The Scarlet Letter Chapters 7 - 12 Commentary

Commentary: For the next several years many characters follow their chosen (or unchosen) paths to sorrow and despair. those who almost separated Pearl from her mother, Hester, unite Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Weak and ill, the minister is compelled to accept the doctor's treatment as well as his companionship when Chillingworth moves to his lodgings. Convinced his patient's sickness orginates in a hidden spiritual affliction, moved by cold curiosity rather than compassion, the physician begins to probe Dimmesdale's soul. After two years, without the minister's knowledge, Chillingworth finds what he is after, what he has been searching night and day for. The discovery at the end of Chapter Ten overwhelms him with malevolent delight. Their friendship is the same on the outside, but now the doctor can play upon the poor minister's guilt-strings whenever he so chooses.

Dimmesdale meanwhile is utterly divided: in public a beloved model of piety and in private a man tormented by a sin he is too cowardly to confess. With his whole heart he wants to serve God and to believe himself capable of redemption. Rarely eating or sleeping, flagellating himself until he collapses, confessing everything and yet nothing about his spiritual depravity to his congregation, Dimmesdale knows himself to a "pollution and a lie."

Late one night he is driven by guilt to mount the scaffold on which Hester had been shamed three years before. She and Pearl (now seven years old) enter the marketplace and, as they join the minister, the mystery is resolved. The holy man was Hester's lover. A giant meteor in the shape of an "A" blazes overhead, illumuniating the guilty family. In his egoism, Dimmesdale assumes that God has set the heavens afire to show the world his sin.

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