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Suffering In The Scarlet Letter By Arthur Dimmesdale

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The Scarlet Letter has shown the many hardships and sufferings of a plethora of its characters, if not all throughout the novel. It is without a doubt that Pearl, Hester, and Dimmesdale are the characters that endure the most adversities. From Pearl watching her mother go through agony, to Dimmesdale being haunted by his sin, and to Hester being harassed by the Puritan society. Out of these three characters, Arthur Dimmesdale is most certainly the character that bears the burden the most. The effects of sin on the mind, body, and soul of Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Hester are all visible even though there are manifested in different ways for each character. Baby Pearl being without having a father is its own suffering. She is not accepted by society …show more content…

He is unquestionably the character that suffers the most in The Scarlet Letter. The guilt of sin caused him to mentally and physically torture himself. “In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh.” (141). 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. “ He fancied himself given over a fiend, to be tortured with dreams and frightful thoughts, the sting of remorse and the despair of pardon.”(168) To make his suffering even worse he reverts to self-punishment in the form of fasting, consecutive sleepless vigils, and relentless studying of the

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In The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller use a great number of rhetorical strategies in order to argue that a person's conscience should take precedence over their religion. A rhetorical strategy that is used quite often by the two authors is pathos, in which they tapped into the reader's emotions to convince them of this idea. In The Scarlet Letter the character Dimmesdale is the one with the heavy conscience due to the fact that he is Pearl’s biological father. He does not admit to this sin because he is in an eminent position by being a minister of the community.

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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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Pearl is a constant reminder of their sin, in which Hester holds onto public guilt, and Dimmesdale onto private guilt. Both Hester and Dimmesdale are destroyed by their guilty consciences, but Hester can redeem herself in the town. Dimmesdale continues to be brought down by sin. In the novel

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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

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Arthur Dimmesdale was the town minister in The Scarlet Letter, a story of a young woman who committed adultery and faced the consequences, such as wearing a scarlet “A” on her chest. Dimmesdale was a very interesting character because he was very religious but also committed a sin that haunted him everyday. He also happened to be the man who was involved in the young woman’s adultery. He was never convicted, however he still faced the consequences everyday. Dimmesdale was a man of God.

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Dimmesdale can't escape the guilt of committing adultery with hester so he doesn't admit to it. So he doesn't ruin his reputation with the townspeople. He doesn't want the town to know of his sins. Instead he decides to make himself miserable just so he doesn't

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One moral consequence of sin is guilt. In Dimmesdale's case his sin was a great one. He had committed adultery with a married women, Hester. Hester received her punishment, but Dimmesdale goes unpunished, causing him to be ridden with guilt. Guilt was the culprit of all of Dimmesdale’s suffering.

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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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In life, unhealthy unburdening will lead to an inevitable demise. The only unknown is whether the person or a toxic environment around oneself is the cause. In the Scarlet Letter Hawthorne writes Dimmesdale as a beloved minister who is sinfully in love with Hester Prynne a wife, a mother, and an outsider in the eyes of the townspeople. Dimmesdale and Hester have a daughter Pearl, who’s born out of sin due to Hester’s pre-existing marriage to a man named Chillingworth, a “doctor” who is often referred to as a leech due to his fiend ways. The story takes place in Boston, Massachusetts, a town that contains generations of people who have been groomed to repress and never express.

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Hester Prynne is a victim of the scarlet letter, but Arthur Dimmesdale is the victim. When reading The Scarlet Letter, by Nathanial Hawthorne, it is easy to focus on Hester and her suffering, as she is the primary focus of the novel. But, with a little close reading, it soon becomes apparent that Dimmesdale’s suffering is more destructive than Hester’s. As a result of her crime, Hester is banished to the fringes of Puritan society; inducing an almost complete social exile. Yet Dimmesdale's position as the head of the Church creates a moral quagmire of his values and sin; one which his inability to reconcile and drives him to self loathing.

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The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, describes the experiences of a woman, Hester Prynne, who is publicly shamed for adulterous actions, which resulted in a child. The book shows the progression of her life and her daughter’s in addition to the life of Arthur Dimmesdale, who is the father of Hester’s daughter, but never revealed it publicly in fear of being viewed differently by his peers. Dimmesdale and Hester, connected by the act of adultery, have both experienced stress and unforgiveness, resulting in negative changes to their mental states. Troubled by this stress and unforgiveness, both Dimmesdale and Hester reflect the negative changes through internal struggle, yet in slightly different manners. Suffering from stress

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Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a multitude of imagery and symbolism to serve as metaphors for different themes in his novel The Scarlet Letter. The theme sin versus guilt, appears often throughout the novel. It is often accompanied by the symbol of the scarlet letter, serving as a constant reminder of the guilt each of the main characters carry, as a result of the sins they have committed. Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale each carry the burden of living a tainted life, being that they have all committed a sin. Hester and Dimmesdale both committed the ultimate sin of adultery.

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The Scarlet Letter Essay Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale were two of the main sinners in The Scarlet Letter. Both characters kept their sins secrete throughout the story. These sins included adultery, revenge, and even murder. Out of the two sinners, Chillingworth was the worst, because he never felt guilt for the terrible things he was doing. Dimmesdale spent his entire life in guilt and remorse for the sins he had committed (“Who”).

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Imagine living through gruesome physical and mental torment for seven long years of life. This affliction would be due to a sin that was committed out of wedlock and causes a long and harrowing death. Arthur Dimmesdale is one of the characters Nathaniel Hawthorne uses to present this torment in The Scarlet Letter to present how failing to survive the effects of sin can lead to a characters death also known as not receiving redemption. Correspondingly, Roger Chillingworth exemplifies through the transgressor of revenge that not bearing through the effects of sin does not lead to redemption. Uniquely, Hester Prynne is displayed by Hawthorne to expatiate how being driven to live through the effects of sin eventually lead to redemption.

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"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. "(Hawthorne, 211) The Scarlet Letter, based in the 1600s, is said to be “America’s first physiological novel” because it represents the true facets of sin and guilt of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale.(PBS) The main subject, Mr. Dimmesdale, holds the principal conflict in the novel and is the true meaning of “human frailty and sorrow”.(Haw., 46) Author Nathaniel Hawthorne incorporates many psychological aspects relating to the bewildering character of Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and the repression of sin he holds throughout the novel.

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