A story’s setting is often overlooked as auxiliary information, or a way to know when or where something happened. However, settings can often mean more than this. A reoccurring setting can symbolize a place where characters undergo change or similar motifs. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne is an American author who wrote dark romances, like The Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter is about an adulterer, Hester Prynne, who has an affair with the minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. In the novel, Dimmesdale is present at a scaffold three times, and there are many similarities in each scene. However, each time changes him in a way. Dimmesdale evolves throughout the three different scaffold-scenes in how he presents his “A”, how he acts towards Hester, and his emotional-state-of-being.
The way Dimmesdale acts towards Hester evolves throughout the novel, especially at the scaffold. In the beginning of the book, Dimmesdale is cloistered, but secretly demands Hester to reveal him to the town as her lover. He tells her to have no “pity and tenderness for him” as to stand with
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In chapter 3, Dimmesdale stands at the scaffold “with his hand upon his heart” (108), a symbol of The Scarlet Letter. Not only does Dimmesdale stand at the scaffold like this in chapter 3, but also in chapter 12. The narrator describes the scene as the minister standing “with his hand over his heart” (240). He gripped his heart in pain, a symbol just like Hester’s “A”. Hester wears her letter and so does Dimmesdale since they both are sinners. This pattern ends in chapter 23 with the third scaffold scene, as Dimmesdale “tore away the ministerial band from before his breast” and “revealed” (404) his letter to the town. He reveals his “A” because hiding it had caused guilt and trouble in him, deteriorating Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale had gone from cloistering to shamelessly showing his act of sin to the town with each scaffold