The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - Essay Example

Scarlet Letter Interpretive In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the main characters is Reverend Dimmesdale, a young but highly respected Puritan minister, who lives in Boston in the seventeenth century. Hester Prynne is also a main character, a recent English immigrant, whose husband, Roger Chillingworth, has been missing at sea for two years. The main conflict in The Scarlet Letter is when Dimmesdale commits adultery with Hester Prynne and she becomes pregnant when her husband, Roger Chillingworth, is away.

Hester does not reveal who the father of her child is and Dimmesdale is too cowardly to reveal himself. The scaffold is where people accused of crimes would be punished. Over the course of the three scaffold scenes, Dimmesdale changes from cowardly guilt and hypocrisy to desperate guilt and hypocrisy, and finally to repentant hope. In the first scaffold scene Dimmesdale is aware of his guilt and hypocrisy when he questions Hester, but is too cowardly to confess his sin. While Hester is being punished, Reverend Wilson asks Dimmesdale to force her to tell the people who the father is.

Dimmesdale knows that if Hester does not reveal who the father is, he also will not be punished. Hester replies to Dimmesdale after he asks her to reveal the father of her child, “Never! It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!” Hester does not want to reveal Dimmesdale because she knows that it will cause a lot of suffering for him as well. After Hester refuses to reveal Dimmesdale, he is relieved, but when he leaves the scaffold he knows that the guilt will never leave him for the rest of his life.

In the second scaffold scene, seven years later, Dimmesdale is desperate to confess because his guilt and hypocrisy have only increased, but he manages only a cowardly private rehearsal of his confession. Dimmesdale practices many different kinds of penances to try to hide his guilt, including fasting, scourging, and long overnight vigils. One night, Dimmesdale goes to the scaffold to make a vigil there. Before Hester and Pearl arrive, he cries out and thinks he says his words to Reverend Wilson.

When he looks up into the night sky, he sees a meteor in the shape of a giant letter A. He describes it as “So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth” (106). Dimmesdale is not happy with his life because he is always full of guilt for keeping his sin of adultery inside of him. Dimmesdale is too cowardly to admit his sin to the people, who regard him very highly, including his congregation, who think of him as holy. Since Dimmesdale will not admit his sin, he has a terrible feeling of guilt on him and he lives his life miserably.

Finally, a few days later, Dimmesdale confesses his sin publicly in the third scaffold scene, showing his repentance and thereby finding relief from guilt and hypocrisy. After his sermon on Election Day, Dimmesdale looks very frail and like he is dying. Dimmesdale calls Hester and Pearl to him, despite Chillingworth’s reaction of sending them away. Dimmesdale replies to him by saying, “Thy power is not what it was! With God’s help, I shall escape thee now!” (173) Dimmesdale is ready to confess his sin in front of the townspeople at this point.

After he confesses, Dimmesdale escaped Chillingworth’s wrath and Dimmesdale decides to forgive Chillingworth. After his confession, Dimmesdale fixes his relationship with Pearl as well. As a result of Dimmesdale’s confession, he is freed from his guilt, from Chillingworth’s wrath, and from Pearl’s feelings against him, leading him to having a peaceful death without any guilt. Dimmesdale is aware of his guilt from the first scaffold scene, but he is not willing to admit his sin until the third scaffold scene.

Dimmesdale is too cowardly to admit his sin at the first and second scaffold scenes. He realizes that he has suffered because of not confessing his sin and waits until moments before his death. In conclusion, Dimmesdale dies a peaceful death because of his confession to the whole town after living in pain of concealing his sin.