The Sin Of Intellect Vs. The Sin Of Passion

The setting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet letter” is crucial to the understanding of the event that takes place in the story. The setting of the story is in Salem, Massachusetts during the Puritan era. During the Puritan era, adultery was taken as a very serious sin, and this is what Hester and Dimmesdale committ with each other. Because of the sin, their lives change, Hester has to walk around in public with a Scarlet Letter “A” which stands for adultery, and she is constantly being tortured and is thought of as less than a person. Dimmesdale walks around with his sin kept as secret, because he never admits his sin, his mental state is changing, and the sin degrades his well-being. Chillingworth

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne expresses how sin causes guilt through Hester’s, Chillingworth’s, and Dimmesdale’s actions and emotions. Hester Prynne was the main sinner in the story, and she felt

With all the chaos present in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, there is a central point at which the novel revolves around: Hester Prynne’s sin. Because of her adulterous actions, she is mocked by both modern and Puritan society. It is through her character as an adulteress that D.H. Lawrence scorns and evaluates Hester Prynne’s flaws through his use of brief diction, sarcastic tone, and biblical allusions.

Hurt, betrayal, guilt, and anger are all negative emotions that fuel revenge. While Hester stepped above the rays of revenge, the men of the novel were not so lucky. Chillingworth, blinded by his hurt and unknowing what to do, channelled all his energy into his vengeance on Dimmesdale. This not only changed him from a gentle scholar into the devil’s assistant, but lead to his death shortly after the Reverend's. Dimmesdale, the product of Chillingworth’s revenge and his own, fared far worse physically and mentally than Hester and Chillingworth combined. While Chillingworth’s revenge was mental, Dimmesdale inflicted punishment on himself to deal with his guilt. This sapped his life, but allowed him to connect better as a minister with his parishioners. Revenge led to the demoralization and death of both male characters, while Hester’s inner strength and independence allowed her to avoid such conclusions almost

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a study of the effects of sin on the hearts and minds of the main characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Sin strengthens Hester, humanizes Dimmesdale, and turns Chillingworth into a demon.

It is said that the physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing are interconnected among spiritual men. Should the spiritual wellbeing be compromised, through sin or some such disconnect with God, mental and physical health declines. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a similar degeneration of health, both physical and mental, is undergone by the tortured minister, Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale is the secret lover of Hester Prynne, the young, passionate protagonist of the novel. Having sinned, he cannot reveal himself to the townsfolk, and thus is resigned to suffer with it himself for years. His subconscious guilt is constantly agitated by Roger Chillingworth, and as he becomes more and more guilt-ridden, he becomes untrusting and frail, melancholy and beaten. His mental and spiritual health diminish to the point of his untimely death in the finale of the book. Indeed, The Scarlet Letter is a psychological novel, illustrating the steady dissolution of Arthur Dimmesdale from a healthy, young, and enthused minister to a frail, sickly, and defeated shadow of his former self due to his inability to cope with his actions.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne exhibits how three very unique characters are evidently brought together by the sins that they have perpetrated and how they manage to perform acts of atonement in the puritanical Boston society. Hester Prynne sins by committing the shocking transgression of adultery. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who as well engages in adultery with Hester, abandons her and their daugher because of his own cowardice and hypocrisy. Roger Chillingworth grows to become a maleficent being who tries to corrupt the very soul of Reverend Dimmesdale. Although Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale do sin greatly, it is Roger Chillingworth who sins to the most ferocious degree.

Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the ideology of Puritan society in the novel the Scarlet Letter; however reader also get to witness his characters being an illustration of hypocrisy and victims to their own guilt. In the Scarlet Letter, as in many of Hawthorne’s shorter works, he makes profuse use of the Puritan past: its odd exclusionary belief, its harsh code of ruling, its concern with sex and witchcraft. The Scarlet Letter is a story that is embellished but yet simple. Many readers may view this novel as a soap opera due to the way Hawthorne conveys this Puritan society’s sense of strictness and inability to express true emotion along with the secrecy and how deceiving the characters are being. As the story unfolds the main character Hester Prynne is bounded in marriage at an early age. She engages in an adulterous affair with an unknown member of their small village. Hester soon becomes pregnant and with her husband’s absence the chances of this child belonging to her husband are slim. The towns’ people know that she has committed a sin and imprisons her for her crime.

Najae Bradford S. Corkern English III February 27, 2018 “The Scarlet Letter” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” explores the nature of sin and the effect that it can have on a person’s soul. In this novel, a young woman, by the name of Hester Prynne, committed a sin of adultery. She was punished for her affair with minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who she shares a child with named Pearl. As Hester keeps Dimmesdale's identity a secret, he continues to hide it from the Puritan town. The development of character, setting, and plot in “The Scarlet Letter”, are conveyed through Dimmesdale’s metamorphosis, Hester’s sin, and the development of the Puritan town to reveal how secret sin is destructive and how hypocrisy negatively affects a society.

In his highly acclaimed romance known as The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the effect of sin on the main characters. The novel is set in Puritan Massachusetts, where its was believed that any sin against God was the most blasphemous of crimes, and the resulting punishment must be drastic and painful. Overall, this is the primary theme of The Scarlet Letter, which focuses on the respective sins of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. However, no character is affected by their sins more than Hester, as Hawthorne uses her to epitomize how sin can greatly alter people, both negatively and positively. Moreover, after sinning, Hester Prynne is affected in that she became isolated by her community, has to live with Pearl as a reminder of her sin, but grows tremendously as a moral character.

Rich in symbolism, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes the life and mistakes of the main characters, along with the setting itself and certain other elements, in order to convey the nature of human weakness and the effects of sin upon individuals and society. A highly respected Puritan minister in the mid-1600’s, the protagonist Arthur Dimmesdale is not only the figure of contemporary Puritan cruelty prevalent in mid-seventeenth century society, but of human frailty and weakness. His extramarital affair with the married Hester Prynne, whose husband has been away for two years, results in her impregnation; consequently, their adultery is discovered by the harsh Puritans. The consequential personal strife of Dimmesdale, the strong

The Scarlet Letter displays a theme of sin throughout the novel through multiple major events. To start off, in chapter seven, “The Governor’s Hall”, Hester observes herself in a convex shaped mirror, and realizes that the scarlet letter was exaggerated in size. The second major event is the entrance of Roger Chillingworth. He was quickly accepted into the Puritan society as an excellent physician, but as time passed, a few puritans started to suspect Chillingworth of using the skill of black art from the Indians. Hester also starts to realize a change, which goes into another major event to display the theme of sin. As Hester and Chillingworth were talking, she started to recognize a change in him, similar to a demon that had possessed him. But Hester wasn’t the only one to notice, Chillingworth noticed himself. In chapter nine and ten, Chillingworth is given the opportunity to cure Mr. Dimmesdale and to discover all of Dimmesdale’s hidden secrets. The final major event to represent sin is in chapter fifteen, “Hester and Pearl”, when Hester rids herself of the scarlet letter and realizes the freedom from the weight of her sin and shame. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses appearance versus reality to illustrate sin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a well-know Dark Romantic, employs the issues prevalent in Dark Romanticism in his novel The Scarlet Letter. These include the concepts of: guilt and sin, good and evil, and madness in the human psyche. Guilt and sin are heavily addressed in the novel, focusing on Hester’s outward versus Dimmesdale’s hidden guilt, and the sins committed by the adulterous couple and the revenge-driven Roger Chillingworth. The idea of what good and evil are is questioned in the novel. For example, the reader is led to question if Hester was right in not revealing Dimmesdale, and in turn if both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth were

One of the main themes in The Scarlet Letter is that of the secret.  The plot of the book is centered on Hester Prynne’s secret sin of adultery.  Nathaniel Hawthorne draws striking parallelism between secrets held and the physical and mental states of those who hold them.  The Scarlet Letter demonstrates that a secret or feeling kept within slowly engulfs and destroys the soul such as Dimmesdale’s sin of hypocrisy and Chillingworth’s sin of vengeance, while a secret made public, such as Prynne’s adultery, can allow a soul to recover and even strengthen.

Nathaniel Hawthorne strongly believed that all people have a dark side and a sinful nature. According to Mark Barna, Hawthorne wrote, “In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or the prisoners whom they hide” (para. 12). In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne presents a situation filled with sin—secret and public—when a minister and a young married woman commit adultery and each character has to deal with consequences in his or her own way. Because so much debauchery is happening, it is controversial whether the novel’s biggest sinner is Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, or Roger Chillingworth.