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  • Another View of Arthur DimmesdaleScapegoating and Revelation in The Scarlet Letter
  • Tadd Ruetenik (bio)

Near the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold of shame and tears away his shirt to reveal something to the community. The narrator exclaims: “It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation.”1 The actual manner in which this revelation is manifest is hidden, allowing readers to fill in the details. What is presumed, however, is that there indeed was some mark on the minister’s chest, and the narrator provides three explanations, derived from eyewitnesses, as to how it came into existence. It was the result of Dimmesdale’s self-flagellation, or the effects of Chillingworth’s evil potions, or the seemingly supernatural transference of spiritual guilt onto the hypochondriac minister’s body. Curiously, the narrator discounts the testimony of the few witnesses who claimed not to see anything significant on the minister’s chest. Noting that most people saw the semblance of a scarlet letter, the narrator adds that

it is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and who professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more [End Page 69] than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these highly respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying,—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he has made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.2

On this account, the minister was preaching a grand sermon, complete with dramatic visual embellishment, and showing the community that even the loftiest among them still suffers the effects of original sin. The narrator continues, however, by explaining away this one particular interpretation of the revelation of the scarlet letter:

Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character; when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.3

The narrator seems to be saying that, although the interpretation of these stubborn folks might indeed contain a momentous truth, it is nonetheless a misapplied one. After all, one would be deluded in thinking that Dimmesdale is anything but guilty of adultery.

Could the narrator be mistaken in his assessment? The momentous truth to which he alludes cannot be swiftly dismissed, and the claim that Dimmesdale is guilty of adultery is not as obvious as it seems. The stubborn dissenters who resist the imputation of literal guilt were, after all, not present in the deep forest of the supposed lovers’ confession. The narrator’s presentation of Hester and Arthur’s private forest dialogue—which, according to Pearl herself, “only the trees could hear”4—gives readers verification of what at this point in the story they have all but confirmed for themselves: Dimmesdale is Pearl’s earthly father. The Salem community, however, has only ambiguous public words and actions upon which to determine the true intent of the minister’s swan song. It is thus reasonable for some people to choose not to convict the minister. There is no [End Page 70] sunshine proof of Dimmesdale’s adulterous guilt, only the spectacle of a beloved preacher garnering his energy in order to express some “deep life...

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