I read Scarlet Letter in english 11 and fell in love.
Dimsdale caught my attention the most I would say and I wondered, how do others view him? After finishing the book, I complied a few thoughts, but went no further.
-His guilt killed him.
-He was a coward.
-He loved Hester.
-He feared losing his title
-He was prideful
-He experienced profound guilt.
-He would rather inflict self-harm than confess
I could go on, but I liked to hear from you all...
You have correctly listed the attributes of the good Reverend Dimsdale - all of which make him utterly and unforgivably human. Dimsdale is a coward of sorts - but how much do we blame him? Hawthorn specializes in ambiguity, and his portrait of Dimsdale is no exception. Are we to judge the reverend by his actions, or his intentions? St. Abelard once said (paraphrased) "God looks upon the intention, not the action; it is the intention of the heart that makes an action praiseworthy or blameworthy."Originally Posted by klawick
Dimsdale's cowardice lies in his failure to act honorably - but do the contents of his heart mitigate our judgment of him any?
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." - C.S. Lewis
I agree with you, but if he loved Hester so much, then why didn't he say something instead of letting her go through this all alone? It takes 2 and he should have screwed respect and told the truth if he was a real christian!!! He would have my respect if he actually aid something and didn't put the woman he supposedly loved through that hell!
Now now, TH3, let's calm down... To be fair, he does try to say something, and no one believes him (but then, of course, Hawthorne conveniently reveals to us that Dimmesdale knew this would happen), and it isn't exactly like he is having a time of it himself. He also ensures that Pearl is not taken away from Hester.
These are the two that never quite stick for me. There is definitely a suggestion that he is worried for the fate of the souls of his parishioners if he is brought from his pedestal, but I haven't noticed much in the way of fear for his title. Is there a passage somewhere?
He did what he did on purpose though, like you said he knew what he was doing and let it happen. He might of helped Hester keep Pearl, but Pearl will be raised without her father, that's just crap!
Before I begin, I do not really wish for my ideas on The Scarlet Letter to become someone's essay, though it is perhaps unavoidable in this forum. Please respect my wishes and come to your own conclusions (if perhaps inspired by my ramblings).
To begin, I feel that the McLuhanism, "the medium is the message," is a little confusing as a broad descriptor for all literature (though the idea has been the source for many of my thoughts). I only say this in reference to The Scarlet Letter because I would like to separate the two states to explain why I think that this novella is about one thing: Love.
My friends have ridiculed my idea as being morbid. I must persuade them (and hopefully all of you) that this is not morbid at all. Perhaps when we think of love we think of the archetype of the love genre, the Harlequin Romance. This is simply the most popular of writings on love, but to confine love to that genre, as our literature students will likely agree, views a single tree as though it were the whole damned forest.
The Harlequin Romance uses a realistic medium to convey a romantic message. Thus the temporal and situational setting is realistic, in the sense of a realist painting, that is, a photo-realistic description lacking allegory; however, the plot is romantic, lacking any trace of the reality of love, which should contain the bitterness and incompletion that true lovers experience in real life. Another crime the Harlequin commits is that it is linear in relationship. The novel is restricted to one or two types of love presented to the reader. Try: man loves woman. Perhaps there is infidelity. Or maybe it targets a homosexual audience. It all depends on the market demographic that will buy a maximum amount of commercial units.
Hawthorne, on the other hand, has not, as I have read from some misguided authors, created the same kind of Gothic pulp that has been popular since before the Enlightenment. The Scarlet Letter treats love differently, and here is my radical proposal. The topic is love, but the message is realistic. The love in this novella is incomplete, morally wrong, or otherwise fundamentally sick and in need of great repair. In fact, there is an ancient tradition (albeit written mainly by monks) of naming Venus, our love goddess, as the shepherdess of the fallen world in which we all live.
Hawthorne’s medium on the other hand, is allegory. Somehow, in the few relationships that exist in Hawthorne’s narrative, there are limitless possibilities for the several types of love that can exist on earth. There is the possibility of man-woman, as with Hester Prynne and either Reverend Dimmesdale (as his name is spelled in my edition) or Roger Chillingworth; mother-child, as with Hester and Pearl; father-child, as with Dimmesdale and Pearl; hoi polloi-minister of religion, as with Dimmesdale and his adoring public; the recalcitrance fetishist-magic, as with Chillingworth and alchemy (my audience is now beginning to groan); and numerous other relationships I’m sure you could spot. The relationship I was most intrigued by was (arguably) the main relationship: a love triangle between Hester, the Scarlet Letter itself, the unthankful poor and abject denizens of the settlement that Hester aids. The one main ingredient in all these relationships is, as I stated before, incompleteness, sickness, and moral deficiency.
I’m sure many of you are now saying, O brother, what a way to stretch a theory. But continuing with this theme of realistic love, does Hawthorne not reveal at the end that there is little difference between love and hate? I did not conceive of the omnipresent love topic and allegory until I read that particular bit. It was meant to explain the love between Dimmesdale and Chillingworth (the man-man relationship of the story) but could apply to so many of the other relationships as well. Think of how grim Hester’s outlook on Pearl could become. Pearl is described as everything short of pure evil.
One last thing I must comment on is the question of heroism. Some of our audience may wish to cling to their ideas of moral correctness when trying to discover a hero. In my opinion, the only Christian hero, that is, the Christ-type, is Hester, and Hawthorne gives many parallels to the Christ-type, though I cannot think of a New Testament account of some weakness that motivated Christ to do good, he just did it to do it. The closest I can come to that realization is that Christ typologically completed the trinity that Abraham never could. To understand the body (or manifestation of God) and the mind (the ethereal presence of God) would not be enough for Christ’s mission. Christ opened the spirit of humanity for the world to contemplate and rebelled against the Israelite conviction for the letter of the law (for instance, in the situation that begot the aphorism, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her” [“her” replacing the adulteress in the temple: a fantastic parallel, no?]). Thus, as Christ disobeyed the temple in the name of compassion and forgiveness, Hester too disobeyed her church to bring the vitality of passion to Dimmesdale, which becomes his only speck of vitality within the whole narrative, and leads to the rebirth of innocence in the form of Pearl. Hester then wears her penance above her heart.
I’m sure that especially my Christian audiences will debate that theory. Please do. I am but a wanderer.
But the question of heroism in this forum relates specifically to Dimmesdale’s death, and whether or not he was heroic at that point. Dimmesdale’s failure to do penitence (the hidden scarlet letter) motivates his ‘tongue of fire’ that lifts the souls of his congregation. The more he suffers, the more the people are delighted. At one point, Hawthorne gives a curious clue as to the type of hero that Dimmesdale is. Not the saintly hero, but the flawed hero, like the tragic pagan types, for instance, Herakles, Sigmund or Achilles/Hector. Hawthorne suggests that Dimmesdale has communed with a more Classical source. I forget the quote. Read it and you’ll find it. Those old flawed heroes gain boons from the gods, but are always fighting with their own immoral animal nature.
At the beginning of this unstructured rant I insisted that no one use these ideas for their urgent essays. I only say this because though you may think you are satisfying a need, you only do so temporarily. If you do not draw your own conclusions, you hurt the community of literary critics by not bringing in your own fresh, subjective thought. Please mind this, and use my work only for inspiration. Thank you.
Reverend Dimmesdale is living a life of hypocrisy. His congregation believes he is pure; they think of him as a saint. He wants to tell them the truth about himself, but he doesn’t have the courage to do so. He is getting weaker by the day from the burden he is carrying, but others misconstrue this progressive physical weakness as a sign of extreme piety. For seven years he lives a life full of deceit, and proves himself to be a coward. Eventually he confesses before dying. But this is a desperate confession to save his soul, and to buy himself eternal peace. While he is dying he thinks his suffering has absolved him of his sin. He thinks his death is triumphant.
“To die this death of triumphant ignominy before people!”
But the bottom line is that he deceived people who trusted him, he knew he was deceiving them, he knew that was the wrong thing to do, and yet he did it anyway.
We get a glimpse into the Reverend’s true character when he is walking back from the forest, after talking to Hester. Now that he has hope he might be able to escape people’s judgment and start over somewhere else he no longer feels the self-pity that made him sympathetic to others’ problems and suffering. He had to exert extreme effort “to refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind” to the Deacon. “Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of the souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture” to whisper in the poor widow’s ear. And as he approached the young girl “such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word.”
Perhaps Hawthorne is trying to ask us this question:
Which one is a greater sin - the adulterous affair of a young woman with the man she loves while there is a good chance that her old and cold husband is dead, or living a life of duplicity and hypocrisy among people who trust you the most?
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