Personality In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Puritan society is a period of strict rules harsh punishment, and cruel judgment for those who do not follow societal guidelines. When Nathaniel Hawthorne penned The Scarlet Letter, he not only exposed the hypocrisy in the Puritan religion, but he revealed numerous psychological components. Within the lines of his novel, Hawthorne exposes what is perhaps Sigmund Freud’s most prominent theory, his take on personality. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter exposes Freud’s personality theory in providing explicit examples of the Id, Ego, and Superego at work within Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, Arthur Dimmesdale and Puritan society itself; these aspects often interfere with one another causing conflicting emotions and repression.
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His theory is on “how the mind, the instincts, and sexuality work” (Barry 92). The Id demonstrates our primitive impulses, our desires, our innermost needs. This is what drives Hester throughout most of the novel- her desire. Not only did she desire Dimmesdale, resulting in her infidelity, but also she desired a better life for her daughter, Pearl, and she desired freedom. Roger Chillingworth also has this affliction. His desire was to seek revenge against the man who ruined his marriage and his wife. All Chillingworth can see is revenge and he blindly follows his Id down a path of havoc and bloodlust. The Ego represents both our conscious and unconscious. The Ego is the middle sister or the referee if you will, between the Id and the Superego. Its function is to determine which impulses desired by the Id can be fulfilled while still satisfying the Superego. The final part of personality is the Superego, the part that maintains our social constraints. It maintains our feelings of guilt and disobedience and blindly follows whatever society and morality tells us to. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale is at war with all three parts of his personality. His Id forces him to act on his love for Hester, yet his Superego will not allow him to admit it to his congregation. His Ego allowed one too many desires to get through, and now he is experiencing shame. However, he cannot regret his love for Hester or the
Freud suggested, “The very act of entering into civilized society entails the repression of various archaic, primitive desires” (Felluga Repression). This means that even the most civilized of human being were susceptible to their desires in one way or another-be it through repression, slipping, or dreaming (Felluga Repression). The Freudian definition of repression is “the ‘forgetting’ or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires, or traumatic past events, so that they are forced out of conscious awareness and into the realm of the unconscious” (Barry 92-93). Hawthorne’s novel accounts an act of repression that began a chain-reaction leading to the events surround Hester, Arthur, and Roger. It all began with Hester and Arthur’s repressed love for one another and the slip that led to their adulterous act. Freud wrote, “Things unfit for expression were ideas