Arthur Dimmesdale's Suffering In Scarlet Letter

Sophocles once said “Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.” In the novel The Scarlet Letter, hiding from the truth destroys the character Arthur Dimmesdale. In the novel, Arthur is a Puritan minister and has fathered an illegitimate child, Pearl, with Hester Prynne, and he seeks to hide the truth of his relationship with her. While he longs to hide his identity as Pearl 's’ father, Hester Prynne must have an “A” attached to her chest while she is condemned by her Puritan neighbors, during this time Dimmesdale seems to be living his life just as before as the town’s minister. Unfortunately, in the novel Dimmesdale 's guilt ends up getting the best of him and is what destroys him. Although it isn’t apparent it will be this way in the beginning of the novel, it becomes easier to realize what is causing all of Dimmesdale’s problems. …show more content…
“ She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison” (Hawthorne 50). In this excerpt we are able to analyze the fact that her sins are set forth and it is obvious that she is guilty of this crime allowing us to ask “Who is the father?” pieces come together in the story in the beginning allowing us to know more than the characters throughout the story. We see Hester judged and condemned for her sins, the letter on her chest places her in her own world of isolation and it seems as if she’ll be the one who suffers in this novel, but as the chapters progress we notice she isn’t the one living with the