Arthur Dimmesdale is a protagonist in the novel The Scarlet Letter and understood to be guilty of two sins, one of commission (his adultery with Hester Prynne) and of omission (his cowardly and hypocritical failure to confess. The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850 and inspired by his Puritan primogenitors in the 1630s. Because of his knowledge of the Puritans he is able to describe their strengths and portray their weakness as a colony and community. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is his depiction of the Puritan society and its flaws. It is important to acknowledge that the characters Hawthorne introduces are based upon his Puritan ancestry because he develops them as his own representations of the aspects of the Boston
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This scene starting in Chapter 16, “A Forest Walk,” and culminating in Chapter 19, “The Child at the Brook-Side,” is particularly important in terms of Dimmesdale’s moral character. It is here that the minister chooses sin consciously for the first time; before this, he had only transgressed “in a single instance,” and this “had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.”(Hawthorne 200) The minister is physically weak and hypersensitive, and therefore cannot control is cowardice or fear, but, as the narrator explains ever since committing adultery, Dimmesdale has found “acts...easy to arrange.” (Hawthorne 200) He enters the forest scene with “a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterized him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself liable to notice” (Hawthorne 188) meaning that he entered unselfconsciously, without a false face vulnerable and possibly on the verge of death. He pours his heart out to Hester about how miserable he is, about how he might have found peace “‘ [w]ere I an atheist.’” (Hawthorne 191) She begins to try and comfort him by claiming that the congregation reverences him but he retorts that it has only brought him more misery, that he has “‘laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!’” (Hawthorne 191) Hester protests that his “present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people’s eyes,” that he had done “petinence through his good works,” (Hawthorne 191) but Dimmesdale cries out that “[o]f penance I have had
This scene starting in Chapter 16, “A Forest Walk,” and culminating in Chapter 19, “The Child at the Brook-Side,” is particularly important in terms of Dimmesdale’s moral character. It is here that the minister chooses sin consciously for the first time; before this, he had only transgressed “in a single instance,” and this “had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.”(Hawthorne 200) The minister is physically weak and hypersensitive, and therefore cannot control is cowardice or fear, but, as the narrator explains ever since committing adultery, Dimmesdale has found “acts...easy to arrange.” (Hawthorne 200) He enters the forest scene with “a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterized him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself liable to notice” (Hawthorne 188) meaning that he entered unselfconsciously, without a false face vulnerable and possibly on the verge of death. He pours his heart out to Hester about how miserable he is, about how he might have found peace “‘ [w]ere I an atheist.’” (Hawthorne 191) She begins to try and comfort him by claiming that the congregation reverences him but he retorts that it has only brought him more misery, that he has “‘laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!’” (Hawthorne 191) Hester protests that his “present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people’s eyes,” that he had done “petinence through his good works,” (Hawthorne 191) but Dimmesdale cries out that “[o]f penance I have had