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Scarlet Letter Arthur Dimmesdale Weak

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Many people are said to be weak individuals, because of how they choose to live their lives. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale is being characterized as a very weak individual who can only make bad decisions that cause him guilt and stress. Dimmesdale denies being the father of Pearl, and having an affair with Hester. Guilt begins to take over his life, and to make himself feel better about hester taking all the punishment, he harms himself. A man named Chillingworth, who claimed to be a doctor, made Dimmesdale feel worse about his secret, Dimmesdale let him get in his head. Reverend Dimmesdale was very weak for being a priest and putting no faith into his God. Reverend Dimmesdale is afraid of his town and his people finding out about his sin. As a priest he wants to seem holy and sinless like the people think him to be, so he hides the fact he and Hester committed adultery. When Hester is on the scaffold, Dimmesdale is asked to try and get Hester to confess who the father is, “If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will be made more …show more content…

Chillingworth is trying to find out who the father is and he comes to believe that it is Dimmesdale and manages to get into Dimmesdale’s head like he planned. Chillingworth drops hints to Dimmesdale to try to let him know he knows his secret. He talks about where he go his new medicine and calls Dimmesdale out on his lying in the process, “They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he has done better to confess during his lifetime” (Hawthorne 90). Here chillingworth is telling Dimmesdale that it is better to confess a sin while you are living, than to take that secret to the grave. Dimmesdale here reaches his breaking point and begins to have mental breakdowns and his illness grows

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Dimmesdale and Chillingworth both have secrets that make them look and act differently, their secrets affect their character and how they do their job. Dimmesdale is the father of Pearl but he doesn 't want to face the same humiliation as Hester did for his sins. Because of his secret he self punishes and fasts, he also preaches better than he did before although his health is failing. Chillingworth’s secret is that he was the husband of Hester while he was away, before she cheated on him. Chillingworth gets uglier and uglier driven by the need to get revenge on Pearl’s father.

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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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Dimmesdale’s True Colors Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, also the father of Hester’s child, showed prominent parts of his character throughout the story. The first trait the reader becomes aware of is Dimmesdale’s cowardice. He has no intentions of revealing his sin to the public, due to how highly he is seen in the community’s eyes. Remorse, or guilt, is another term that can be associated with Dimmesdale, growing increasingly more prominent as the novel goes on. Cowardice, a lacking of bravery when facing danger, was a trait that Dimmesdale carried.

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Dimmesdale is the biggest jerk of The Scarlet Letter. From the beginning of the book, Dimmesdale is a hypocrite. Although it is implied that he preaches against premarital sex as a Puritan pastor, Dimmesdale commits adultery with Hester. After getting Hester pregnant, he avoids visiting Hester and his daughter for seven years.

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Due to the fact that he restrains his emotions so painstakingly in favor of religion, he frequently refers to himself in a self-deprecating manner when alone and even to the point of inflicting physical pain upon himself as he wallows in his internal guilt of dodging the consequences of his affair with Hester Prynne. After Chillingworth is appointed as Dimmesdale’s medical adviser to observe his declining health, Chillingworth begins to start questioning Dimmesdale as to why he refuses medicine and treatment. Chillingworth then goes on to describe his view of Dimmesdale, as one who “did feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of intellect” (Hawthorne 102), therefore enjoying the freedom to think in other ways apart from the church. Alone, this observation already raises a question of how a minister so religiously inclined could possibly feel trapped within the church’s mindset. It becomes reasonable to consider if Dimmesdale actually knows who he is and if he really feels at ease giving everything to the church along with the burden of a sin hidden from the light of

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Many characters from The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, changed throughout the progression of the novel, — including Chillingworth, Hester, and even Pearl herself. No character, however, has changed as much as Dimmesdale has. Towards the beginning of the novel, Dimmesdale tries to ignore his sinful actions. Near the middle of the book, the clergyman, with the ‘help’ of Chillingworth, is able to realize his wrongdoings, and starts obsessively thinking of those wrongdoings. Around the end of the novel, with the help of the forest’s freedom, is able to finally repent correctly for his sin.

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Dimmesdale does not confess that he has committed a sin with Hester, and for a brutal seven years, he withholds his guilt inside of him. One of his worst sufferings is Pearl his own daughter rejects him. His child does not love him and washes off the kisses he gives her. Arthur Dimmesdale has the most tribulations without a doubt. He is faced to live with and tormented by not only his overwhelming guilt of sin, but moreover Roger Chillingworth who plagued him almost as much as his own conscience.

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Originally, the minister Dimmesdale had been a stable, respectable man of God; but as the story progresses, he is reduced to a life of pain and penance, walking around the world with “a hand over his heart”. The weight of DImmesdale’s sin has taken it’s toll upon his soul, and his guilt is consuming him. As of the? point in the story where Chillingworth opens up and discovers what is beyond Dimmesdale’s robes , we know what lies under Dimmesdale’s hand, on his chest we see a constant reminder of his greatest sin. Along with discovering what, assumed as self-punishment, is on Dimmesdale’s chest the readers also learn that Dimmesdale truly does feel bad for his sins and wants to repent. The protagonists are not the only people that change within

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How does wearing an A for the rest of your life because of a sin sound? Not only can it be traumatizing and cause effects of guilt and sin. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there are many characters that experience effects of guilt and sin, but mostly Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale are the ones that experience it the worst. Not only is there internal guilt, but the effects can also take a toll on the overall appearance of someone. Throughout "The Scarlet Letter," there are many obvious effects of sin and guilt throughout the book, where if might affect a person in a bad way.

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