He scrutinizes Dimmesdale’s every move and attempts to extract a confession to the point of infuriating Dimmesdale. Right after the first scaffold scene, Roger Chillingworth, secretly the former spouse of Hester, offers his medical support to Dimmesdale.Instead of trying to heal him, Chillingworth digs mercilessly for evidence of Dimmesdale’s sin by asking invasive and incriminating questions. He quickly falls ill, under “bodily disease” as well as a “black trouble of the soul” (128). By beating himself, he is hoping that somehow it will make up for the “mortal sin” he has committed. He starts to beat himself as an act of penance, but “ purify himself” simply through inward guilt. However, after a while the guilt and pain get to Dimmesdale and he begins to fall apart and eventually confess.As the novel progresses, Dimmesdale is frequently tempted by the desire of confession. However, Hester decides to take her punishment without dragging anyone else under because I think that she has a heart that secretly wants people not to suffer the way she did. The congregation would no longer trust or listen to him because of his one bad act.ĭespite his dishonesty and deep-seeded fear, however, Dimmesdale desperately implores Hester to speak the name of her fellow sinner, implying himself, because it would be better “to step down from a high place… than to hide a guilty heart through life” (60). Thus Dimmesdale is terrified that if he were to confess, no one in the community would see him as a valid source of inspiration orĬorrect moral action, which he has been working for years to fulfill as one of the main Reverends of Boston. ” If he did not punish this sinner, or even worse admit to being involved, he fears that the community and perhaps even God would see him as a failure and potentially cast him as an outcast like Hester.He declares that some men “shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them” according to this Puritanical society (119). Dimmesdale is described as having a “purity of thought” and the “speech of an angel,” but in reality, he is no better than Hester (60.) Dimmesdale has a position of social importance that bestows upon him a duty to uphold the “law. Similarly, theReverend Dimmesdale, although he is also an adulterer, uses his “vast power of self restraint” to abstain from admitting his guilt to the public (59). Thus, the scaffold masks the potential plethora of sins occurring in the community. Much like how Christ dies, the puritan community uses the public ridicule to hide their own sins and allows them to use Hester as a scapegoat in hopes that they might forget their own sins. Certain infuriated women in particular declare that she “has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Hawthorne shows that keeping our sins hidden can potentially “ … the sanctity of a human heart” and is more torturous than any possible public shame resulting from honesty (178).In the opening chapters, the reader is looking at Hester Prynne on the scaffold where the puritan community is looking at her as if she is less than human. Instead of ignoring this fact, Dimmesdale exposes it in order to encourage comfort and counsel rather than unrelenting punishment of all reprobates who are discovered. Dimmesdale’s struggle between penance and penitence, as shown in the three scaffold scenes, shapes into a longing to publically confess rather than suffer private punishment.In these scenes, Dimmesdale comes to realize that anyone can be a sinner and that a confession can counter the “grim rigidity” of the Puritanical community that disregards the fact that “we are all sinners alike” (44, 237). Hawthorne brings the reader again two more times to this place of humiliation, during which Dimmesdale grapples with the guilt “of penitence there has been none” (175). Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, the spiritual leader of the Puritan community, has the duty to denounce those placed on this spot of disgrace.However, when a woman named Hester Prynne is placed on the scaffold for adultery, Dimmesdale does not publically confess his involvement in her sin. However, the pillory only shows the condemnation of those sinners who are caught, while it hides the majority of many sinners who manage to evade punishment but more importantly, manage to evade public ridicule. Scarlet Letter English – Scaffold Essay In the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the pillory is established in the opening scene as a place of religious and social justice, judgment, confession and humiliation.
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