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Hypocrisy In The Scarlet Letter

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Hypocrisy in the Scarlet Letter A sin to Puritans was not taken lightly, hints the reason why Hester Prynne is punished so harshly for her sin of adultery. Puritans hold people accountable for just about everything. But, Puritans seem to ignore the unfortunate sin of hypocrisy, which is why they committ the sin themselves. Because Dimmesdale is a “Reverend Master” (Hawthorne 48) and a “godly pastor” (Hawthorne 48), everyone looks to him to be truthful and sincere. In the third chapter of the book, Dimmesdale tells Hester to “speak out the name of the fellow sinner” (Hawthorne 63). Hester refuses reveal their father’s name and tells Dimmesdale the father can do it himself. Dimmesdale does not reveal himself to be the father to the public. …show more content…

He is in pain mentally, because he knows what he did was wrong, but can't expose himself. He says, “What can thy silence do for him except it except it tempt him- yea, compel him, as it were- to add hypocrisy to send? Heaven has granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayst work out in open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him- who, perchance hath not the courage to grasp it for himself- the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!” (Hawthorne 63) Dimmesdale tries to give Hester the responsibility of telling the town that he is the father when it is his own responsibility. He also makes it sound like it is Hester's fault that he is a hypocrite by saying, heaven granted Hester a ignominy and she shouldn't deny the father from the cup that she has drank from. This makes Dimmesdale a bigger …show more content…

He tells Dimmesdale that he has known about Hester and him and anywhere they went he was never alone. "Hadn't thou sought the whole world over," said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, "there was no place so secret- no high place nor lower place, where thou couldst have escaped me- saved on this very scaffold (Hawthorne 230, 231). Chillingworth told Dimmesdale that he knew the whole time that Hester and him had a relationship and Dimmesdale was the father of Pearl. Chillingworth fails to mention his own hypocrisy and secret that he was plotting revenge on Dimmesdale. Chillingworth also never mentioned that him or Hester were ever

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Consequently, Arthur Dimmesdale is the cause of Hester Prynne's shame for he is the man whom Hester loves. No one knows he is the father of Pearl, Hester won't say and he isn't strong enough to speak up. He struggles with this knowledge that Hester is being punished and not him. The only truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect, (Hawthorne 142). Being a minister of God the citizens look up to him, and he feels guilty about his hidden sin.

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In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale commits a mortal sin by having an affair with a married woman, Hester Prynne. As a man of the cloth in Puritan society, Dimmesdale is expected to be the embodiment of the town’s values. He becomes captive to a self-imposed guilt that manifests from affair and his fear that he won’t meet the town’s high expectations of him. In an attempt to mitigate this guilt, Dimmesdale acts “piously” and accepts Chillingworth’s torture, causing him to suffer privately, unlike Hester who repented in the eyes of the townspeople. When Dimmesdale finally reveals his sin to the townspeople, he is able to free himself from his guilt.

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He and Hester do not let the town know that he is the father of an illegitimate child. This causes him to commit many transgressions against God. In the story, Dimmesdale does not raise Hester the way he is supposed to. 1 Timothy 5:8 says “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.(NIV)” After being shamed by the town, Hester moves out to an old cottage in the forest and has to work very hard to provide for her.

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He repeatedly asked her who the father of her newborn child was knowing that it was himself all along. He did not join Hester on the scaffold when he was just as deserving of the punishment. This kind of behavior showed just how harsh his personality was to be able to stand there and watch the public display of his secret lover. The book also described him as “stone faced,” showing no emotion towards Hester as he was constantly harassing her with questions that he already knew the answer to. In this way it is also easy to see just how cowardly the young Dimmsdale was at the beginning of

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937 Words | 4 Pages

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter takes place in the Massachusetts Bay colony during the 17th century. The story revolves around a young woman, named Hester Prynne, who is forced by her community to bestow a scarlet “A” on her chest for the rest of her life in order to remind her of the adulterous sin and crime she has committed. As her punishment, in the form of public humiliation, Hester is constrained to stand upon a scaffold in the town square while holding her illegitimate baby, Pearl. In the midst of the townspeople, she recognizes a familiar face; her long, lost husband who had been presumed dead at sea.

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The townspeople believe that Dimmesdale is doing God’s work with his determination to reveal the identity of this sinner so he can, “stand beside [Hester], on [her] pedestal of shame,” (62), but the only person who truly understands the meaning of Dimmesdale’s words is Hester, as she is the only person who knows he is the fellow adulterer. He reveals the information that he, “hath not the courage,” (62) to reveal himself, so he asks Hester to do it for him, so he can, “step down from [his] high place,” (62) to have his own public shaming; to relieve his guilt. Following Dimmesdale’s speech, Hester alludes to the fact that he is the father of her child with her words. She claims that her child will, “ never know an earthly [father],” , but only, “seek a heavenly father,” (63). Hester’s words are meant to be taken literally because of the community’s strong beliefs regarding religion, and that is how the townspeople interperate them, but they are also meant to refer to Dimmesdale.

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In the beginning of the novel when Hester Prynne is standing on the scaffold, she is enduring her punishment alone for their sin. Because Dimmesdale is the town’s minister, he asks Hester to confess the name of the father of her child. She says, “I will not speak!” He even says that Hester should confess the father of her child’s name because the father will only “add hypocrisy to sin” if he does not confess. He is trying to get Hester to admit to his sin, so that he will not have to do this.

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While Reverend Dimmesdale blocked out the world around him, “the spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along, unconscious of the burden” (Hawthorne, 144). Hawthorne uses irony to describe the huge burden that Dimmesdale had to carry since he did not admit to being the father of Pearl. Though he often put his hand over his heart no “imagination would have been irrelevant enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on both of them?” (Hawthorne, 149). While it is ironic that Hester and Dimmesdale bear the same physical mark- the scarlet ‘A’, the truth is revealed that the mysterious lover and father of little Pearl is Reverend Dimmesdale himself.

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What Does The Forest Symbolize In Chapter 16 Of The Scarlet Letter

522 Words | 3 Pages

Dimmesdale believes that he has not shown penitence for his sin and still believes himself to be unclean. 6) We learn that Dimmesdale and Hester love each other and that Dimmesdale is the father of Pearl. Hester and Dimmesdale believe that their sin is nothing in comparison to the heinous sin that Chillingworth has committed by using their sin against them. 7)

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Chillingworth's Loss Of Innocence In Scarlet Letter

965 Words | 4 Pages

Later on in novel, Chillingworth forces Hester to keep his identity a secret from Dimmesdale, the townspeople, and Pearl. Chillingworth begs, "'One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee... Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour, Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this town that know me.'" (Hawthorne 68).

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665 Words | 3 Pages

He was held above the rest, and this is proven in one of the first scenes of the book. As Hester is above the townspeople on a scaffold, Dimmesdale, Governor Wilson, and others are still above her. But, as the reader soon discovers, Arthur Dimmesdale is his own worst enemy. It is unknown until the end but he is actually the father of Hester’s child. He hates himself and often inflicts physical pain on himself. "

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1054 Words | 5 Pages

While Hester knew she had a husband she still laid down and had sexual intercourse with Dimmesdale. With Hester doing these actions she kept the secret to herself who the baby father was and who her husband was. With doing that it caused Hester a lot of pain because she was the only one who knew the secret (besides the two people she had relations with). This is called dramatic Irony, which is when the only people that knows things about the situation is the author, the characters that already know, and the reader. Dramatic irony is what is occurring in this book because it is explaining to us how Dimmesdale know he is the baby father, Chillingworth know he is the husband, and we also know these things.

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508 Words | 3 Pages

Following the scene where Olive pretends to have sex with Brandon, Brandon is congratulated for his acts that bolster his reputation around school and end his bullying, while Olive’s reputation continues to tarnish and she is often referred to as a tramp. Similarly, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s reputation is much more dishonored than Dimmesdale’s, even though he reveals his sin at the last second. Dimmesdale, continues to be looked at as a hero and the Puritans choose to ignore his sin in effort to continue the practice of their faith. In class, we talked about Hawthorne’s purpose to point out these hypocrisies and double-standards in the Puritan faith to act as a lesson and to resolve them today. However, watching Easy A it is clear to viewers that even modern society continues to use the Puritans hypocrisies and

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553 Words | 3 Pages

This explains how Dimmesdale is punishing himself because he felt guilty about not revealing his secret while Hester was on the scaffold. This leads to various tragic punishments, but the blame got the best of Dimmesdale. It consequently resulted him in speaking

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1597 Words | 7 Pages

Being in such a public position makes it nearly impossible to admit what he has done, and as that is the first step to growing into who you are, he cannot correctly alter his mask. The pompous paint begins to crack under the weight of his lies, but every Sunday before his sermon it gets a shiny, new coat. There are so many layers that he begins to lose sight of who he is as a person. We can see that Hawthorne uses this character to portray the worst possible outcome for an untruthful soul. In reference to this Hawthorne writes “To the untrue man, the whole universe is false, -it is impalpable, -it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.

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