After the minister's clandestine meeting with Hester in
the forest, Hester has convinced him that they must leave the colony and return to
England where they can live together as a family. Arthur Dimmesdale departs, looking
backward, uncertain of what he has truly experienced. With the quandary of public
hypocrisy and private suffering seemingly solved now, Dimmesdale's mind is free to
consider other possibilities, and, like a child released from rules, his spirit feels a
sense of release. He considers that he yet has time to give the Election Sermon,
deceiving himself that the townspeople will at least say he performed his duties to the
end. Having held his sin within his heart so long, Dimmesdale has become delusional.
Of this Hawthorne significantly writes,
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.
A
transformation, however, does come over the spirit of Dimmesdale in his sense of release
from his secret sin, as he feels that he has "flung down" his sin like "a cast-off
garment." Describing this sense of release in Dimmesdale, as "a revolution in the
sphere of thought and feeling," Hawthorne portrays Dimmesdale as incited to commit
"wild, wicked things" as an outlet to having held so long his secret guilt. Like Peter,
who denies his Lord three times, Dimmesdale commits three acts of wickedness. Yet, these
great temptations and his conversation with Mistress Gibbins cause the minister to
return to his thoughts that he is a powerless victim of fate and must bear his cross of
guilt and sin:
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded
himself, with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly
sin.
Realizing the great
evil of his hypocrisy in concealing his sin for so long, Dimmesdale pulls back from his
feelings of release in the forest with Hester; and, as he feels fate directing him
more,
...Another man had returned out of the
forest...with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never
could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge
that!
When he enters his
house, Chillingworth greets him, but realizes that the minister no longer trusts him.
Speaking of his forthcoming sermon, Chillingworth suggests that he give the minister
medication, but Dimmesdale, sensing a looming fate that he must be punished for his sin,
refuses him and, instead, speaks of going to "another world."
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