Arthur Dimmesdale Hypocrisy

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The Captive Soul
Hypocrisy is an immense apprehension in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. One of the main characters, Arthur Dimmesdale, who is a highly respected priest, preaches all day about sin and is seen as a holy person, but he commits a sin that is rooted in the town of Boston for seven years. This sin is the cause of much anguish for all of the main characters in the novel which makes Dimmesdale an important source of hypocrisy. Hawthorne uses Dimmesdale, a highly respected religious official, as a source of hypocrisy to show that followers of the Puritan religion will idolize their leader without knowing their leader’s true background.
While Dimmesdale was prodding Hester to hand over the name of her lover at the first scaffold scene, he uneasily speaks for he is the father of Pearl. Dimmesdale conveys Hester to “be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him... though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life” (212). This is clearly …show more content…

When Pearl asks him to stand with her on the scaffold he replies with “Not so, my child. I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother thee one another day, but not to-morrow!” (383). Dimmesdale once again is afraid to show his sin to the world because he is not able to own up to it. He is not even generous enough to alleviate the burden that is set on Hester from her sin being revealed to the public. With all of this in consideration, Hawthorne seems to infer that a respected man with a guilty conscience would rather keep his position in society than do the right thing and release the guilt from his conscience which would then remove the societal pressure on those affected by that same

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