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Puritan ideals and values
Arguement on The Puritans
Essays over the puritans
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Puritan ideals and values
Arguement on The Puritans
Essays over the puritans
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
In the book The scarlet letter , Nathaniel Hawthorne questions the reader by questioning whether it is okay to punish sinners since we all have committed sins. Scarlet letter takes place in massachustes in new england in the time of colonization of the new world.at the time massachustes is very religious and the church has alot of power over the people, they control almost evry aspect of their life and punish thoose who commit sins. Dimmesdale is the head of the church in salem massachusetts and he is defined by how people admired him and how people liked him, this traits affect the theme and other characters in the story because it makes dimmesdale look pure and sin free making people make wrong assumption and decisions when it come to dimmesdale. At the beginning of the book Dimmesdale is liked by his community and is well respected.
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.
Arezu Lotfi Mr. Burd, Block A American Lit 11 November, 2015 Fight or Flight With the inner struggle of guilt, a person can either be redeemed or destroyed. In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne Hester Prynne is ridiculed publicly by the Puritan community for adultery. Mr. Dimmesdale, the man Hester cheats with is a young minister in the town, and hides his sin from the community. Together the two have a daughter named Pearl, that Hester raises.
Arthur Dimmesdale: Inside His Own Version of Hell In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky spoke, “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a rounded character such as Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, displays vital roles in the novel: a highly regarded Reverend in a Puritan society and the father of protagonist Hester Prynne’s child, Pearl. Through the well-written and three-dimensional character of Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne exhibits the themes of guilt and suffering.
A narcissistic personality often causes turmoil, with the ever-present black hole of self-importance potentially manifesting into an abusive relationship. In The Scarlet Letter, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a narcissistic personality is seen in the character of Dimmesdale, the reverend in the Puritan town of 17th century Boston, and secret lover of Hester Prynne. Hester, having given birth to a child out of wedlock, is forced to wear the letter “A” on her chest as punishment for her adultery. She is ceaselessly insulted and ostracized by the other Puritans for the rest of her time in the town. Meanwhile, Hester refuses to reveal who her lover is and thus, Dimmesdale is able to maintain his facade of a pure and holy reverend.
In The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne makes it evidently clear that the Minister, Dimmesdale, is the father of Hester Prynne's illegitimate child, Pearl. With a series of increasingly elevated indications of his fathership, Hawthorne is able to foreshadow Dimmesdale’s role in the adultery that causes Hester to live her life in solitude. As the novel entails, Hawthorne introduces Dimmesdale to readers in The Recognition, which is a slight giveaway in itself. Yet, Hawthorne describes Dimmesdale so meticulously, unlike many of the other characters, which consequently gives off that he must be a very important character in the novel.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is convicted of adultery and the whole town ostracises her for her sin and the secrecy of who the father is, who is coincidentally their preacher, Reverend Dimmesdale. The town fails to find out the true identity of the father until he confesses seven years later after the birth of Pearl. While Hester is able to forgive herself with the help of her only treasure, Pearl, Reverend Dimmesdale does not forgive himself. When Rev. Dimmesdale fails to confess and forgive himself, he dooms his life forever because of the burden of his sin; but, not only did it hurt his life, it hurt Hester and Pearl and the rest of the community. Reverend Dimmesdale feels very guilty for not confessing to
Hawthorne uses several similes to express the magnitude of Dimmesdale’s deception of the Puritan churchgoers, comparing Dimmesdale’s face to one that has “the light of heaven beaming from it”. In this comparison, Hawthorne asserts that the churchgoers not only respect Dimmesdale, but they idolize him, making his pain and guilt worse by reminding him of his deception. He also compares Dimmesdale’s words to those of the Holy Spirit, who descends from heaven during the Christian Pentecost, which is ironically a sort of “grace” for sinners such as Dimmesdale. Additionally, Hawthorne uses strong diction with a connotation of guilt and shame, such as “misery”,”delusion”,”ruined”, and “polluted” to accurately describe how Dimmesdale’s sin and resulting moral hypocrisy has been weighing him down. Hawthorne then uses a rhetorical question in which he juxtaposes Dimmesdale’s “ruined” and “polluted” soul and the “redeemed” and “purified” ones of his audience to imply that due to the hypocrisy brought on by his sin, Dimmesdale doesn’t think that he has the right to be a minister or to be a holy figure to the Puritans.
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne exposes the blindness of the Puritan people through the treatment of Hester, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale’s external characters. Hester Prynne is labeled as an adulteress and mistreated by society because of their unwillingness to see her true character. Chillingworth, the husband of Hester, leads the town to believe he is an honorable man and skillful doctor, when his true intents root from his vindictive nature Finally, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s lover and the father of her baby, acts as the perfect man therefore the town views him as an exemplar model, while he is truly a sinner. In the novel, Hawthorne portrays Hester as a strong, resilient woman, though the members of her community
The book “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a complex novel that has underlying themes of sin and the responsibility for sin. The novel takes place in a Puritanical society, but two people, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, fornicate with each other, even though Hester is married to someone else. Only Hester is punished, so Dimmesdale keeps his guilt inside, not revealing it to anyone. Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, then proceeds to ruin Hester’s partner in crime, corrupting his soul and being the ultimate cause for his death. Hester, on the other hand, leads a relatively happy life after she had repented for her sin.
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.
Whether this hidden duality is shown or not, it is always present no matter who or what the subject may be. Duality is shown to not only be a large portion of current society, but it has a massive effect on a fictional, yet realistic community from 17th century Massachusetts Bay. All throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter characters and symbols representing duality have been present, taking shape in important characters such as Hester Prynne, Pearl, Roger Chillingworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale, as well as objects such as the rose bush, the scaffold, and the forest. One of these symbols is Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the Puritan Priest of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dimmesdale is seen
Nathaniel Hawthorne, a famous American author from the antebellum period, notices the emphasis on individual freedoms in the works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists during his residency in the Brook Farm’s community. In response to these ideas, Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter, a historical novel about Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale’s lives as they go through ignominy, penance, and deprecation from their Puritan community to express their strong love for each other. Their love, even though it is true, is not considered as holy nor pure because of Hester past marriage to Roger Chillingworth, and thus Hester gained the Scarlet Letter for being an adulterer. Hawthorne utilizes biblical allusions, such as the stories of
Aiden Christianson Pugmire/Maack 11th Grade ELA 1/10/2023 Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is a novel talking about the puritan lifestyle, and how seriously they took their society. This story delves into themes of “hypocrisy” and “sin”, the biggest offender being Arthur Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale is the biggest hypocrite in this story, he committed adultery alongside Hester, but he stayed anonymous, keeping his job as the Puritan minister. He kept preaching about Puritan beliefs even though he himself was a sinner.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne explores recurring themes of suffering surrounding the main characters, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester and Dimmesdale both commit adultery with each other, and, as a result of this, both experience gruesome and occasionally unbearable forms of suffering. Though they undergo different forms of pain, both of their experiences are highly reliant on how the Puritan society treats them. Hester 's pain stems from the shame and estrangement she receives from the community, while Dimmesdale’s is due to the reverence with which the community regards him. Although, in spite of the fact that both Hester and Dimmesdale receive harsh penalty for their sin, by the end of the book, Hawthorne shows how their suffering is, in fact, the key to their salvation.