Who Is Dimmesdale's Identity In The Scarlet Letter

When I first met Tom in 6th grade I saw him as a sweet, kind boy. He was loved and revered by all his peers for his intelligence and unwavering kindness. However, through the years Tom tried so hard to please everyone around him -- his teachers, his parents and his friends -- that he became fake and self-absorbed. Tom had told me that he felt terrible pretending to be someone he’s not, but he’s afraid of what those around him would think if he were his true self. Even though Tom is a young man, he shares similar traits with Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dimmesdale attempted to be the venerable saint everyone in the town wanted him to be, despite harbouring a dark secret that haunted him for seven years. He
Throughout the story he’s contemplating whether he should be an honest or adored man, and in a sense, he is both. He wrestles so much with his emotions that he goes to the scaffold one night to try and draw the town out to see him on his pedestal of ignominy. This was several years after Hester’s punishment, and “he had been driven hither [to the scaffold] by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back with her tremulous gripe”(Hawthorne 139). One part of Dimmesdale believes he should’ve stood with the woman he loves in her hour of need on the scaffold all those years ago, while the other part of him is so afraid of being untruthful to his holy name and to the townspeople that love him, that every time he even considers coming clean, fear drags him back to the edge of sanity. Before he committed his sin, the reader can only assume that Dimmesdale was a virtuous, self-assured man. However, “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”(Hawthorne 205-206). Dimmesdale spent his career acting hypocritically and contradicting himself by his preaching and treatment of Hester and Pearl. Had the townspeople managed to see past Dimmesdale’s “face” they might have realized he wasn’t
Dimmesdale’s, however, affects him the most drastically. A part of Arthur dies inside as he struggles to come to terms with his tarnished purity, and the idea that he is not the righteous man everyone praises him for being. Hawthorne strived to convey to the people of his and future generations that trying to hide every mistake and deny our humanity will dehumanize us and tear our world to pieces. Everyone has things about them that they’d rather not share, but putting on a mask for the rest of the world will lead to a society similar to Dimmesdale’s Puritan one -- a world full of people desperate to idolize someone and disapproving of mistakes. If we as a whole are to learn anything from Dimmesdale and Hester’s tragic story, it ought to be that we should never be afraid to show the world who we truly are -- whether that be better or worse than who we pretend to be. If people cannot accept us for who are on the inside, perhaps we need to change our views and not