A Bar Too Far: Arthur Dimmesdale’s Near Evasion of Earthly Judgement
Hester Pyrnne and Arthur Dimmesdale committed adultery, sinned, transgressed, and violated the law together. The veracity of these statements depends on one’s perspective; some of these claims are virtual certainties while others are less clear. That they violated the law and committed adultery can be traced to the letter of the law and their adulterous progeny, respectively. The nature and degree of their transgressions and sins are less clear. Taken at face value, their society’s conflation of law and religion simplifies these issues greatly: transgression and sin become equivalent. While the narrator is dismissive of the equation of law and religion, the story seems to affirm the necessity of this arrangement by constraining Hester within the iron mores of society. Hester was doubly doomed: Chillingsworth had anticipated her escape attempt (had Arthur told hims?) and Arthur had other ambitions. At this point, “Hester’s strong, calm, steadfastly enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom, which—at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of misery—showed itself, with an unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path” (Hawthorne 228-9). The narrator tells us that Hester and Dimmesdale’s escape was not meant to be and essentially attributes this to the gravity of sin, . In any event, Hester and Arthur wouldn’t be going anywhere.
If Hester’s civil punishment was warranted by Providence, we must ask ourselves why Arthur’s wasn’t. Is it enough that he suffered inwardly for his transgression while keeping his privileged position of authority? While Hester must suffer open ignominy, Arthur must suffer growing worship. If, however, one wishes to affirm the meaning of Hester’s punishment, then should be inclined to view Arthur’s final confession as an evasion of justice and the height of his hypocrisy, egotism, andflagrant antinomianism. Dimmesdale is not merely a hypocrite but a fugitive from justice guilty of a capital crime. And yet, in his role as minister, Arthur’s position is sanctifying in and of itself. So long as his confessions are made on the pulpit and not the pillory, they will be contextually interpreted within the framework of a sermon (Pimple 260). Puritan authority justifies itself through an ex post facto rationalization of its divine origins through the circular logic of Providence. In Puritan theology, election signifies both the will of the people and, more importantly, a predestined, Unconditional Election by God(Foster 142). Thus, if Dimmesdale stands at the pulpit, it must be God’s will; he must be Divine. And yet, Hawthorne uses dramatic irony to show the reader that he is a “subtle hypocrite.” Can he be both?
Early in the book, Arthur Dimmesdale is called upon to convince Hester Prynne to provide the name of her accomplice in crime: the father of her child. The scene that follows drips with irony, as the reader has already been made aware of the implicit connection between Hester and Arthur: Arthur is the man whom the tribunal seeks, and he is also sitting beside rightthem on their officious balcony, bending their ears. Speaking to Hester at the behest of the Puritan tribunal, Arthur must perform a feat of rhetoric as delicate as a rope walking and “the trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous” (Hawthorne 63). Arthur’s performance, however, is but one feature of a larger spectacle orchestrated by the highest earthly authorities this society has to offer, who naturally serve as the legal tribunal. The tribunal’s deliberations are far from celestial; they are rather absurd. “They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage,” Hawthorne insists, “but, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face” (Hawthorne 61). Their officiousness only heightened the ridiculousness of their overexertion of authority and typified a general lack of self-awareness and a certain naïve faith in their righteousness. Here are the self-reliant men of New England! Their intuitions are perforce the tuitions of others.
They are excused, in large part, because they belonged to a harder, more primitive world and lacked the refinement of Hawthorne’s contemporaries (an assertion served with a large amount of irony). Hawthorne jests that “the period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature.” Thus, Hawthorne explains, “the witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.” Hawthorne seems to imply that by the standards of his day, this spectacle would be rightfully viewed as preposterous but, in Puritan times, it was a matter of the utmost sincerity. At the very least, no one dared imply otherwise, for “even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town; all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform”(Hawthorne 54). In other words, these iron authorities were beyond reproach.
Their very positions made them unassailable; to question an elected official was tantamount to heresy and rebellion. Thedark and solemn clothes worn by the members of the magistrate, were not merely emblems of their authority as judges but “distinguished… a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine institutions” (Hawthorne 61). From the centrality of their civic and religious authority, they claimed for themselves, by way of Providence, a divine attribution of power. Thus, Governor Bellingham, for instance, claims the prefix “worshipful.” Hawthorne utilizes liberal irony in reference to the sanctity of their system of justice:
Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn.
The last sentence of the above quote, begs the question, why not? Earlier, the reader was told that the witnesses would not have been much more perturbed if they were awaiting an execution; some of the less appealing wives want just that, in fact. Perhaps, the magistrates’ should be recognized for their ability to channel the passions of the mob into a more suitableresponse. Theirs is a kind of sanctified mob justice,“as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful.” The difference between a civilized execution punishment and a barbarous punishment might simply depend upon the office of the beadle who allows the populace to be witnesses rather than vigilantes.
In The Scarlet Letter, the town beadle certainly fulfills this office: “this personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanical code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender” (Hawthorne 50). On the other hand, the more dignified magistrates wished to keep a healthy distance between their judgements and their consequences. Accordingly,“when such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning" (Hawthorne 54). For such lofty personages to oversee such an event in person indicated an expectation of beneficial publicity.
The magistrates’ handling of Hester’s trial is undoubtedlyperformative, like their solemn garb, and always seems to conveniently support and reinforce their privileged positions of power serving as a warning to any potential disruptors of the conservative social order. “It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest” (Hawthorne 47). The magistrates’“Scriptural authority” seems to be invoked in a very partial manner; they are primarily interested in: children, heretics, and drunk Indians. Thus, we might conclude that they are more concerned with suppressing disorderly conduct than fraud, especially amongst their own.
Were the magistrates, however, in possession of anything resembling divine intuition, they might have punished Hester similarly. In reality, however, they were only capable of partiallyjudging the surface of a transgression and so failed to perceive that they were catalyzing in Hester “a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” (Hawthorne 152). Crime, it would seem then might be more closely associated with disobedience to male authority than divine authority. As dangerous as Hester seemed after potentially violating her marital vows, she would have been greeted with far more hostility for questioning “the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle” (Hawthorne 152). Crime and sin must be seen predominantly as agents of disorder.
Returning to the trial of Hester Prynne, we see that Arthur is very much their man. Whether more refined or simply morecapable of presenting himself as the earthly embodiment of their sacred order, Arthur commands a certain awe and garnerspopular support. Ironically, however, the power of his speech is not diminished but multiplied by his refusal to divulge his secret crime and face “the more rigid order of principles in religion and government” which were the outward manifestations of his religious order’s faith. If celestial authority can be claimed in the earthly realm, how then can Arthur, as one of its representatives, excuse himself from a public expiation of his sin, while Hester, on the other hand, stands beneath him on receiving end of an “ignominious” public trial. Within this context, Arthur’s plea that “it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude” is highly ironic and self-serving given that, he himself was so intimately involved in both her crime and her punishment. I would argue that, in his Puritan society, the pulpit, like the “scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France.” Hester’s exile places her in a position not unlike that which Hawthorne jokingly claims as a “DECAPITATED SURVEYOR…who writes from beyond the grave” (Hawthorne 42). In Hester’s case,“SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom…had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.” As the tale proceeds, we see that while Hester is forced to suffer the open scorn of society, Arthur must endure its adoration with an anguished conscience (and agrowing fear of exposure). Dimmesdale actually manages toelevate his position in society through his sin as it gives new fire to his rhetoric that captivates the hearts of the populace.
Arthur’s feelings towards the success of his sermons iscomplicated. According to Kenneth D. Pimple, “it is true that the minister is physically weak and hypersensitive, and that he cannot control his cowardice or his fear, but, as the narrator tells us, ever since committing his one sin, Dimmesdale has found his "acts . . . easy to arrange" (Pimple 261). Even in the forest scene, Dimmesdale, through cunning rhetoric and childish despondency, pleads, “Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!” (Hawthorne 183). Hester’s first response is that he should stop living with Chillingsworth: “Thou must dwell no longer with this man,’ said Hester, slowly and firmly. ‘Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!” (Hawthorne 183). Yet, Dimmesdale knows that he cannot shake Chillingsworth’s power over him so long as he can threaten to expose Arthur’s crime, compounded by years of hypocrisy, to his adoring public. It is, however, “typical” of Arthur to refuse to take any accountability for himself.
Seemingly unable to carry on and unwilling to address the source of his suffering (his hypocrisy), he seduces Hester intoassuming the responsibility for yet another transgression. He is willing to sin again, it seems, so long as he can convince himself that it was not his idea and provided that he doesn’t have to do it alone. Anyways, he can hardly be expected to continue his holy work with a blackmailer about! He feels no shame as he plays upon Hester’s heartstrings and drives her toward what he himself cannot admit he wants.
“Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!” said Hester, with the tears gushing into her eyes. “Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other cause!” “The judgment of God is on me,” answered the conscience-stricken priest. “It is too mighty for me to struggle with!” “Heaven would show mercy,” rejoined Hester, “hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.” “Be thou strong for me!” answered he. “Advise me what to do (Hawthorne 183).
Before suggesting that they elope, however, Hester suggests that Dimmesdale take advantage of Heaven’s mercy. If Hester were standing on the pulpit, rather than nursing Arthur in the forest, the implication would implicitly be inferred as a summons to confession. This was not the advice that Arthur was looking for, however. After all, as in his sermons,
The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived.
Is hypocrisy a moral necessity for Dimmesdale?! He seems to conceive of his evasion of justice in terms very sympathetic to his ambition, “His spirit rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.” Additionally, when Chillingworth forces Dimmesdale to (abstractly) confront the question of his hypocrisy, Arthur is typically effete. Arthur reflects that “it may be that they are kept silent by the very constitution of their nature. Or,—can we not suppose it?—guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service” (Hawthorne 122). Yet, as Herman Melville, wrote in Moby Dick,
Woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!’ (Melville 42-3).
It is not improbable that Melville was thinking of Hawthorne’s stories when he wrote “The Sermon” and, it is a certainty that this chapter of Moby Dick has much to say that might illuminate the tragic hypocrisy of Arthur Dimmesdale’s frustrated attempts to evade earthly justice and the “torment” that this “seven years’ cheat” inflict upon him (Hawthorne 178). Indeed, Arthur Dimmesdale’s story bares many similarities to Melville’s portrayal of Jonah. Namely, in both cases, we are admonished to be True and shown that there are consequences for egotistical delays of repentance; it may be that the bar of judgement demands earthly penitence without any earthly assurances of salvation or, in the case of Dimmesdale, that repression is too hard on his nerves. Regardless, both men terribly fear apparent moral necessity when it forces them to face some primal terror, which in both cases, might be equated with an angry mob. They fear to confront the chaos of the common heart; they fear the abyss of infamy. “Bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached (Melville 42). In similar fashion, Arthur is compelled to confront the sanctified with the unwelcome truth of his wickedness, yet he too is “appalled at the hostility it should raise” and “fled from his mission” to the forest, where he “sought to escape his duty” and board a ship with Hester and Pearl.
Throughout the novel, Dimmesdale insists that he is too weak to confess but this is not so, as he does confess and in a state of weakness that is verges on death. It is not temperamental weakness but spiritual weakness that hamstrings him. Namely, ambition and egotism prevent him from revealing himself. As in Hawthorne’s tale The Egotism; or Bosom Serpent,
It was partly the result of desperation on finding that the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep and dark enough to hide the secret, even while it was so secure a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had crept into it. But still more, this craving for notoriety was a symptom of the intense morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells…There is a pleasure--perhaps the greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible--in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality. …A little while before, had held himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was referred, and which he pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive sacrifice of devil worship.
This description seems to fit Dimmesdale like a glove. Indeed, it is the reason why he left his glove on the pillory, why he had to lie about being there, and why he feels his heart is being gnawed at (a sure symptom of a bosom serpent). Additionally, it is the reason why he frets solely about himself. We see little evidence of his good works and what little he does for Hester could easily be attributed to self-preservation. It is by her grace, that he stands before his parishioners in “angelic” splendor. So too does he hold himself above the law and, therefore, the common man. Like Roderick, Dimmesdale cannot help but talk down to others, while “at the same time giving an instinctive clutch to his breast.” His egotism makes him see the whole world as a stage for his redemption and, when he mounts the pulpit, he seems only to speak of himself. Of course, he is also morbidly diseased and, as Chillingsworth notes “whether the disease be of the mind or body” it seems to indicate a certain toxic preoccupation. In any event, Hawthorne has stated that “All persons chronically diseased are egotists” and, in that respect, the case is made rather simple. Like Roderick, Arthur “appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity,--not celestial, it is true, but darkly infernal,--and that he thence derived an eminence and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly monster.” The reader may be reminded of Arthur as he wrote his Election Day speech and “wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as he.” Additionally, we might consider Arthur’s morbid and exhibitionist display of his scarlet letter as an act that is very much in line with the aforementioned symptoms of egotism. The grounds for comparison here are immensely fertile and the connection virtually certain.
Dimmesdale has proven adept at manipulating his parishioners, however, the spiritual leader of the town is helplessly dependent upon the affirmation of the iron authoritieswhom he fears to be discovered by. Hawthorne wrote, “In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework“ (Hathorne 114). Though a tender soul, Dimmesdale needed an iron framework. He was not equipped for even a stroll in the moral wilderness. Yet, he had inescapably transgressed into it and yet endured through masochistic repression; he dealt with his hypocrisy by claiming that he was too weak to be otherwise and attributing it to the will of Providence, rather than his own. Finally, after being enabled by Hester, Dimmesdale plunges anew into “the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion.”
The taint of his sin has been the source of his ascendancy through the social ranks; it gave him the “tongue of flames, symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language” (Hawthorne 131). His egotism was mistaken for humility and his volatile and pathetic exclamations invoked sympathy. It seems that the appeal of Dimmesdale’s sermons lay in their cathartic power rather than their import. From the outset of the novel, the narrator has told us that, “The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy” (Hawthorne 64). In “The Embroidered Sin: Confessional Evasion in ‘The Scarlet Letter,” Dennis Foster writes that:
The people hear the words but, the narrator tells us, fail to understand their true, ”deadly purport,” even though the words affect them deeply, stirring in them the feeling that they have experienced sins too horrible for them to speak. Although Dimmesdale supposes that there is some truth he has not yet spoken and that is why he is misunderstood, the people’s response is sympathetic (at least insofar as they are aroused to an imitative guilt) if not comprehending. The anguish that Dimmesdale feels for his own transgression is mirrored in the excited consciences of his parishioners, Dimmesdale’s confession having provided the terms for sin by which they can imagine their own deeds (Foster 146).
It is certainly worthy of noting that the reader is seldom exposed to the content of Dimmesdale’s sermons. The reader is only shown what the narrator wishes to achieve the effects that he desires. Thus, the reader is aware of Dimmesdale’s hypocrisy but not burdened by it. Furthermore, Dimmesdale’s worst flaws are highlighted by the uniquely unsympathetic Chillingsworth, who himself is subjected to substantial narrative framing in order to ensure that he remains distasteful and unreliable. After returning from the forest, Dimmesdale dismisses Chillingsworth altogether and is then free to marvel at his own divine intellect. Arthur then “wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as he. However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved forever, he drove his task onward, with earnest haste and ecstasy. Thus, the night flew away, as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it” (Hawthorne 210). Indeed, freed from self-doubt, Dimmesdale is carried by his fatal ambition as he prepares for the high point of his career, his Election Day speech.
The following day, “the young and eminent divine” followed the magistrates in a parade of majestic authority; a celebration of the sanctity and divine institutions in through a celebration of their annual renewal. “His was the profession, at that era, in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for—leaving a higher motive out of the question—it offered inducements powerful enough, in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the grasp of a successful priest.” It is of no small significance that the narrator forcefully directs the reader’s attention to the very earthly appeal of Arthur’s profession and contrasts him with Increase Mather, who accrued power for himself throughout the Salem Witch trials. On the eve of his confession, the reader receives the strongest implication of Dimmesdale’s arrogant egotism and earthly motivations. As he moved within the procession, he seemed to glide “along the track of a creed” which had worn “its passage continually deeper with the lapse of time” he was swept along as if on rails. “Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, andimparted to him by angelic ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that potent cordial, which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest and long-continued thought” (Hawthorne 222). The latter case, which we may probably attribute to egotism, seems to be the more probable explanation. At any rate, Hester and Arthur are quite a pair; Hester has shame but no guilt, and Arthur has guilt but no shame! As Dimmesdale passes Hester, he does not even acknowledge her.
She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped, as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him,—least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!—for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not (Hawthorne 223).
Here we are reminded of their midnight rendezvous on the scaffold, which anticipates and contrasts powerfully with Dimmesdale’s approaching daylight confession.
On that night, Dimmesdale had sought human sympathy and reached out to grasp the hand of his wife and daughter but was shocked by Pearl’s withdrawal of her hand. While Dimmesdale has fooled most of the town, he cannot fool Pearl or elicit much sympathy from any other children: “children are not readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile; but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my arms, weep bitterly” (Hawthorne 193). The sympathy of children is with truth, it seems, and Pearl is acutely sensitive and intolerant of falsehood. Of all the characters in the story, only Pearl seems to be able to see herself through an “untarnished mirror” consistently. She seems to have no ego; she is pure, unrestrained Id. Wherever she goes, there she is─always a pure spirit, although capricious. She seems to be the honest enactment of the whims of Hester’s heart. She is the emblem of a broken law; she is the embodiment of freedom. Through the reflection of Pearl’s (and other childrens’) lack of sympathy for Dimmesdale, we are given a clue to the real contents of hisheart, a Bosom Serpent that gnawed at him constantly!
Indeed, as Dimmesdale stood upon the pillory that night, his thoughts hardly touched upon Hester until he heard Pearl’s laughter. Instead, he fantasizes about how surprised people would be if they found him there the next morning. Nor was he thinking, like others, of the impending death of the Governor. No, “while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart” (Hawthorne 137).Dimmesdale lets out a scream. Not a scream designed to draw attention; this was more of a bleating emission of pent up nervous energy. His intention was to attempt a kind of exposure therapy designed to help him overcome his overwhelming sense of guilt. Yet,
there was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure (Hawthorne 136-7).
Accordingly, when Father Wilson walks by, Dimmesdale is given quite a fright! After Wilson passes and Arthur recovers from the shock, he proceeds to gloat at his evasion of detection. At a superficial level of consciousness, he wants to confess. At a deeper level, he merely wants to steady his nerves by seeking to make a secret concession to his guilt so that he may continue to pursue his ambitions more freely. This is another version of his closet penance. In both cases, he seems to be seeking a controlled release of repressed desires, although now he is upping the stakes. As soon as he is out of harm's way, he is overcome by a mischievous glee at having pulled one over on the higher-ups once again. Instinctively, he begins to gloat and make light of the situation. The protege now stands above his teacher and it is as if the pillory has been transformed into a podium. Looking down on his Father Wilson, "the minister could hardly restrain himself . 'A good evening to you venerable Father Wilson! Come up hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!" (Hawthorne 139). After this “lurid playfulness”Arthur imagines how the earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and, half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go, knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost—as he needs must think it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then—the morning light still waxing stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.
Surprisingly, Arthur didn’t think of Hester once while imagining this dramatic tableau, a morning visage of himself, “half-frozen to death. Their moment of passion, the child it produced, the ignominy that she suffered seven years ago on the very platform on which he now stood trying to stealthily expiate his guilty conscience...none of these entered his glorious fantasy! There was no room left in his egotistical heart. Sensing this, Pearl will remove her hand from his on the scaffold. Upon reflection, Dimmesdale’s falseness and egotism are not so unlike Chillingsworth’s. Chillingsworth pries into the heart of the man who impregnated his wife while he was marooned, while Dimmesdale seems to especially enjoy the priviliged insight that his position gives him into the hearts of so many of his fellow Bostonians. He delights in the blusheing confessions of young maidens whose devotion to him extends well beyond a desire for spiritual guidance. Their thinly veiled attraction seems to be his favorite perk. These “young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms; which now, by the by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs.” Arthur Dimmesdale’s Bosom Serpent had not done its office!
Dimmesdale’s refusal to expiate his sins in front of his congregation, exposes him to the vengeance of Chillingsworth. Truly, the two belong together. And so, he meets Chillingsworth the following day. As Arthur sees Chillingsworth, he begins to feel a vague sense of terror: “I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!” muttered the minister again. “Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless horror of the man!” Pearl, not Hester, has the answer for him. Chillingsworth has come, she says, because “Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!”—answered the child. “Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother’s hand, to-morrow noontide!” (Hawthorne 144-5). And it is thanks to Chillingsworth, and his “dark necessity” that Dimmesdale is compelled to mount the pillory in the daytime. Undoubtedly, had the pangs of his conscience subsided, he would have been happy to ‘let bygones be bygones.’ Yet, as Mistress Higgins notes easily upon seeing Dimmesdale energetically walking towards the podium for his Election Day speech:
We may all see it in the sunshine; and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it openly; so, there need be no question about that. But this minister! Let me tell thee, in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be disclosed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world! What is it that the minister seeks to hide, with his hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne!”
After this encounter, the narration shifts to a description of Dimmesdale’s sermon. His “foul…organ pipe” was in full effect and his “vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment; insomuch that a listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.” Once again, Dimmesdale plays the “subtle, but remorseful hypocrite.” Once again, it seems that his congregation is moved, not by his power to elucidate the scripture, but by his ability to obscure it and infuse it with his “animal spirit.”
If the town slept through his midnight shriek upon the pillory, however, they were wide awake to his anguished passion now and they drank it up. They were seized by “the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that could be heard, and scarcely heard, sighing amid a desolate silence.” He cast a spell over the audience and heralded “a spirit of prophecy” and announced that“it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord” (Hawthorne 232). Yet while they were thrilled by his glorious prophecies, they were haunted by “a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise than the natural regret of one soon to pass away” (Hawthorne 232).
Once again he managed to transfigure his dreaded sin into sympathetic music, enrapturing the city of Boston, “it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies, had shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant,—at once a shadow and a splendor,—and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them” (Hawthorne 232). Yet, how could this man, who could not tell good from evil, the day before, how could he have risen to such heights of glory?
He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England’s earliest days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied, as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the close of his Election Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast! (Hawthorne 232).
Hester’s transgression had apparently given her a special sympathy with Dimmesdale, but did she really understand him? When he passed her on his way to his Election Day sermon, he paid no heed to her and realizes that she herself was yet another victim of Arthur’s charismatic egotism and is deeply hurt. Once she had pleaded with him to protect her, now she sensed a “labyrinth of misery” encircling her. There was no escape. In the Governor’s mansion she cried, “Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can… Thou knowest,—for thou hast sympathies which these men lack!—thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are, when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter!” She no longer seems to feel this sympathy and wonders if it was from the beginning just an illusion (specifically, a projection).
Hester protected Arthur throughout the novel. Had she given up the minister’s name in the beginning, she would not have had to wear the scarlet letter. Further, having done so, she would not have been alone with “but her child and the scarlet letter.” All along, Dimmesdale share a deep sympathy with Hester, yet he also enjoyed reading the hearts of the blushing virgins in his church. Once, he had made a covenant with her in the forest: “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?” “Hush, Hester!” said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. “No; I have not forgotten!” (Hawthorne 181). In their most intimate moment in the novel, he hushes her! He does not want to acknowledge what he did; he wants to repress it. In his final moments, Hester asks him once more, “Shall we not meet again?” whispered she, bending her face down close to his. “Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes! Then tell me what thou seest?” “Hush, Hester, hush!” said he, with tremulous solemnity.
“The law we broke!—the sin here so awfully revealed!—let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God,—when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul,—it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost forever! Praised be his name! His will be done! Farewell!” That final word came forth with the minister’s expiring breath. The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.
In the final analysis, Dimmesdale seems to be a kind of Puritan Faust. He goes around in an egocentric haze, hardly aware of the consequences of his actions. When forced to acknowledge them, he attributes them to a fiend. Although he views his heart as tainted, he seems convinced that his motives remain relatively noble. What happened to the man who, in reference to his congregation’s adoration of him, had so recently said “There is no substance in it! It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance, I have had enough! Of penitence, there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat” (Hawthorne 178).Dimmesdale calls for faith, but since he is faithless to his own words, I call for doubt. Once again, he stands upon the pillory, and though the light of day shines upon him, his self-awareness is dimmer than ever. His is a public enactment of penance, not true penitence. He has spoken shown himself freely to the world (having deemed himself too delicate for the black flower of civilization) and merely spoken in a way “whereby the worst may be inferred!” Until Dimmesdale’s very last breath, hisinsight remains dim and his words seem hollow. Thus, they echo throughout the crowd inspiring rather liberal interpretations. The real moral of Dimmesdale’s story, however, seems to have been foretold upon his earlier dress rehearsal upon the pillory: “But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate!” This is exactly what Dimmesdale does in the end. And finally, “Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!...Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!’ (Melville 42-3). How can a castaway lead a nation to golden truths when he cannot know his own?
In the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes, “Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow.” If this book truly aspires to herald the coming revelation of “a new truth…in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness,” than surely it must admit a present one: that neither could its profit be a man stained with sin. The final passage of the Ego Serpent also seems an apt conclusion here: “The serpent was but a dark fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The past, dismal as it seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To give it its due importance we must think of it but as an anecdote in our Eternity.” This seems surprisingly similar to Dimmesdale’s final conclusion. In the end, not even their dust is allowed tomingle but, importantly, Hester’s is placed above Dimmesdale’s and perhaps, in the end, she had risen above his influence.
Works Cited
Foster, Dennis. “The Embroidered Sin: Confessional Evasion in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Criticism, vol. 25, no. 2, 1983, pp. 141–63. JSTOR.
Pimple, Kenneth D. “‘Subtle, but Remorseful Hypocrite’: Dimmedale’s Moral Character.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 25, no. 3, 1993, pp. 257–71. JSTOR.
