The Scarlet Letter, Guilt, And Its Effect On A Person

When was the last time you felt guilty? What did you do to make you feel that way, and were you punished for it? In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, guilt, and its effect on a person are explored in two well-defined characters; Hester Prynne and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Guilt can be disastrous to a person’s health, well-being, and internal spirit, as displayed by our two characters own private struggles. Placed intermittently throughout the novel, three different scaffold scenes show various stages of guilt, and, in a way, its progressive torture over time. In the first scaffold scene, placed at the very beginning of the novel, main character, Hester Prynne mounts the scaffold to serve her ignominy. Then, in the next scene, Dimmesdale’s concealed guilt is shown when he stands atop the platform in the dead of night with his fellow adulterer and secret child. Finally, readers witness Dimmesdale’s transformation from concealed to revealed guilt in th e last scaffold scene, in which he finally confesses to his sin. Based upon these three separate instances, you can see the pain, suffering, and damage that guilt can instill on a person, and how the scaffold reveals this. Literary classic, The Scarlet Letter, set in the middle of the seventeenth century in Boston, Massachusetts, begins with a beautiful, elegant woman, bearing the name Hester Prynne, being escorted out a town prison and onto the town scaffold. With her, she carries her illegitimate child, conceived outsideShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of The Scarlet Letter 1434 Words   |  6 Pages Dark romanticism is defined as emphasizing the fatality and proclivity of sin and guilt. This new subgenre explores the conflict between good and evil and later reveals the psychological effects it has on one s body. 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