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... the best policy in life is to be true, honest, and ever ready to show ones worst to the outside world, as Hawthorne apparently intends them to do through his earnest appeal: Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred! (P. 307) Dimmesdale dies an honest man with an easy soul, and the sin has done its work!
Roger Chillingworth: The Sinner of the Unpardonable Sin When the two chief sinners, Hester and Dimmesdale, turn out to be saints, or nearly so by their ultimate penance, the injured husband becomes a devil. Here we are made to feel, though we may not translate our feelings into ideas, that it is a greater sin for the old husband to marry the young girl who does not love him than for her to love the young minister. By persuading a young girl with no mental maturity to fancy herself happy by his side, Chillingworth seems to have committed a fouler offence than any which has since been done to him. After the adultery inflicts on him great injury, his intellect and knowledge do him justice in the confession that: It was my folly, and my weakness. I, -- a man of thought, -- the bookworm of great libraries, -- a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge, -- what, had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! (P. 96) But in spite of this, he takes the role of a vicious avenger.
The scholar, then, under the disguise of a man of skill, a friendly physician, exerts his almost hypnotic control over the young minister and deliberately causes his ruin. Embarking on his obsessive quest for the A in Dimmesdale, he is unconsciously throwing himself into the character of Satan. It is true that the old man is the unhappy husband who has been most vilely wronged, nevertheless, he makes a fiend of himself when his only purpose of life becomes retaliation. His aspect undergoes a remarkable change through his seven years devotion to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture. We feel we are haunted by the lurid expression at his secret discovery of the scarlet A on the ministers bosom: With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features and therefore bursting forth through whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! (P. 169) Here is another ruin. It is what Hawthorne calls the Unpardonable Sin and it is worse than sins of passions.
Dimmesdale says when the physicians true character is revealed to him: We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old mans revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so! (P. 234) Roger Chillingworth is the only sinner in the story who does not repent. When we stand by Hester's side to pity him for the hatred that has transformed a wise and just man to a monster, we tend to assume he would relinquish the wicked motive and be once more human at her emotional appeal: Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that claims it.
There might be good for thee, and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit? (P. 209 - 210) Sadly enough, he prefers to take a devils office. After he becomes aware of what has happened to him, Charles Feidelson says, he turns to Calvinism for comfort, asserting that a dark necessity beyond the human will has determined the whole action (P. 12). We realize there would be no salvation for him when we hear him reply with gloomy sternness to Hester's persuasion, refusing to pardon the two sinners who have greatly wronged him.
Chillingworth withers after Dimmesdale's death. Whats the meaning of life for him when he loses the object where he exercises his intellectual power? The last time we see him, he is kneeling down beside Dimmesdale, with a blank, dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed. Isnt here another moral that the author tries to point to that one must recognize and courageously combat the evil possibilities in every human heart? Another Cause of the Tragedy Puritan Moralist and Puritan Doctrines The Scarlet Letter is certainly a tragedy with Hester leading a life of disgrace, with Dimmesdale's death after years of penance and with Chillingworth ruined by the obsessive motive to revenge. However, is the adultery, which seemingly sets everything going in the story really the cause of such a tragic ending?
Is there something else pulling the strings? The setting of the story is seventeenth-century New England. It is an elaboration of a fact that the author took out of the life of the Puritan past. We know that in the early days of New England, the Puritans lived a life of strict and rigorous moral discipline. The Puritan creed has the strongest impact on Dimmesdale. He was born and brought up in the church, which has largely developed in him the reverential sentiment.
He is a true priest, a true religionist. At the head of social system, as the clergymen of that day stand, he is only the more trammeled by its regulations and principles. Here lies the tragedy the very man who has been denied any sexual pleasure by the Puritan society has so fearfully transgressed the most sacred law. Although for Dimmesdale, the adultery is a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose (P. 240), he is too much a Puritan, too much a minister to forgive himself. The load of doctrines is nowhere heavier and the desire to elevate nowhere stronger than it is, perhaps, in this righteous priest. Reading the book, we feel that it is the young clergyman's nature to speak out the truth.
But he is not able to do so until the very end of his life either because he is cowardly or because he fears the revelation of his guilt might shake the congregations faith in the church. Unlike Hester, whose mind is too radical and rebellious to conform to any Puritan doctrines which have made her the peoples victim and life-long bond-slave, Dimmesdale is such a Christian that he deems that adultery an Unpardonable Sin and thereby preys on himself as Chillingworth preys on him. Had he revered the Puritan laws less, he would not have been trapped in such a miserable mental state. Hawthorne says here: Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once!
This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance. (P. 180) Leading a double life, Dimmesdale is irrevocably doomed to his collapse. His torture is more psychological than physical as there is so weighty a load of guilty conscience on him because all his principles are Puritanical which, most to his remorse, he has violated. He reveals to Hester: Were I an atheist, -- a man devoid of conscience, -- a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts, -- I might have found peace, long ere now but, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of Gods gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable! (P. 229) As for Hester Prynne, the tragedy goes in large account into womens role in the Puritan community. Early in the Custom House, Hawthorne hints at the womens status by writing about the office room: this is a sanctuary into which womankind, as very infrequent access (P. 22). It is then not hard to infer that the responsibility that women were expected to share was no more than guarding the household and making compliance with whatever regulations and disciplines the Puritan society has imposed on them.
Hester's transgression, therefore, is viewed by the Puritans as the sin of a womans frailty. When Hawthorne makes a sharp contrast between Hester's graceful endurance of the scaffold punishment for her disgrace and the women spectators unrefined manners, we know he is not going to share the general morality of the Puritan New England which catalogues the adultery sin of the most unpardonable. Undoubtedly then, as Richard Chase declares, The Scarlet Letter has a feminist theme. In her lonely life, Hester becomes a radical. She believes that at some brighter period, a new truth will be revealed and that the whole relation between man and woman will be established on a surer ground of mutual happiness. She even comes to think in feminist rhetoric, and we can hear her talking firmly about the whole relation between man and woman (P. 311).
Nevertheless, Robert E. Spiller would rather define the tale as a Greek tragedy because Hester Prynne is the woman of earth who has defied man-made law and has risen to heroic statue through the tragic flaw that must at last destroy as well as ennoble her. The Scarlet LetterA hymn to the moral growth of Hester and her lover In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne is at his best in treating the old problem of sin. All his life, he seems to be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life, which naturally leads to a blackness of vision in his works. In The Scarlet Letter he studies sin only to ask whether some forms of conduct called sin may after all be innocent or even virtuous, and whether some popular virtues may not be, in some cases at least, great wrongs. On the part of Hester and Dimmesdale, Hawthorne obviously thinks that sin educates rather than degrades them.
Hester's life eventually acquires a real significance when she reestablishes a meaningful relationship with her fellow humans Dimmesdale's ultimate revelation purges his soul. One feels that he dies to go to heaven, and that he is too good for a world which cannot accommodate him. As for Chillingworth, the real villain, the sin is unpardonable -- the violation of the human heart. There is every reason to assert that what Hawthorne means here is an admonition that every one has the responsibility of examining his own motives and actions in the minutest detail, and should confess his sins and strive for salvation by doing good. Although it is salient that Hawthorne condones sin in this book, The Scarlet Letter is not a praise of a sinning Hester Prynne and her lover, but a hymn to their moral growth when sinned against. Bibliography:
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