Dimmesdale's Suffering In Scarlet Letter

“There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you are useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.” - Sabaa Tahir. Unfortunately, in the novel The Scarlet Letter - Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Reverend Dimmesdale suffered the former to the point that he eventually died. Hester, Dimmesdale’s fellow adulteress, eventually deceased but it was most likely peaceful because she felt no conviction through publicly declaring what she had done. Through the suffering that Reverend Dimmesdale endured, Hawthorne demonstrates that running away from conviction or guilt can lead to demise. One of the ways that Dimmesdale that tried to escape the conviction or guilt he was feeling was by denying Pearl her offer for Dimmesdale to appear on the scaffold with Hester and her. Because of this, Pearl becomes more distant from Dimmesdale by …show more content…
The people that Dimmesdale teaches every week about sin and his God but did not have the courage to “admit” that he was a sinner in front of those people. It did not help that his congregation thought that he was perfect. It was eating him alive that he could not and did not tell them what he has done. When Dimmesdale finally opened up about his sin on the scaffold, some of his congregation did not condemn him but instead saw that, “After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.” This is not what Dimmesdale saw, as Dimmesdale saw himself deeper in sin than any of his congregation. Because of his views, he did not want to tell his congregation the full extent of how he had sinned, which is why he suffered even more - as he felt that he had been lying to his