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Summary Of Zoellick's 'Mistakes In The Scarlet Letter'

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Former president of the World Bank Robert Zoellick says this about making mistakes: “All of us make mistakes. The key is to acknowledge them, learn, and move on. The real sin is ignoring mistakes, or worse, seeking to hide them.” Zoellick states that ignoring or attempting to conceal mistakes is much worse than just accepting the mistake. This fits really well with one of the themes of the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne which is that certain sins can be worse or better than others. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne presents sin as something that has several tiers and can vary in severity. This is indicated by society's eventual acceptance of Hester Prynne, Reverend Dimmesdale's intense self-judgement, and Roger Chillingworth's …show more content…

In puritan society, adultery is a severe sin worthy of heavy punishment. Despite receiving the harsh sentence of having to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest for the rest of her life, Hester’s sin is the least of those of the main characters in the novel. In chapter five, Hawthorne says this of Hester, “Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, ⏤at her, the child of honorable parents, ⏤at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, ⏤at her, who had once been innocent, ⏤as the figure, the body, the reality of sin” (71). Because of her crime of …show more content…

In fact, the guilt of Reverend Dimmesdale seemed to magnify as time went on. Reverend Dimmesdale is exalted to a pious standard by the people of Boston but he is far from the perfect pastor that they think of him as. “They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love” (129). The truth is that Dimmesdale is Hester Prynne’s secret lover, the father of her daughter Pearl, and her co-conspirator in adultery. After seven years have passed, Arthur Dimmesdale has not confessed his sin to anyone and his pain, although different from Hester’s, has not subsided. “While

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