How Sin affects People

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How does sin affect people and their nature? Sin, happening to be the darkness of the world that causes immorality, affects people in countless ways. Sin has the ability to change people completely without any forewarning. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, tells the story of how sin affects the lives of people. “When he referred to sin, he seemed to assume a force of evil so pervasive that it did not need to be embodied in anyone or in any particular action. It was all general and vague,” (Donoghue, 2). It demonstrates this through the characters of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. Sin affected these three people in different ways: Hester lived an awfully shunned, isolated life; Dimmesdale felt the guilt plaguing him till the day he died; and Chillingworth became a sinister, spiteful man consumed with revenge. According to Nathaniel Hawthorne, sin affects people by completely altering their personalities and transforming the way others felt about them into something undesired. This was shown through his three characters: Roger Chillingworth, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Hester Prynne.
Roger Chillingworth was cold and uncaring, yet he was calm and regular in the eyes of others. He was a physician. He cared about how he was seen in the eyes of others and was selfish. His unkind nature started to spiral the day he found out that Hester had committed adultery. He wanted to know who the man was. Although she Hester would never revile the man she committed her sinful act with, he was determined to discover who it was. His nature was not what it had been before. He had become more evil and sinister. “But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was she best remembered in h...

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...be molded by it, like Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. Sin will change people, but it is up to them if it changes them for the better or for the worse.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2003. Print.
Pimple, Kenneth D. "'Subtle, but remorseful hypocrite': Dimmesdale's Moral Character." Studies in the Novel 25.3 (Fall 1993): 257-271. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 158. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 11 May 2014.
Donoghue, Denis. "Hawthorne and Sin." Christianity and Literature 52.2 (2003): 215+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 11 May 2014.
"Who? The Characters." The Scarlet Letter: A Reading. Nina Baym. Boston: Twayne, 1986. 52-82. Twayne's Masterwork Studies 1. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 11 May 2014.

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