Self Guilt In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Many people on this earth have to deal with self guilt on the daily; Guilt affects the body, the mind and also the spirit. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, he uses two crime committing characters to illustrate the theme of guilt. He shows the characters who both committed the crime of adultery, struggling to live a normal life mentally and physically. Their self guilt managed to take over their emotions which affected their actions. Self guilt was expressed through their body, their mind and their spirit. To start, the theme of self guilt affects Dimmesdale's physical image and physical health. In the beginning of the story Dimmesdale's health was perfect; He was handsome, in shape and full of life. Dimmesdale had self guilt mainly because he knew he had sinned but he did not know how to confess his sins. Dimmesdale needed to find a way to free himself of the guilt in order to stay healthy, but he lacked the courage to do so. In the novel, a specific time when Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed the theme of self guilt was when Dimmesdale burned the scarlet letter onto his chest. At that moment, the sufferings of his body were the expressions of …show more content…
Hawthorne creates the theme of guilt by affecting Dimmesdale's spirit which leads him to lose faith in god. Dimmesdale is eventually no longer able to see what was once important and he can no longer hear the small voice that kept him sane. Dimmesdale lost touch in his morals and himself as a person spiritually. In the novel it states, “In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had piled it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh.” This is an example of Dimmesdale's inner battle of a confused conscience as an effect of the self guilt that he was