We cannot look to our circumstances for reasons to do anything wrong. Dimmesdale is no different from the young boy that grows up in an abusive household beating his wife and claiming that he is not responsible because of his environment.
Finally, Dimmesdale's suicide is the ultimate gesture of his weakness. He cannot be honest with those that assume to know him. He claims in these last moments that he withheld his "own heavy sin and miserable agony" (244) and now must let the truth be known. This is a brave move and it would have been even braver to live after confessing. Instead, he takes his own life. Many may assume that he took his own life because of grief and inner turmoil but it makes more sense to assume that he could not live with what he had done and he could not have lived with the kind of life that the truth would have offered him. He was a coward that finally buckled under pressure because a real man would not have left Hester and Pearl alone after what...
This is the wrong view because it allows him to get away with his behavior. We should instead look at Dimmesdale as the man he is - a deadbeat dad by modern terms. He committed the greatest sin because he did not own up to the truth. While he may have "suffered" while he was living a lie, he obviously did not suffer enough because he kept the secret for a long time while Hester took a beating almost every day because of it. Dimmesdale is the epitome of a television evangelist that is caught with a prostitute. The narrator in the novel maintains, "we are all sinners" (250) and this is true. That Dimmesdale tried to live above this fact only demonstrates how weak he was in matters of the heart and humanity.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New Jersey: Watermill Classics. 1995.
