Bottling Guilt: The Ballooning Effect

Guilt is an emotion that we create inside ourselves. It is something that a person can only feel inwardly towards himself. Once the action that created the guilt is confessed or discovered, the guilt is rid of the soul and replaced with shame and humiliation. Throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the “pure” Reverend Arthur Dimmsdale holds onto the guilt for his adulterer sins. As a result of bottling up his guilt, it grows out of control inside him and becomes the largest guilt of all the characters, eventually consuming everything that he is.
In Dimmsdale’s attempt to persuade Hester to confess the name of her fellow adulterer, he makes it clear that it should bring them both great peace if she speaks his name. In one part of his speech he says, “Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on the pedestal of shame, yet better were it so,...