The Scarlet Letter 54

The Scarlet Letter

Chapter Twenty

Entry Fifty-Four


Dimmesdale and Hester decide to escape four days from their encounter in the forest. He is glad that it is after the Election Sermon, he wants noone to be able to say that he left a public duty unperformed nor ill performed. Hawthorne speaks in this paragraph directly to the reader as the omniscient narrator.

"We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease, that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."

The pastor isn't able anymore to decide which of his faces is the true one: The one he puts on when he is in public, or when he is the broken man who is in love with Hester Prynne. The best for them would have been if they had fled immediately. But he wants to finish his job for the society, so he still feels responsibility for the people. He shouldn't. All they should care about is how they can escape Boston and - more important - Chillingworth!
When he returns back to town he feels that something changed in the town. He can't tell what it is since the buildings or streets didn't change but he feels it.
Again, Hawthorne intervenes in the book's action. He explains what exactly changed: It is not the town, nor is it its inhabitants, but the minister itself. Hester's energy was transferred to him.