In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the respected minister Arthur Dimmesdale deceives his community, preventing the townspeople from seeing the truth that he has sinned and hidden his secret. When his guilt finally overcomes him, he fantasizes about confessing the secret of his adultery to his congregation seven years after he committed the sin, but the people do not believe what he says. Rather than believing him, they believe the deception he has been showing them. He shows the community a perfect image of an innocent preacher, when he knows that he is really a sinner.
He expects them to be angry and make him leave the pulpit when they hear his veiled confession, but instead “they heard it all, and did but reverence him the more” (Hawthorne 107). Dimmesdale reminds himself of his seemingly unforgivable sin when he sees the meteor. This meteor comes when Dimmesdale is on the scaffold, when he is showing his secretive, sinful side instead of the perfect Puritan side he usually shows the community. The scaffold is the place where he punishes himself for his sin, so it is fitting that he sees the meteor when he is on the scaffold. He interprets the meteor’s shape as a symbol of his impurity.
The community, however, interprets the meteor to mean that their deceased governor is now in heaven. He may have been impure, but kept it hidden, like Dimmesdale. These differing interpretations of the meteor support the theme that a community cannot define goodness and sin in an individual, because of the privacy and secrecy in everyone’s lives. Dimmesdale interprets the meteor’s shape as a sign of his adultery, showing that because the community has not punished him for his sin, he suffers from self-shame and cannot forgive himself for what he has done. Dimmesdale, as an individual, interprets the meteor differently than the rest of the ommunity because he constantly has his sin on his mind and he will not forgive himself for his actions. Dimmesdale’s guilt does not go away because he believes that since he has not received punishment for his sin, he does not deserve forgiveness—his own or anyone else’s. He craves punishment so he can achieve forgiveness.
Dimmesdale urges Hester to confess for him and tell everyone that he is an adulterer. He emphasizes his wish to be punished by saying, “What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him-yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? (50). Dimmesdale views himself as a hypocrite because, as a preacher, he warns his congregation about sin and everyone thinks he is perfect, but he is really a sinner. He does not want to feel like one; he wants to confess and feel free from his sin. He sees the meteor as a symbol for his adultery because he has not been punished like Hester has. Therefore, he does not think he should be forgiven, and he cannot forgive himself, for he feels that his burden is too great to be relinquished without retribution.
Dimmesdale feels that Hester should be grateful that her punishment is out in the open, because he would rather his shame be public than private, claiming that private guilt is harder to bear. He tells her that standing on her “pedestal of shame” is better than “[hiding] a guilty heart through life” (50). He urges her to proclaim that he is Pearl’s father, but Hester would rather let him choose to ess for himself whenever he is ready, so she remains quiet. Dimmesdale wants to receive punishment so he can work for his forgiveness.
He expresses this wish by saying, “Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest workout an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without” (50). What he really means by this is that he thinks Hester is given a public punishment so she can work through her sin, move past it, and put it behind her. Dimmesdale himself, however, is not given the public ignominy that Hester is given, so he believes that he cannot put his sin behind him and be forgiven. Dimmesdale holds all of his guilt and shame in, and when it builds up, it causes him to inflict his own punishment upon himself.
He starts whipping himself and doing other things to inflict physical harm because he assumes that he needs to punish himself since no one else is. Dimmesdale longs for everyone to know about his sin so he can eventually be relieved of his burden and feel normal again. This desire to feel normal demonstrates the prevalent want and need to feel accepted. His desire to confess is further exemplified when he tells his congregation that he is “altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity” (107).
His description of himself goes to show that not only does he feel guilty for what he has done, but he also feels shame-selfloathing. When Dimmesdale is presented with the opportunity to confesses his adultery and relieve himself of his guilt and shame, he is finally able to feel the freedom and relief that comes with releasing his heavy burden, and he is able to die feeling that everything is right. Since they are not harboring the “agony of heaven-defying guilt”, the Puritan community takes the “A” shape of the meteor to mean something more innocent than Dimmesdale’s interpretation: “angel” (111).
This innocent interpretation is viewed as a sign that their newly-deceased governor is in heaven. This interpretation supports the Puritan expectations of innocence and purity. These Puritans are, to some extent, forced to show a perfect, sinless, Christian version of their real selves. Although this community expects perfection and sinlessness, it contains innumerable secrets and hidden sinslike Hester and Dimmesdale’s adultery—that people are expected to hide. Another expectation of this society is conformity, especially conforming to society’s opinions and beliefs.
This is exemplified when the everyone in the community claims to see the same symbolization in the meteor. No one wants to feel isolated from their community, so everyone conforms to the opinion of the rest of the community. This idea of conformity is demonstrated when the sexton says that he saw the meteor—”a great red letter in the sky,—the letter A,which we interpret to stand for Angel” (118). It is understood that by saying “we,” he is referring to the community as a whole. The sexton tells Dimmesdale what the community thinks so he can conform to their opinion and not be or feel isolated because he has a different opinion.
In this situation, the sexton’s actions support conformity to the community’s beliefs rather than individuality and expressing one’s own beliefs. These two interpretations of the meteor-adultery and angel —support the same main idea about how the community is unable to identify for sure what goodness and sin truly are in each and every person because everyone is so secretive. Therefore, the community should not judge people based on what they appear to be, because they are often not who they lead everyone to believe.
Although Reverend Dimmesdale is the only example of hidden sin that the reader knows of for certain, it is assumed that there are many more townspeople that are hiding their own secrets. When the narrator says, “another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it,” he means that everyone is guilty of his or her own personal sin, so he or she would interpret the meteor differently (Hawthorne 116). Dimmesdale interprets the meteor as meaning “adultery” because that is his secret sin, but anyone else would interpret it as a symbol of whatever their secret sin is.
