Scarlet Letter:bewilderment At
Bewilderment at the Hands of Sin
"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 ...
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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 ...
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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 looked upon their supposed "consecration" and, perhaps even more importantly, how they felt about what ...
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"Scarlet Letter:bewilderment At." Essayworld.com. October 7, 2008. Accessed April 30, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Scarlet-Letter-bewilderment-At/91059.
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