimmesdale’s health “had suffered severely, of late, by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labors and duties of the pastoral relation” (74). Truthfully though, the young minister was “pale, and holding his hand over his heart” as a clue of is suffering from hiding his sin (78). Later, it is