Friday, October 30, 2009
guilt by colten
I plan on doing a comparison between the guilt dimmesdale and hester feel throughout the book. At the beginning of the book hester is publically shamed and her "crime" is known to all. her concience is, for lack of a better term, cleared. this gives the public time, of a sense, to become acustomed to what she did. dimmesdale keeps it internal and it kills him throughout his life. nobody can become accostomed to what he did so guilt just festers and becomes worse as time goes by. also dimmesdales guilt is very selfish. he never once feels guilt towards the fact that hester has taken the blame. he only cares what people will think about him once they find out. hesters guilt is selfeless. she feels shame over the fact that she wronged chillingsworth and feels bad that she could not be faithful. i plan on including the fact that dimmesdale himself says "stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better it were so, than to hide a guilty heart through life". basically he is saying that "whoever" sinned with hester should come forth rather than living a lie. dimmesdale is a hippocrit.
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Blah Blah Blah blah blah blah blah....that's a mouth full. Quote 114 = u r teh win
ReplyDeleteI am really disappointed in the structure of this blog that doesn't mean anything. I would like to see better capitalization and punctuation in the upcoming essay. Just because you have the lush hair of a unicorn doesn't mean that you can do whatever the hell you want.
ReplyDeleteColton,
ReplyDeleteAs we discussed on Friday, this seems like a productive start. Keep your focus on the differences between PUBLIC guilt (which, I guess, is what we call shame) and PRIVATE guilt, which is what Dimmesdale experiences, and what eventually destroys him. Your thesis might ultimately have to do with what argument Hawthorne is making about WHAT we should feel guilty about (not violating society's rules so much as are own), and HOW one should act in order to 'correct' the source of our guilt (something, as you already point out, Hester does in revealing Chillingworth's identity to Dimmesdale, and something which Dimmesdale fails to do--until the very end--by keeping his own identity as Hester's lover a secret). reading over this, I'm wondering--is Hawthorne simply making the case that guilt arises from keeping secrets. Is openness (or transparency) the answer? Maybe it's that simple. I don't know. Let's see what you come up with in your first draft!