Scarlet Letter And Dimmesdale's Guilt

In the book of Ezekiel, God tells Israel that He will replace their hearts of stone with living ones. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s living heart turns to stone under the judgment imposed upon her by the magistrates. Distancing herself the letter she must bear upon her chest, she allows her guilt to be nearly as removable as the mark upon her breast. Her illicit lover, Dimmesdale, lacks any such option, with the letter stitched on his skin, close to his living heart, reflecting his great pain and guilt. While not entirely rejecting her sin, Hester thrusts the letter away from her heart both physically and metaphorically, in contrast to Dimmesdale’s letter, which is etched onto his flesh. Each of these scarlet letters reflect the degree of the bearer’s guilt through its proximity to the heart, near when the …show more content…
Dimmesdale’s letter emerges from his heart, and the pain it inflicts grows throughout the novel, reflecting his growing guilt. Inversely, the letter is external to Hester’s heart, attached to her clothes, mirroring her reluctance to accept the guilt of her sin. In the forest scene, both Hester and Dimmesdale temporarily reject their guilt, casting off their letters to reflect this apostasy. Though in Ezekiel God offers living hearts, Hester and Dimmesdale struggle to accept this over their hearts of stone.
Pressing on his heart, Dimmesdale associates the closeness of the letter to his guilt. When he addresses Hester in the first scaffold scene, he implores her to admit her fellow adulterer. Dimmesdale urges her that yielding up her lover’s name would be better than for him to “hide a guilty heart throughout life,” and that he “hath not the courage to grasp the bitter cup of confession for himself” (63). Through his words at the scaffold, Dimmesdale implies that the “open ignominy” that “heaven hath granted” Hester allows her guilt to be external rather