The Burden of Guilt Lies with Dimmesdale

The Burden of Guilt Lies with Dimmesdale

Nathaniel Hawthorne is the author of many great works; the most famous one is The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne grew up in a family of strict Puritans. Two of Hawthorne's ancestors were witchcraft judges. These two men were the catalysts to many people's death. This caused Hawthorne great amounts of guilt and anxiety. He showed his guilt through his writing; especially in The Scarlet Letter. In this novel Hester Prynne is caught and punished for the sin of adultery; both her and her lover, Dimmesdale, suffer but in different ways. Just as Hawthorne suffered from the guilt of what his ancestors did, Dimmesdale suffers from his own wrong doing. Hawthorne greatly attaches sympathy with Dimmesdale's character throughout the novel.

Hawthorne chose Dimmesdale as a character to which he attached much guilt causing the reader to feel sympathy for him. The text states, "thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul and given over to the machinations of his deadliest enemy" (Hawthorne 123). Dimmesdale is physically withering away as his guilt intensifies. It is as if an illness is spreading throughout him. Dimmesdale does not actually have a bodily disease; the pain that he is constantly enduring is the guilt from committing the sin of adultery with Hester. only from having committed the sin, but also because he has not confessed it; instead he has bottled it up inside, and he won't confess because he is a coward. Because of the intensity of his guilt, Dimmesdale begins to act like a madman.

Throughout the story Dimmesdale steadily becomes more crazed because of his guilt. The text says, " Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night...sounded with a far greater power to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed The town did not awake" (Hawthorne 130). Dimmesdale guilt has now not only caused him physical pain, but it has also begun to take over his mind by making him see and hear things that simply are not there. In other words, Dimmesdale is beginning to hallucinate. He did not scream aloud as he thought he did because it would have caused a disturbance, but that did not happen. On the inside Dimmesdale is probably screaming from the torture he is enduring which is what caused him to believe he screamed aloud. His guilt is torturing him so much that he is desperately looking for a way to release it. Slowly but surely Dimmesdale's guilt begins to work from the inside out, and causes him physical weakness.