Scarlet Letter Story Essays - The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne

Scarlet Letter Story "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. At the court house, when Arthur Dimmesdale was pleading for Hester to reveal the name of the man with whom she had an affair, it was clear that a part of him actually wanted everyone to know that it was he who was the guilty one. "Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place...better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life,"(47). When this plea is made, it at first glance appears to be quite ironic. The actual man who committed the crime is trying to convince his accomplice to do him in. However, this statement shows that Arthur was not simply a confused man; it was much more extreme that that. He was "bewildered to the point where a part of him really wanted Hester to let the whole town know that it was he who was the guilty one. Whether he meant to or not, Arthur did sound extremely convincing in his speech, which makes the reader understand that he was being pulled in two completely opposite directions. A part of him wanted more than anything to have the weight of this secret sin lifted from his conscience; another part of him, arguably the practical part, knew that he could never let the people know the truth. His facade and image were much too important not only to him, but to the entire community. If he had admitted to everyone what he had done, then he would have been seen, not only as a hypocrite, but a betrayer of everyone's trust. Some people inthe community might have even started doubting the religion because, if this man who they considered holy and righteous, could not live a sin free life, then how could they? Clearly, Arthur was asking these questions as well, and the world in which he had lived in a had served so faithfully in was beginning to close in on him. It was because of this that his health began to fail and his body could, at the end, no longer handle the weight and sadness of his soul. His spirit had been lost long before his body gave out. 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