The Fallen Angel’s Venial Sins
Margarita Georgieva writes about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sin based fin in “The Burden of Secret Sin: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fiction.” She comments on Hawthorne's writing which includes The Scarlet Letter. In Hawthorne's novel Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth repeatedly transgress the religious laws of the Puritan society they follow. Hester's affair with Arthur Dimmesdale causes Roger, the husband whom she thought dead, to seek vengeance since he feels humiliated. Although both Hester and Arthur sin, Roger’s sins are made with the intention of harming the other parties involved. Roger's mass of sins accumulates into true evil. Hawthorne marks a dichotomy between sin and evil in his novel,…show more content… Roger, as mentioned before, believes his lack of passion condemns him to a life of acerbity which he cannot control resulting in an astute nature. Roger is an intelligent man, but his intelligence makes him a passionless and cold person which Hawthorne depicts when he states that skilled intelligent men "seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic" (110). In Roger's search for knowledge, he does not evolve spiritually—sloth. Therefore, Roger lives an isolated life but some may confuse this isolation with Hester's. Hester wanted to stay isolated and punished because that is the only way that she could still develop in her own right; Hester fears that if she left the place of her crime than she would not be obligated to attempt to atone for her sin. Roger’s distant nature is the reason he has such an interest with Dimmesdale: in his search for knowledge he becomes greedy and wants to acquire all the information he can. Roger and Arthur become "friends" and have many a intelligent conversation (115). When Hawthorne writes the following, he wants the reader to see Roger not only as a passionless person, but also as a man of a superficial