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Guilt In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

792 Words4 Pages

Few sensations in the human experience stand as universal as sin. All who ever live on this Earth shall sin; and sin, with its war waging upon embattled humans roaming the earth, its pillaging and plundering the immense spectrum of human emotions, its seeping into every crevasse of the human experience, comes with an immense flurry of guilt, isolation, concealment, punishment, and consequences. With this burden of sin, all people must face this question: What happens when this sin—this horrible plague of blackness and death—overcomes an individual? In his book, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorn delves deep into this very question of what individuals do when guilt and the isolation resulting in the concealment of sins overtakes their soul. …show more content…

Verily, he suffered. With the iron will penitence, a will forged by the purplish-blue fires of guilt, so strong that not a thousand swords could slice it and so resolved that no pain shall dissuade it, Dimmesdale’s hand scourged a bloody, scarlet “A” upon his chest (Hawthorne, 81). Accompanying the scourges, almost daily vigils and fasts commence. Yet, if he confessed, if he revealed himself, his guilt would rush forth, like air from a ruptured balloon; but, Dimmesdale concealed sin isolated him from the community and cut him off from all hope of freedom; and so his sin, his guilt, his concealment, and his isolation stood too large a burden to bare. Scourged, scarred, and scarred, Dimmesdale’s raw and tortured soul direly yearned for peace. On that fateful night, Dimmesdale rushed from his abode to stand in the precise spot that Hester first mounted with the scarlet “A.” There stood no peril of discovery, no human breath around, no chance of revealing his sins to the town; and upon mounting the scaffold, emotion overtook Dimmesdale. “Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night” (Hawthorn, 83). What a miserable

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