Essay On Cruelty In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter'

Is ignorance truly bliss? Unfortunately in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet letter an answer to this age old question is nowhere to be found. This is because Hester Prynne had a daughter out of wedlock. This living embodiment of sin made it impossible for her to save herself from the condemnation put upon her. The central part of this condemnation was a certificate of damnation. This certificate being a scarlet A. It was to be worn upon her chest at all times. The A stood for adulterer, However its meaning is ambiguous. For no one ever sees the hidden A that Dimmesdale wears on his chest beneath his clothes. His suffering is internal, while hester's is external. All of this ties into the underlying meaning of the story which is that the truth is the only thing that will ever remain constant. People often times create issues when they attempt to cut corners around it. For this reason …show more content…
He represents the epitome of hypocrisy, and the hidden side of the scarlet letter A. Dimmesdale suffers from an internal guilt he feels may be worse than hester's external guilt. He whips himself at night, has an extremely difficult time sleeping, and lives with the daily ritual of contemplating weather or not he is going to confess his sins to the world. His lack of transparency creates a living hell for himself. The puritan society of boston massachusetts in the middle seventeenth century has no grey area. As a result all of the members look up at the reverend and perceive him to be all good, in contrast they think of hester as all bad. One is either seen as entirely aligned with god or entirely unaligned with god. Society's perception of dimmesdale as this elusive god like character speaks volumes about what would have happened if he would have confessed earlier. Mostly due to the fact that he was one of the most highly respected members of the