Summary Of The Scarlet Letter By Arthur Dimmesdale

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

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

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

Life is unpredictable, and through trial and error humanity learns how to respond to conflicts and learns how to benefit from mistakes. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a character who changes and gains knowledge from the trials he faces, but first he has to go through physical, spiritual, and emotional agony. In the midst of all the havoc, the young theologian is contaminated with evil but fortunately his character develops from fragile to powerful, and the transformation Dimmesdale undergoes contributes to the plot’s climax.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s book, The Scarlet Letter, we see the theme of guilt portrayed in the life of Reverend Dimmesdale in three different ways. In this essay we will talk about those three different ways. Reverend Dimmesdale’s guilt began when Hester was put into prison for the sin they both committed. When the child was born, all of the people of the Puritan town marked Hester with an “A” for adulter and condemned her only for their sin. Unlike Hester who beautifully embroidered her “A”, Reverend Dimmesdale wore his “A” in silence.

He becomes demonic and is tempted "to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other," at once in violation of his nature and emanating from some unknown and "profounder" part of it (CE 1:217). Anticipating Freud's view of the mind--an unconscious of sexual, aggressive, and otherwise tabooed impulses precariously restrained by a socialized conscience--Hawthorne writes of a "total change of dynasty and moral code" in Dimmesdale's "interior kingdom" (CE 1:217). His ruling superego has been dethroned, and unconscious forces formerly held in check by conscience and will are unleashed and seize control. Within his own mental universe, Dimmesdale has indeed, as he fears, "sold himself to the devil" (CE 1:222).”(Milder, 6). The First vision that her encounters is his attempt to blaspheme in front of one of his mentors who, is also a high ranking official in the church, but is able to laugh off this as imagining the old man's face when hearing this made him laugh. In his second vision, trial as it is described sees our good Reverend coming across one

Secrets can destroy even the most respected people. Sometimes is not the secret itself that drives people into exhaustion, but the emotional baggage that comes with it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Dimmesdale physically deteriorates because of his guilt caused by a dishonorable sin. The Puritan society in which the story is set discourages the idea of the private self, which Hawthorne shows by creating distinctions between the characters’ private and public lives, specifically Dimmesdale’s.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, the young Arthur Dimmesdale is a highly respected reverend in 17th century puritanical Massachusetts. However, he is the most morally ambiguous character in the novel because of the one great sin he commits and fails to readily confess. For this, he suffers an internal affliction that destabilizes his physical and spiritual composure. Dimmesdale’s sin was detrimental, but this action cannot qualify him as a bad person because in all other aspects, he is as righteous as the Puritans came. This moral ambiguity of Dimmesdale plays a pivotal role in the novel because it allows the reader to distinguish between true good and evil.

“To sigh, yet not recede; to grieve, yet not repent.” George Crabbe. Everyone agrees that Pearl had a father, while some believe that Dimmesdale should have confessed, but others reckon he should not have confessed. Dimmesdale should have confessed for these three reasons: Chillingworth would know who it was, Dimmesdale would be able to show his face without guilt, and his actions were heinously sinful.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne paints a picture of two equally guilty sinners, Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale, and shows how both characters deal with their different forms of punishment and feelings of remorse for what they have done. Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale are both guilty of adultery, but have altered ways of performing penance for their actions. While Hester must pay for her sins under the watchful eye of the world around her, Reverend Dimmesdale must endure the heavy weight of his guilt in secret. It may seem easier for Reverend Dimmesdale to live his daily life since he is not surrounded by people who shun

In the time of Britain’s early settlements in the colonies, Puritans dominated a region known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Individuals under puritanic law were held to very strict social and religious standards— especially those honorable few who had chosen to be holy men. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter characterizes Arthur Dimmesdale, a reverend pastor living in Boston, as a lost soul, struggling to find his purpose. The reverend remains on a dim, unclear path of life with a guilty conscience of his sinful past weighing him down for the vast majority of the novel. It is not until the end, when he freely confesses his fatherhood to Pearl, “The sin-born child,” that the author conveys Dimmesdale as a man at peace with his decisions,

In June 1642, the townspeople of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gathered together in front of the scaffold to see the the punishment that would be levied on the young women, Hester Prynne. Hester Prynne was guilty of adultery and forced to stand upon the scaffold for three hours. While Hester was standinding on the scaffold, she was subject to name calling and constant questioning, by the other women of the town. As Hester was being shamed, she noticed and man in the crowd, it was her husband, who was presumed to be dead. Her husband, angered deeply by this, vowed to find the man responsible for this, and selected the new name Roger Chillingworth. The reverend, John Wilson, and the Minister, Arthur Dimmesdale questioned Hester, but she refused to reveal the the father.

In the stories of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the antagonist characters display parallel story lines through their searches for the enemy. Roger Chillingworth, the former husband of Hester Prynne and the antagonist of The Scarlet Letter, works against his wife in order to find her untold second lover. Frankenstein is a contrasting story in which an unnamed monster is the antagonist towards his human creator, Dr. Frankenstein. Yet despite quite different story lines, the two characters possess traits that exibit parallels between them. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth displays the startling passionate characteristics of an unwavering drive to seek out his foe, madness as his focus on his search takes over his entire being, and terrible anguish when his task is unexpectedly over, all of which are reflected in the daemon created at the hand of Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley 's novel Frankenstein.

Hawthorne uses the strong emotion of despair that overwhelms Arthur Dimmesdale, a beloved reverend in the town, to show how pretending to be the pure, sinless man that the town believes him to be causes him great pain, but by confessing he was relieved from his suffering. Romanticism encourages the acceptance of strong emotion, and embraces the free expression of feelings, unlike the Puritans, and in Dimmesdale’s case the emotions were mostly negative. Dimmesdale has been bearing the guilt of his sin for several years after his daughter Pearl’s birth, while Hester has been isolated and able to move on. This has enabled him to keep his religious position in the town, and his status with the townspeople. He attempts to continue the image society has of

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” (23)-Nameless narrator’s narration