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Scarlet letter

 

            Importance of the Three Scaffold Scenes.
             In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, there are three very important scenes that all take place at the town scaffold. The scaffold is a place of great shame in the Puritan society in which the story takes place. These three scenes represent how Revrend Dimmesdale changes over the course of the story. At first he denies is sin, then he reluctantly accepts it, and finally in the third scene he conquers his sin. Reverend Dimmesdale goes from being a very strong man with a guilty conscience in the first scene to being worn down from his guilt in the second scene. Finally in the third scene he cannot take the guilt from his sin and confesses and frees himself of his guilt by revealing to the truth to the townspeople. .
             In the first Scaffold scene Reverend Dimmesdale openly denies his sin in front of all the town and clergymen. At this point in the story Dimmesdale's heart has not yet felt the burden of the sin he is going to have to live with for the rest of his life. He even gives Hester a chance to tell the town who her fellow sin is when he says, " I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow sufferer!" (1369). He is giving her this chance to call him out because he knows she will not. This is insuring that nobody in the town will suspect him of being guilty of the same sin as Hester is. Dimmesdale has no problem with lying in front of the town about his sin, but as time goes on his conscience will begin to get to him.
             This first scene also shows the original strength of Reverend Dimmesdale, which he slowly loses. In this scene Dimmesdale's health is still strong because his conscience has not been eating at him for years. He is descridbed as being " a person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self-restraint"( 1368).


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