Theme Of Guilt In The Scarlet Letter

In the novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne shows sins of several different kinds in numerous people, as well as the consequences and remedies of their sins. Arthur Dimmesdale, bares the most brutal effects of his sins. Hester Prynne recognized her sins and accepted them. She wore the letter “A” with such pride and dignity. Dimmesdale on the other hand knew what he did was unacceptable and was unable to confess his sins, because of the fear of not being accepted into society, and also the fear of not being forgiven by God.

Did you know, that in Puritan Massachusetts adultery was likely punished by death of both committees instead of humiliation? Arthur Dimmesdale, in the book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is the town reverend and is also the father of Hester’s baby, but his guilt is overwhelming himself because he is unable to confess. Currently, Arthur Dimmesdale is torturing himself so juristically that he has developed a illness so bad that he has to constantly clutch his chest in pain. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband, returns to Boston and sees Hester at the scaffold. Roger Chillingworth, seeing Hester on the scaffold with Pearl and the scarlet letter on her chest, starts a man hunt for the father of Hester’s baby. Chillingworth is also a physician and is living with Arthur Dimmesdale to help out his heart conditions. Chillingworth continues to grow suspicious of Dimmesdale in his man hunt for Pearl’s father, so he is secretly spying on him and giving him potions to help out his illness, which are really for humiliation. Dimmesdale’s insecurities and hopes that he will go to heaven hold him back from confessing to the townspeople. Arthur Dimmesdale’s guilt has changed his character physically and physiologically throughout the book because he has developed an intense heart condition, and his guilt is so intense he is starving himself to try to manage it, although, his physical condition is partly due to the treatment and torture he is undergoing from Roger Chillingworth. In the novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne presents Dimmesdale as the town reverend who is heavily respected to someone who is mentally ill and afraid to confess his sin to the townspeople.

Judgment can be the the greatest plague of society. Judgment kripples acceptance, forward growth and blinds entire communities. Though in retrospect plagues are necessary, as is judgment. Without judgment humanity would be blind to people's character exposing them dangerous risks unstable people present. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne , Hester dealt with the judgment repercussions of adultery. Her sin caused society's judgment of her to rise and fall, in tandem producing negative and positive effects for Hester. Throughout the novel the Puritan community shifts their views of Hester. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, judgment that plagued Hester as a result of her sin evolved and shifted the communities views of her.

The Scarlet Letter is a novel about a Puritan woman who has committed adultery and must pay for her sin by wearing a scarlet “A'; on her bosom. The woman, Hester Prynne, must struggle through everyday life with the guilt of her sin. The novel is also about the suffering that is endured by not admitting to one’s wrongs. Reverend Mister Dimmesdale learns that secrecy only makes the guilt increase. Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to display how guilt is the everlasting payment for sinful actions. The theme of guilt as reparation for sin in The Scarlet Letter is revealed through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of northeastern, colonial settings, various conflicts, and

To begin, Hawthorne uses the scarlet letter “A” to reinforce the theme of Guilt. Hester Prynne, the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter, is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” upon her bosom because she has committed the sin of adultery. This leads Hester to feel guilty for the rest of her life. Hawthorne states, “... that scarlet letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself” (Hawthorne 51). The quote shows how feeling guilt has made her much more distant from the rest of the townspeople. Hester experiences this agonizing guilt whenever she glances in a mirror, or down at her chest. Pearl is the result of Hester’s

The presence of guilt has been felt by all human beings. As guilt grows in a

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.

Throughout the contemporary and classic novel, there are a few similarities the two books share. In both books, Speak and The Scarlet Letter, one of the main themes is shame and outcasts. Both Melinda (the main character in Speak) and Hester (the main character in The Scarlet Letter) feel shame for their actions brought on them. The shame brought on to them have very many similarities and a few differences. One of the similarities is that Melinda and Hester feel so much shame for their actions that they will not name their perpetrator. They both decide to keep it to themselves until the end of the story. Another being that their shame does cause them to keep to themselves, and this starts to make them feel very lonely. They both feel that no

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

Guilt is like a termite; it eats away a man’s soul in the same way a termite eats away at a house’s foundation. In his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne covers this undeniable reality through his character, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. The greatly revered Puritan minister, who has the “earnest of high eminence in his profession,”(50) broke the laws that he represents by committing the great sin of adultery and even having a child with his partner-in-sin, Hester Prynne, who is married to the missing scholar Roger Chillingworth. These sins, though, pale in comparison to his greatest sin: Dimmesdale did not admit to his sins like Prynne; Dimmesdale tries to evade the dagger or guilt, which turns out to only pierce his heart all

Arthur Dimmesdale is a fictional character written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1850’s from the book, “The Scarlet Letter.” Arthur Dimmesdale went through great lengths of guilt and suffering throughout the book. He is a Puritan minister who had a child named Pearl, whose mother was Hester Prynne. They hide their relationship together in the years of Pearl growing up. Arthur Dimmesdale was the only Puritan out of four main characters in The Scarlet Letter. Dimmesdale knows that he has sinned in the very beginning of the novel, but kept all his feelings inside, letting the guilt overwhelm him until the end. When he committed adultery, he knew that what he did was wrong, but at the time he had only put his hand over his heart symbolizing that his sin pains him but only secretly. Dimmesdale believed that his sin and guilt has helped the sermons on Sunday and has helped him become a better minister. Although Arthur Dimmesdale knows he has sinned, he still refuses to confess to the church and accept his punishment. Dim-mesdale went through a lot of suffering from holding his guilt in because he was not allowed to confess. He promised Hester that he shall not confess knowing the consequences of committing adultery with Hester, who was a married woman. Guilt took over his life to the point where the mental pain and the physical pain brought him to death.

During this point in the book it is easy to tell that Hester is not asking Dimmesdale to defend her out of sympathies but because Pearl is also his daughter. Hester is admonishing the man she loves to save her daughter while secretly brazening her heart to him. She knows that by begging him that there could be a possibility to keep Pearl and the man she loves without exposing his secret as well. When Hester referenced the scarlet letter that was on her chest she was bringing up their licentious matters so that he would remember why they were in that position. Dimmesdale knows that he loves both his daughter and her mother, but it would have been suspicious of him to defend them when their predicament caused them to live in secret. Also it is

Have you ever felt a nagging throng of guilt; almost like an uneasy anxiety or an unbearable weight on your shoulders? Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, emphasizes the cases of this heavy feeling, as well as the “untold traits” we have that the worst could beinferred. Humans are naturally afraid of judgment, and the things we are afraid to be judged for,we hide. Hawthorne says that people should be open about their flaws, and this can be considered true in a variety of cases, but in some, it can prove quite false. Guilt is a feeling everyone will experience many times in their life.

Vengeance is the act of recovering justice by forcing the opposing individual to endure same punishment or exceed a far more harsh consequence than the victim. People often try to obtain revenge upon others for the wrong reasons due to fact that they believe the actions or sins of another person have affected the victim in a negative way. The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, uses the relentless character, Mr. Roger Chillingworth, to describe the result of being resentful and unforgiving to his wifes secret lover, Reverend Dimmesdale. The Scarlet Letter also vividly describes how Chillingworth became self absorbed with vengeance and how vengeance changes his physical appearance.

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.