Everyone makes a mistake in life that they regret; in Dimmesdale’s case, he kept his sin hidden. Hawthorne uses various methods to depict Dimmesdale’s struggle to overcome the oppressive Puritan society and reveal his true identity. The laws, religion, and members of the community set high expectations for Dimmesdale to live up to. He is pressured to please his people and obey the rules of his society, but he knows that they will not accept who he really is. The community’s expectations cause Dimmesdale to punish himself for his sin instead of confessing. He struggles for years to come to terms with his mistake, and in the end he is able to accept his true identity and confess his sin publicly. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne illustrates how the community’s influence over Dimmesdale prevents him from embracing his true identity, highlighting the negative effects the community can have on a person.
Negative and restrictive diction are used to portray the detrimental aspects of the community’s strict laws, which prevent Dimmesdale from revealing his true identity to the public. The Puritans are described as, “…a people amongst whom religion and law [are] almost identical, and in whose character both [are] so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline [are] alike made venerable and awful,” illustrating the high expectations of the community and the pressure their laws place on Dimmesdale (Hawthorne 47-48). The restrictive diction of the identical value of “religion and law” highlights the severity of Dimmesdale’s sin in the eyes of society, which explains his inability to confess his sin due to the harsh punishments. Negative diction is used to describe how the “mildest and the severest act...
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...ity. The community’s negative influence over Dimmesdale makes him unable to reveal his true identity, except in the face of death.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, tells the story of a young adulteress named Hester Prynne and her bastard daughter, Pearl, as they endure their residence in a small town of the Massachusetts British settlement in the1600s. Pearl’s illegitimate birth is the result of the relationship between Hester Prynne and a minister of the Puritan church, Arthur Dimmesdale. Through public defamation and a perpetual embroidery of an “A” upon her dress, Hester is punished for her crime. Whereas, Arthur choses to suppress the secret over illuminating the truth and endures internal and self-inflicted punishment as consequence.
Before Dimmesdale’s untimely death in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale committed the sins of adultery and lying. In order to keep his sins a secret, Dimmesdale spoke nothing of his involvement in the affair until it tore him apart from the inside out.When Dimmesdale tried to confess his sin to his congregation, they saw the confession as if it were part of his sermon. “He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood”. (Hawthorne 171) Instead of correcting their assumption, Dimmesdale went along with it, once more hiding his sinfulness. When Dimmesdale finally confessed his sin openly...
Beginning with the very first words of The Scarlet Letter the reader is thrust into a bleak and unforgiving setting. “A thong of bearded men, in sad-colored garments,” that are said to be “intermixed with women,” come off as overpowering and all-encompassing; Hawthorne quickly and clearly establishes who will be holding the power in this story: the males (Hawthorne 45). And he goes even further with his use of imagery, painting an even more vivid picture in the reader’s mind. One imagines a sea of drab grays and browns, further reinforcing the unwelcoming feeling this atmosphere seems to inheren...
People often keep secrets in an effort to hide their sins from others. This is a risky since secrets have a way of manifesting themselves externally, and thus, letting everyone know of their owner’s sins. Hidden sin is a prominent theme in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter. Names like Chillingworth and Dimmesdale let the reader know how, in reality, these characters are, before ever really encountering them. Characters whom the reader will encounter in this novel are going through some type of dilemma on the inside, which begins to show itself in the exterior of the particular individual. In The Scarlet Letter, two studious individuals, Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale, two of the main characters in the novel, each possess their own sins which begin to show themselves in their outermost features, each brought apon themselves for their own respective reasons.
To the town, Dimmesdale appears to be perfectly righteous and is respected highly; while in reality, he is just as guilty as Hester. The hypocrisy of his character first begins to develop as he denies his own sinfulness
Bruckner, Sally. "The Scarlet Letter: Critical Evaluation." Masterplots. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Pasadena: Salem, 1996. 5847-5851.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. "The Scarlet Letter." The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors. Ed. Charles Wells Moulton. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith Publishing, 1959. 341-371.
The Scarlet Letter involves many characters that go through several changes during the course of the story. In particular, the young minister Dimmesdale, who commits adultery with Hester, greatly changes. He is the moral blossom of the book, the character that makes the most progress for the better. It is true that Dimmesdale, being a minister, should be the role model of the townspeople. He is the last person who should commit such an awful crime and lie about it, but in the end, he confesses to the town. Besides, everybody, including ministers, sin, and the fact that he confesses illustrates his courage and morality.
Hawthorne's statement through Chillingworth offers insight into Dimmesdale and Chillingworth along with a representation of Hawthorne's disapproval of the Puritan values. This disapproval is the driving force of the novel, and it underlies the relationship between Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and the prevailing greater justice of God. The contrast of the Puritans' justice and God's makes the message of the story greater than a love story or a story of a sin. With this theme, The Scarlet Letter becomes a comparison of the flawed justice of humans and the divine justice of God.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mr. Dimmesdale’s greatest fear is that the townspeople will find out about his sin of adultery with Hester Prynne. Mr. Dimmesdale fears that his soul could not take the shame of such a disclosure, as he is an important moral figure in society. However, in not confessing his sin to the public, he suffers through the guilt of his sin, a pain which is exacerbated by the tortures of Roger Chillingworth. Though he consistently chooses guilt over shame, Mr. Dimmesdale goes through a much more painful experience than Hester, who endured the public shame of the scarlet letter. Mr. Dimmesdale’s guilt is much more damaging to his soul than any shame that he might have endured.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. "The Scarlet Letter." The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors. Ed. Charles Wells Moulton. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith Publishing, 1989. 341-371.
Gerber, John C. "Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter." The Scarlet Letter: A Norton Critical Edition. Eds. Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988.
Reid, Bethany. "Narrative of the Captivity and Redemption of Roger Prynne: Rereading The Scarlet Letter." Studies in the Novel 33.3 (Fall 2001): 247-267. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 158. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 3 Feb. 2012.
Kaul, A.N. Character and Motive in The Scarlet Letter. Critical Quarterly 10 1968, pp. 373-84. Print.
The Scarlet Letter is a fictional novel that begins with an introductory passage titled ‘The Custom-House’. This passage gives a historical background of the novel and conveys the narrator’s purpose for writing about the legend of Hester Prynne even though the narrator envisions his ancestors criticizing him and calling him a “degenerate” because his career was not “glorifying God”, which is very typical of the strict, moralistic Puritans. Also, although Hawthorne is a Romantic writer, he incorporates properties of Realism into his novel by not idealizing the characters and by representing them in a more authentic manner. He does this by using very formal dialogue common to the harsh Puritan society of the seventeenth century and reflecting their ideals through this dialogue. The Puritans held somewhat similar views as the Transcendentalists in that they believed in the unity of God and the world and saw signs and symbols in human events, such as when the citizens related the meteo...