Hester Prynne Heroism

Mr. Dimmesdale’s strong ties to his Puritan faith cause him to commit endless acts of severe penance as retribution for his sin, only bringing him continuous physical suffering and the longing for absolution. Dimmesdale’s faithfulness leads him to beg for God’s forgiveness through his actions in the hopes of saving his soul and avoiding some of the punishment he will likely bear in the afterlife. His penitence and fear of public exposure cause Dimmesdale to whip himself harshly in the closet and to fast “…rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act of penance” (136). Because of the lack of courage within his character, Mr. Dimmesdale turns to private suffering rather than public shame as a means for his atonement. These excessive acts of penance resulted in his suffering of intense physical and mental weakness, and causing him to become frail in overall spirit. In his most extreme act of repentance, Mr. Dimmesdale stooped to self-mutilation by carving the letter A into his own chest to match

Dimmesdale is constantly harming himself because of his sin. He whips himself on a regular basis feeling as if it is only right to punish himself for his sin. He starves himself as well. Every time that he whips or starves himself he grows weaker. Everyone sees him getting weak and they start to worry. He lives with the physician so he should start to feel better but he constantly gets worse. The author writes, “How feeble and pale he looked, amid all his triumph!” (Hawthorne page 238). Though Dimmesdale is successful in his job his heart and body are failing him. He has done so much harm to himself all because of his sin.

               The fact that Dimmesdale is a hypocrite causes him to experience increased torment due to his guilt.  Dimmesdale beautifully illustrates Hawthorne’s point, because if he were not such a highly religious man, then he would not care about his crime.  However, he does care, and he inflicts torment on himself, including long periods of fasting. In addition to hours of staring at himself in the mirror, he could also be caught numerous times in his closet, whipping himself and burning the letter "A" on his chest.   Or he could be seen at the scaffold in the wee hours of the morning, practicing how he is going to confess the next day. Deluding himself by pretending that his

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.

Throughout this chapter Dimmesdale is tempted to do things, and is described as “At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or another” (Hawthorn, 171). This is also confirmed by Olivia Taylor in her paper in which see is comparing Rev. Dimmsdale to a character from another novel “Like Dimmesdale, she too experiences moments of seeming insanity as she labors”(Taylor, 2). Much like Jesus was tested by satan after fasting for forty days Dimmesdale is tempted time and time again, but dimmesdale is not Jesus, and in his current condition by the end of his journey home Dimmesdale is nothing but a hollow shell of his former self, and he enters his house a broken man. Before We dive deeper in to the chapter let us look at a brief overview written by Robert

As the novel continues, it becomes obvious that Dimmesdale’s guilt is bothering him, and it reaches a point where it nearly eats him up inside. Dimmesdale begins to question himself by saying, "Have I gone mad? Am I completely and totally in league with the Devil" (Hawthorne 123). Since Dimmesdale continues to live without confessing his sin, he feels awful and believes that he will go to hell. He starts to feel that he is a disgrace to society and should be punished.

After stating that he was a great sinner he got praised by the townspeople. The narrator states, “remorseful hypocrite that [Dimmesdale] was!” (Hawthorne 131). Dimmesdale lets himself get praised by the townspeople, and the narrator himself calls Dimmesdale himself a hypocrite for letting this happen. If Dimmesdale really wanted the townspeople to know that he was a sinner he would have also confessed his

Dimmesdale, the quintessence guilt is invariably tormented by his repressed iniquity which evolved from his affair with Hester Prynne. As the plot thickens, Dimmesdale becomes more and more disturbed by his internal repression and begins to illustrate multiple examples of hypocrisy. Living a hypocritical life he juggles between publicly being a righteous Reverend and privately being a sinner. His need to repent against the lies he speaks eventually brings him to the town scaffold in the dead of night. While alone, “Standing on the scaffold,” Dimmesdale is able to release his built up agony “in [a] vain show of expiation” (Hawthorne 139). By emphasising the presence of nighttime, the author enables Dimmesdale's inner nature to manifest itself concealed in the solitude of darkness, as compared to his actions in the daytime where he exhibits piousness and his secrets remain repressed. To Dimmesdale, the scaffold is an allegory of repentance, by confessing his sin in an identical way to Heyster as a means of expiation, he justifies his sin as if he had confessed it publicly. Another

His noble position in the puritans society can’t be tainted and and due to societal pressures the character is left it inwardly question his actions. Dimmesdale’s tension between outward conformity and inward questioning lend to his downfall. In the beginning

In the Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, there are many characters that accept different fates. One of them is Reverend Dimmesdale. In the story, Dimmesdale commits a serious crime and sleeps with Hester Prynne and they have a baby. Fortunately for Dimmesdale, no one knows he is the father. He stays for strong for a while but because Hester takes 100% of the blame he begins to build a great amount of guilt for the rest of his life. Having guilt makes things worse especially when he is a reverend. Dimmesdale feels worse and worse and eventually starts putting himself through physical pain because of the sin he has committed. Dimmesdale’s ability to transform from a man of god to a sinner and back to a holy man proves that men can be

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a Romantic novel about two adulterers, Hester and Dimmesdale, who are forced to live with the repercussions of their sin. Hester Prynne is punished by wearing a scarlet ‘A’ which ostracizes her from Puritan Boston, leading to several years of solitude. During this time, Roger Chillingworth, her vengeful husband, preys on Dimmesdale, whose only source of repent is in his hypocritical preachings. When Dimmesdale finally speaks to Hester again, they plan to escape their wrongdoings by fleeing back to England, where they can live together as a loving family with their daughter Pearl. Although some may argue that Hester and Dimmesdale are in love, a closer examination of the novel shows that they are

His guilt changed his demeanor and the way he carries himself day to day, he was always “feeble and pale” (224), he couldn’t handle having two completely different identities. Even after giving himself a physical reminder on his chest, his mind still could not overcome the guilt and the lie he carries inside himself everyday. Every single day Dimmesdale walks with, “a great horror of mind” (134), for what he did not only himself, but to others, mostly Pearl and Hester. It made it even harder being the head of the Puritan church, because everyone looks up to him as angel God has sent to save the Puritan community from sin. Consequently, he commits one of the worst crimes a Puritan can commit, adultery, and he knows that the punishment for this is execution.

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, narrates the experiences of Hester Prynne, a beautiful young woman in Puritan times, after committing the sin of adultery with the local Reverend, Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale. Because she became pregnant, she bears the public scorn of her sin, while the town does not uncover Mr. Dimmesdale’s participation in the act until the very end of the novel. Using the Puritan society as the setting, and the development of both Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne explores the concepts of individuality, identity, and isolation. Through Hester and Dimmesdale, he presents two scenarios: one in which the character is isolated and freed from society,

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mr. Dimmesdale's most evident dread is that the townspeople will get some answers concerning his transgression of infidelity with Hester Prynne. Mr. Dimmesdale fears that his spirit couldn't take the disgrace of such a revelation, as he is an imperative good figure in the public eye. Be that as it may, in not admitting his transgression to people in general, he endures the blame of his wrongdoing, an agony which is exacerbated by the torments of Roger Chillingworth. In spite of the fact that he reliably picks coerce over disgrace, Mr. Dimmesdale experiences a significantly more difficult experience than Hester, who persevered through people in general disgrace of the red letter. Mr. Dimmesdale's

Alexandra Coleman Mrs. Smith Major American Authors, 1st 10 February 2015 Scarlet Letter Paper In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author describes Hester Prynne as a sympathetic character which is shown through her remarkable personality that is revealed through her public humiliation, isolated, and later succeeding life in the Puritan society. Although Nathaniel Hawthorne does not give a large sum of information on Hester's life before her public humiliation, her inner strength, honesty, compassion, and defiance of convention show her true character, a survivor. Nathaniel Hawthorne develops Hester Prynne as a kind and sympathetic women who passively suffers her agony, who kindly helps those less fortunate than she is, and who