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The Symbolism Of Adultery In The Scarlett Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

756 Words4 Pages

In the 1600’s when America was just in the original 13 colonies, the puritans were the dominant religion during that time period . It was a strict and “sinless” society or it claimed to be as such. But no one was really sinless, everyone has sinned many times. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, he created the characters of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. These two committed the act of adultery which was an extreme sin for the puritans, and the two faced consequences. In the novel Hawthorne uses the symbolism of adultery to essentially carry on The Scarlet Letter. One of Hawthorne's most used and most apparent ways of showing us the symbolism of adultery is using Dimmesdale's mental state. It is shown to us when Dimmesdale says …show more content…

Dimmesdale towards the end of the story stated “This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.”-page 202. Which explains his guilt and how he perceives it and treats it. But he also takes it like this “Although engaging in adultery would certainly break the rules of his society, he is so stifled that he further compounds his guilt by refusing to admit the truth and claim Pearl as his child”- (Temple) The quote by Jennifer Temple tells us that not only does the fact Adultery is a major sin in his belief system but that not admitting it “compounded” his guilt and made is life harder mentally which eventually lead to physical trouble. Another major part of the book reveals how characters go about their sin like when Hester “Hester reconciles herself to the community through her self-sacrificing service to others, a self-imposed penance, and thus becomes "the town's own Hester" (Taylor). Thus tells us how Hester went about her guilt which the story doesn’t talk about much due to how she handled it compared to Dimmesdale who’s guilt was literally killing him. But the quote also states how Hester became a better person and how she

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Dimmesdale is considered “a learned and pious minister of the word” (Hawthorne 165) by the puritan community throughout the vast majority of this book. He, nevertheless, committed adultery with Hester and is therefore, as sinful as Hester in this situation. Through his human tendencies, Dimmesdale caused Hester to have Pearl, a daughter that was considered “freakish” and “elvish” (Hawthorne 66) by the Puritan people. Hawthorne agrees when he writes, “It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child and had just then peeped forth in mockery.”

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