Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale

Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are bound by a secret adulterous relationship that forms the hidden core of The Scarlet Letter. Their connection, conceived in passion and concealed for seven years, drives the novel's moral drama, forcing each to navigate the chasm between public identity and private truth. From the scaffold where Hester alone bears the community's judgment to the forest where they briefly reclaim their love, and finally to the deathbed confession that reunites them in shared authenticity, their relationship traces a movement from concealment toward revelation, from isolation toward a tragic but genuine union.

Origins and the Scaffold

The relationship begins before the novel opens, when Hester Prynne, a young woman of perfect elegance on a large scale with dark and abundant hair and a face beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, arrives in Boston ahead of her much older husband. She enters into a passionate affair with the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale, a person of very striking aspect with a white, lofty, and impending brow, large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth apt to be tremulous. The result is a child, Pearl, and Hester's public punishment. On the scaffold, when the Reverend John Wilson and Governor Bellingham demand that Dimmesdale exhort Hester to name her fellow-sinner, he leans over the balcony and speaks to her with a voice tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. He charges her to speak out the name of her fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer, telling her that though he were to step down from a high place and stand beside her on her pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty heart through life. Hester shakes her head and refuses, looking not at Wilson but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman, saying the letter is too deeply branded and cannot be taken off. Dimmesdale, leaning over the balcony with his hand upon his heart, murmurs at her wondrous strength and generosity, and draws back with a long respiration. The crowd, moved by the minister's appeal, cannot believe but that Hester will speak the guilty name or that the guilty one himself will be drawn forth by an inward necessity to ascend the scaffold.

The Seven Years of Concealment

For seven years, Hester and Dimmesdale live parallel but radically different lives under the weight of their shared secret. Hester, wearing the scarlet letter openly on her bosom, endures daily public ignominy. She feels the innumerable throbs of anguish contrived by the Puritan tribunal: clergymen pause in the streets to address words of exhortation, children pursue her with shrill cries, and strangers' gazes brand the letter afresh in her soul. Yet she bears it all with a patient, martyr-like endurance. Dimmesdale, meanwhile, achieves brilliant popularity in his sacred office, his intellectual gifts and moral perceptions kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. The people deem him a miracle of holiness, but his public veneration tortures him. He longs to speak out from his own pulpit and tell the people what he is, but when he does confess himself altogether vile, the worst of sinners, they only reverence him the more, little guessing the deadly purport of his self-condemning words. His inward trouble drives him to practices of penance: he keeps a bloody scourge in his secret closet and plies it on his own shoulders, he fasts until his knees tremble, and he keeps vigils night after night, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, typifying the constant introspection with which he tortures but cannot purify himself.

The Forest Meeting and the Decision to Flee

The crisis of their relationship comes in the forest, where Hester resolves to reveal to Dimmesdale the true character of Roger Chillingworth, her husband, who has insinuated himself into the minister's intimacy as his physician. She sends Pearl to play and meets Dimmesdale alone. He looks haggard and feeble, leaning on a staff, with a nerveless despondency in his air, and keeps his hand over his heart. When Hester tells him that the old man, the physician they call Roger Chillingworth, was her husband, Dimmesdale looks at her with a violence of passion, a dark transfiguration, then sinks to the ground and buries his face in his hands. He cries out that he might have known it, that the secret was told him in the natural recoil of his heart at the first sight of him. Hester flings herself on the fallen leaves beside him, throws her arms around him, and presses his head against her bosom, little caring though his cheek rests on the scarlet letter. She begs his forgiveness, and he grants it, saying he freely forgives her now and that the old man's revenge has been blacker than his sin. They sit down again side by side, hand clasped in hand, on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree. Hester urges him to flee, to leave the settlement and begin anew, telling him that the future is yet full of trial and success, that there is happiness to be enjoyed and good to be done. When he protests that he lacks the strength or courage to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world alone, she whispers that he shall not go alone. The decision made, a glow of strange enjoyment throws its flickering brightness over his trouble. He feels as if he has flung himself down upon the forest leaves and risen up all made anew. Hester, in a flood of emotion, undoes the clasp that fastens the scarlet letter and throws it to a distance among the withered leaves, heaving a long, deep sigh as the burden of shame and anguish departs from her spirit. She takes off the formal cap that confines her hair, and it falls upon her shoulders, dark and rich, imparting the charm of softness to her features. A radiant and tender smile plays around her mouth, and a crimson flush glows on her cheek. Forth bursts the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest.

The Refusal at the Brook and the Public Revelation

But the reunion is immediately tested by Pearl, who refuses to cross the brook and come to them until Hester refastens the scarlet letter upon her bosom. The child's demand forces Hester to resume the symbol of her shame, and the moment of freedom passes. Dimmesdale, returning to the town, experiences a strange transformation, feeling impulses to do wild, wicked things, and he preaches the Election Sermon with an eloquence that is held to be the richest and most powerful that ever proceeded from his lips. After the sermon, as the procession moves through the marketplace, Dimmesdale, pale and tottering, turns toward the scaffold where Hester and Pearl stand. He calls them to him, and when Roger Chillingworth rushes forward to stop him, Dimmesdale cries out that with God's help he shall escape him now. Supported by Hester's arm, he ascends the scaffold and, in a voice that rises over the people, high, solemn, and majestic, confesses that he is the one sinner of the world, that he stands upon the spot where seven years since he should have stood with this woman. With a convulsive motion, he tears away the ministerial band from before his breast, revealing the scarlet letter imprinted in his flesh. Then he sinks down upon the scaffold. Hester partly raises him and supports his head against her bosom. Pearl kisses his lips, and a spell is broken; the great scene of grief develops all her sympathies, and her tears fall upon her father's cheek as a pledge that she will grow up amid human joy and sorrow. Dimmesdale bids Hester farewell, telling her that the law they broke and the sin here awfully revealed must be in her thoughts, and that he fears they cannot hope to meet hereafter in an everlasting and pure reunion. He dies with that final word.

Aftermath and Enduring Bond

After Dimmesdale's death, Hester and Pearl disappear from Boston for many years, but Hester eventually returns alone and resumes the scarlet letter of her own free will. She becomes a counselor to women, comforting them and assuring them of her firm belief that at some brighter period a new truth would be revealed to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. She is buried in the burial-ground beside King's Chapel, near an old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone serves for both, bearing a device: on a field, sable, the letter A, gules. The relationship between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, born in secret passion, sustained through years of public shame and private torment, and culminating in a public confession that costs the minister his life, ultimately leaves them united only in death, their shared grave marked by the symbol that defined their bond.