Adultery In The Scarlet Letter

In The Scarlet Letter the town often forgets that to make a child, a man and a woman are both needed. This is a concept that unfortunately, is still hard for some people to grasp. When a man does the same thing as a woman, in certain cases a man won’t be judged as harshly as a woman. In this circumstance of adultery, the woman is usually branded as a “harlot”, while the man is often seen to have done nothing wrong. Such is the case in The Scarlet Letter between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester is branded with the Letter A to wear on all her clothing to show that she is an adulterer. For some time the town put her in jail and were going to take her daughter Pearl away from her, all for sleeping with another man who was not her husband.

They say it’s noble of him to have confessed his sins to them and that it was a way to teach them a lesson. “It was to teach them, that the holiest among us but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward.” (Hawthorne, 410) Also because Dimmesdale was such a respected man and Reverend, they were very quick to defend his actions, while Hester, had been belittled for the exact same thing Dimmesdale confessed too. “Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends- especially a clergyman’s- will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust” (Hawthorne, 410) The reader is given a clear view that Arthur Dimmesdale is, in fact, a sinner. The previously mentioned quote is evidence that retributions a man receives is nothing compared to a woman’s in the case of adultery. Hester and Dimmesdale both committed the same crime, but Hester was out casted and looked down on, while Dimmesdale keep a good reputation even after the truth came out.

Hester Prynne was just a woman who fell in love after her husband was assumed dead. While she and Dimmesdale made the mistake of adultery, they had a beautiful strong daughter as an outcome. Unfortunately for Dimmesdale, he never got to have a strong father-daughter relationship with Pearl because he’d be ridiculed for being a reverend and having committed such a crime and not coming forward. Hester endured constant public shame, her own guilt, raising a daughter on her own, and having to make a living in a town where people constantly judged her for one mistake. However, while Arthur Dimmesdale dealt with his self-inflicted punishment, he never lost his reputation with the town when it came out that he was most likely Pearl’s father. His clergymen made it their mission to make sure that Dimmesdale’s name remained in good graces with the town. His status in the town allowed for people to dismiss that fact that he committed the same crime as Hester, yet received the complete opposite reaction than Hester was subjected too. He was actually praised for his doing, claiming that his actions were used to teach everyone that “we are all sinners alike”. They regarded his actions as a mistake rather than a crime, while they held Hester to the upmost punishment. Nobody questioned Dimmesdale’s capability to be