Theme Of Sin In The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a book depicting the struggle of a woman who is spared death after committing adultery in a strict puritan society. The woman, Hester Prynne, was spared death only for the reason to make an example to the rest of the community. Throughout the book you can see the theme of how sin changes lives appear in almost every chapter and is an important driving factor behind the plot. This theme is shown through the actions of the three main characters: Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. These three characters act in this novel as the personification of sin in three different types of sin. A different sin by each of the main characters.
The sin made by Hester Prynne is one that is
Arthur Dimmesdale, after committing adultery, also committed a sin by being a coward and abandoning Hester and Pearl after Hester had been accused of the crime. He would not confess to his sin but he was still on the scaffold accusing Hester, trying to keep her from saying that it was he who committed the Adultery, ““She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”” (21). Arthur Dimmesdale is not confessing to his sin and is being eaten alive from the inside out until he finally confesses to his sin and then he falls over dead for unknown causes. It is left to be assumed that he died because that he was only being kept alive to confess his sin, then his reason to live was gone so he died. He was also to scared to be seen in public with Hester and Pearl because he was a coward, so the only place he could meet with them, his family, was in the middle of the woods where no one would see them. The sin committed by Arthur Dimmesdale affected and eventually led to the end of his
His sin was that he tried to torture Dimmesdale and Hester out of revenge, because he was married to Hester before she committed adultery with Dimmesdale. He had planned to keep the secret of Hester but torture the both of them in the process, “The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy,” (41). He managed to torture Dimmesdale to the point that that was what his whole life focus was about. Chillingworth had become so consumed by his sin and the thought of revenge, that he became very sick and horrid looking. After Arthur Dimmesdale confesses his sin and then died, Chillingworth died soon after for also unknown causes. This is led to believe that the only reason he was still living was to torture Dimmesdale and hester. The sin of Roger Chillingworth affected his life to the point that when he could no longer sin, he had nothing left to do but to die.
Sin is never a good act to do but if taken to the extreme can ruin lives and in some cases even cause death. Throughout