scarlet letter bewilderment at the hands of sin

A detailed Summary of scarlet letter bewilderment at the hands of sin

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally becoming bewildered as to which may be true. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, this quote applies to the two main characters of the novel. It applies to Arthur Dimmesdale in a literal way; he clearly is not the man that he appears to be, and the guilt that goes along with such deception consumes him and, in the end, is the cause for his demise. The quote also applies to Hester Prynne, but in quite a different way. It was not her choice to wear the face that she was forced to wear, but the scarlet letter on her bosom determined how people saw her and, in turn, how she was expected to feel about herself. At first, however, Hester did not consider the sin which she committed as blasphemous and horrible as the people of Boston did, but she was forced to wear the face of an evil doer. For both Hester and Arthur, it was true that they could not live their lives concealing their true emotions. Arthur literally could not live with it, while Hester changed the way she felt on the inside to correspond to her guilty image.

Both Arthur and Hester decided that they had committed a true sin and that it was, as all sins are, wrong. Arthur was so miserable and felt so torn and guilty that there was no way for him to believe that what they had done had any elements of purity and goodness. He felt "nothing but despair"(131), he was "most miserable"(131), and he knew that they would receive their punishments on judgement day by the only one true judge: God. Arthur was torn because he could not live with the weight of the secret sin, but he could not imagine making it public. It was because of this, that his health began to deteriorate and his spirit was losing all of its strength and character. "His form grew emaciated; his voice...had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it,"(82) which meant that it became clear that he was not on his way to recovery but, vice versa, on his way to death and "decay".

Both Hester and Arthur struggled with the question of whether or not what they had done was a true sin and whether or not there was utter truth in the words and ideologies of the towns people. The two of them did not simply sleep together out of lust and recklessness; they were truly in love and, at the time, they both believed that what they did "had a consecration of its own"(134). This meant that there was an aspect of holiness in what they did; it was something pure and even sacred to them at the time. Whether they were truly in love, or whether it was passion, or a combination of the two, both Arthur and Hester were faced with the question of whether what they did was truly a sin. They had to ask themselves an extremely difficult question and what the people of Boston thought was irrelevant to the question, because they were dealing with the way that God felt and looked upon their supposed "consecration" and, perhaps even more importantly, how they felt about what they had done.

Instead of completely giving up all hope, Hester decided that the people of Boston were right in labelling her and placing the "A" on her. She did not, at first, think that what her and Arthur did was evil.

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Approximate Word count = 1415
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English