Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Hypocrisy In The Scarlet Letter'

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Dhruv Patel Davis American 16 October 2014 The Death Though Hypocrisy Hypocrisy is the practice of claiming to have moral standards or believes to which one’s own behavior does not conform. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester, a woman from England moved to Boston, sinned and had a baby with someone other than her husband. She has a girl named Pearl. Hester’s punishment for adultery this is stand on the scaffold for a day in with the letter ‘A’ on her chest. After seven years Pearl finds out that her dad is Dimmesdale, a minister, and they plan to leave to go to England three days later. On the scaffold Dimmesdale is saying a speech and then he confesses that he is father of Pearl and then he dies. Three scenes from a single book can describe the entire history of hypocrisy in Puritan society. In the Scarlet letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses…show more content…
Dimmesdale is on the scaffold giving a speech and then realizes that he can’t hold in his sin anymore. Guilt building up and Dimmesdale confessing kills him. The last chapter Dimmesdale is giving a speech and then starts saying that he is the father of Pearl and then he rips his shirt open to let everybody see what is on his chest. “‘Hester Prynne,’ cried he, with a piercing earnestness, ‘in the name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last moment, to do what—for my own heavy sin and miserable agony—I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it with all his The Scarlet Letter might!—with all his own might, and the fiend’s! Come, Hester—come! Support me up yonder scaffold’” (Hawthorne 263). Dimmesdale wanted to die in Hester’s hands when he confessed that he is truly Pearl’s father. Being hypocritical leads to Dimmesdale’s

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