The Reverend Dimmesdale is “usually understood to be guilty of two sins, one of commission (his adultery with Hester) and one of omission (his cowardly and hypocritical failure to confess) (Pimple, 1993).” Dimmesdale is the young, unmarried pastor of the church who has sinned by committing adultery with Hester and fathering her child. He has to live with the guilt of hiding this sin, which begins to take its tole on his health and appearance. While he had never before broken any laws, Hawthorne shows he “fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue, than if he had never sinned at all (Hawthorne, 244).” Hawthorne illustrates the guilt and its consequences by writing “the breach which guilt once made into the human soul is never, in the mortal state, repaired (Hawthorne, 245).” Dimmesdale’s “selfhood is so fractured that he has to appeal to someone else to make known who he is. He exhorts Hester to name her fellow sinner, aware that the guilty party is himself (Gilmore, 2001).”
Chillingworth is a physician and the husband of Hester, and is seen as an evil force. He is guilty of the pretense of treating Dimmesdale while actually extracting vengeance on him after finding out that he was the one Hester had the affair with. This vengeance further affects Dimmesdale’s health, and will eventually lead to his death. Chillingsworth’s sins of harassing Dimmesdale gave him a purpose in life, and he tried in vain to prevent Dimmesdale from admitting his adultery on Election Day. Chillingworth’s sins were noted when Dimmesdale tells Hester that he forgives her for hiding the true identity of Chillingworth. While admitting they are sinners, Dimmesdale states “There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart (Hawthorne, 237).”
The Scarlet Letter continued its theme of sin and guilty to the very end. Knowing he was about to die, Dimmesdale finally acknowledged the sin and guilt he has lived with for the past seven years and shows he had to wear his own scarlet A, although his had been hidden. Although Hester moves to Europe, she returns to Boston to live out her life still wearing the A, although it is no longer required. Upon her death, she is buried next to Dimmesdale, where they share a tombstone marked with a scarlet A, thus forever branding them for their sin.
Chillingworth, having no one to harass and punish any longer, dies within a year of Dimmesdale. Although, he has been pure evil throughout the book, he does exhibit one act of kindness. He leaves Pearl money and land, perhaps from the guilt of what he has put her parents through.
The theme of guilt and sin would not have continued had Hester and Dimmesdale escaped to Europe. Dimmesdale would never have felt compelled to admit his guilt, and would have lived out his life with everyone thinking he was above sinning. The reader would have been left feeling Dimmesdale had gotten away with his sin, while Hester had shouldered the burden by herself.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter” intertwined the lives, sins and guilt of its three main characters: Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. He was able to maintain this theme throughout the novel, and in the end showed that the characters were never able to escape from their burdens.
Works Cited
Gilmore, Michael T. “Hidden in plain sight: The Scarlet Letter and American legibility”. Studies
in American Fiction. (2001): 22 March.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields,
1850.
Pimple, Kenneth D. “Subtle, but remorseful hypocrite: Dimmesdale’s moral character”. Studies
in the Novel. (1993): 22 September.
