{{Notability|fiction|date = November 2015}}{{Infobox character | image = Dimmesdale Watching Over the Scaffold.jpg | caption = 1850 depiction of Dimmesdale (published in oil on canvas in 1874) | first = ''The Scarlet Letter'' | occupation = Clergyman | religion = Puritanism | nationality = 20px English }} '''Arthur Dimmesdale''' is a fictional character in the 1850 novel ''The Scarlet Letter'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Puritan minister, he has fathered an illegitimate child, Pearl, with Hester Prynne, the protagonist in the novel, and considers himself unable to reveal his sin.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Hawthorne |first=Nathaniel |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uLw-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA10 |title=The Scarlet Letter |date=1893 |publisher=New York |language=en}}</ref><ref name=":1">{{Cite web |title=Arthur Dimmesdale in the Scarlet Letter {{!}} Description & Analysis |url=https://study.com/learn/lesson/arthur-dimmesdale-the-scarlet-letter-overview-character-analysis.html |access-date=2024-10-25 |website=study.com}}</ref>
== Fictional role == Next to Hester Prynne herself, Dimmesdale is often considered Hawthorne's "finest character." His dilemma takes up a significant portion of the novel, bringing out Hawthorne's most famous statements on many of the concepts that recur throughout his works: guilt and redemption, truth and falsehood, and others. Dimmesdale faces a problem that is both simple and paradoxical: the knowledge of his sin, his inability to disclose it to Puritan society, and his desire for confession.
He attempts to ameliorate the pressure of this position by punishing himself (both physically and mentally) and by insisting to his parishioners that he is a base, worthless creature. Without the awareness of his specific crime, however, his flock takes his protestations of worthlessness as further evidence of his holiness (a fact of which he is well aware) since, in the Puritan conception, awareness of one's sinful worthlessness is a necessary component of whatever virtue is available to humans; thus, Dimmesdale has been taken as an example of a conflict typical of Puritans (or seen as such by Hawthorne from his historical distance).
==Portrayals== Dimmesdale has been portrayed by: * Lars Hanson (1926) * Hardie Albright (1934) * John Heard (1979) * Gary Oldman (1995)
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==References== {{Reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dimmesdale, Arthur}} Category:The Scarlet Letter characters Category:Fictional clergy Category:Fictional characters from Boston Category:Literary characters introduced in 1850
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