The Scarlet Letter 6

The Scarlet Letter

Chapter Three

Entry Six

After Hester and her husband saw each other, the trial began. Prynne, still caught in her thoughts about him, was called by John Wilson, the “eldest clergyman of Boston.” He stood on a balcony hanging over Hester’s platform, next to him a pale young man. While he spoke he introduced this man as Brother Dimmesdale.

He is one of the most important and at the same time puzzling characters in the story.

He is described as a “young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest-land.” He had a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which often trembled if he didn’t press his lips together.

All in all, he seemed to be an insecure person, feeling comportfable only in loneliness, but his freshness and purity of thought affected many people like the speech of an angel.

It was up to this man to make Hester reveal the secret name of her affair.

Durig the proceedings, the evidence is that Arthur Dimmesdale is the father of Hester Prynne’s daughter.

First, he is announced by John Wilson as a man who didn’t want to force Hester Prynne to tell the man’s name. He didn’t want her “to lay open her heart’s secret in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude.” Why should he care about an alien woman in a time where adultery was on of the greatest sins in life, when he didn’t have a personal relationship to this person?

Furthermore, his body tries to resist Wilson’s request to speak in front of Hester and the staring crowd: “The trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.”

Also, before he starts to speak, he “bents his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed.” We don’t know what he is praying for, but it is likely that he begs for mercy from heaven when he pretends to be against the woman he loves.

Furthermore, after Mr. Wilson weighs in to threathen her with the “limits of Heaven’s mercy,” Hester looks instead of the reverend’s eyes into Dimmesdale’s while she is replying “Never!” To the reader it seems like an oath she is making to him.

In the end, Hawthorne’s choice of names looms large. “Arthur Dimmesdale” contains “Adam, Adultery” and “Dim and Dale = to hide one’s sin”

All this reasons make me think that his name is the wanted one.