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The Scarlet Letter
The ninth commandment tells man not to give false witness.(Exodus 20:16) Nathaniel Hawthorn and Charles Dickens in their novels The Scarlet Letter and A Tale of Two Cities, respectively, both use punishment for deception as a recurring theme. Although they do so to different degrees and in dissimilar manners, both authors agree that deception is a sin that requires punishment.
In The Scarlet Letter, the heroine, Hester Prynne conceived a child out of wedlock. Despite the pleas and demands of the clerical community, she did not reveal the identity of the father. The Puritanical community in which she lived in demanded her to give up her conspirator or bear the consequences of the deed alone. Due to her doggedness, the townsmen sentenced her to wear a scarlet letter *A* embroidered on her chest. The A served as a symbol of her crime, was a punishment of humiliation, gave her constant shame, and reminded her of her sin. Hester*s penalization was a prime example where deception led to negative consequences in that she would have been spared the entire encumbrance of the crime if she did not deceive the townspeople. Although seemingly, her paramour did not escape punishment.
In fact, the father of her bastard child took a more severe sentence. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale seemed to be an upstanding, young priest. The whole town liked him and respected him as a holy man. Thus, his deception was much more direct and extreme when he did not confess that he impregnated Hester Prynne. Unlike Hester, he was not publicly punished. So although Hester overcame her ordeal and went on with her life, Dimmesdale exacted a constant, physical and mental reprobation on himself. This inner pain was so intense that his physical health began to reflect his inner sufferings. In the end, he redeemed himself by his confession in front of the whole town, but his long endurance of the secret took its toll and he died. Roger Chillingworth had a similar fate.
Like Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, Hester*s husband, keeps his relation to her a secret. Chillingworth*s deception allows him to become consumed with hatred and the desire to inflict his revenge on the one who stole his wife*s heart. Because he had secretly lived his life in hate, he too began to show his rotten inner self on the outside. Never having revealed his true identity to everyone, he died without solace and alone.
Although Charles Dickens is not so severe in the castigation of his characters, he too makes the crime of deception punishable even by death. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Darnay is an example of one who escapes punishment for his offense.
Charles Darnay was his first line of deception. Darnay used this pseudonym in order to hide his roots in the French aristocracy. He was truly an Evr*monde. This fact continuously haunted him later when he met and fell in love with Lucy Manette. This was due to her roots which lied in her father, Dr. Manette. Dr. Manette was imprisoned unjustly by an Evr*monde and saw their abuses of the peasant class. He thusly accused all Evr*mondes of being monsters. Later, he suspected that Charles was an Evr*monde, but did not tell anyone because of his daughter*s relationship with Charles. This became a problem later when Charles needed to go to France after the start of the Revolution. Because he had always been careful to hide his identity, he assumed no one knew his true identity so he left for France despite the danger the Revolution was for him. When he arrived, he was immediately imprisoned and sentenced to death. Only through the sacrifice of another man, he escaped his sentence.Every character was not as lucky as him, however.Another character who despised the Evr*mondes was Madame Defarge. She was not spared an unnatural death. Like Dr. Manette she hid the fact that an Evr*monde wronged her in the past. In her case, it was an Evr*monde who impregnated her sister and killed her brother. She secretly abhorred the family of Evr*mondes and nurtured hopes for someday exacting a revenge upon them. Unlike Dr. Manette, she could not separate Darnay from his infamous family and tried to have him killed during the Revolution. Because of her secret, she tried to confront Charles alone. This led to her confrontation with Ms. Pross when looking for the Evr*mondes. In her struggle with Ms. Pross, she draws a gun, only to be accidentally shot with it by Ms. Pross, ending her life.
Dr. Manette had a secret hate for the Evr*mondes too, but his ability to see past Charles* name saved him from a fatal end. As a victim of the Evr*mondes, it was necessary for him to risk his life when he wanted to save Darnay from death. A letter, he wrote years ago before he knew Charles, that deemed all Evr*mondes as monsters made this impossible. Because of this he almost caused his only love in life*s, his daughter, the pain of losing her husband. The sacrifice of man named Sydney Carton saved him from going through his daughter*s grief and allowed his son in-law to live.
The sacrifice of Sydney Carton was his punishment for secrecy. He was in every outward aspect, Charles Darnay. This included the fact that he was in love with Lucy Manette. Unfortunately, his mirror image and Lucy were already in love and he knew that he could not win her heart. Thus, he was consigned to love Lucy clandestinely and hated himself for the years of life he wasted making nothing of himself. He was jealous of Charles, who was just like him, but had made something of himself, and thus, won Lucy*s heart. When Charles was in prison and was waiting to be executed, these inner feelings of Carton came into play as he made Darnay switch clothing with him so that he would go to the guillotine and Darnay would go free. Charles* life was his gift to Lucy and his revenge upon Darnay who, now, owed his life to Carton. He was one who faced the punishment of death.
The death of a character is the ultimate penalty in both The Scarlet Letter and A Tale of Two Cities. Both Dickens and Hawthorn use this to compensate for a character*s falsification and the wrongdoings due to the secrets that each hide. They both, however, also allow death to be an end with grace, as it was for Reverend Dimmesdale, in A Scarlet Letter, and Sydney Carton, in A Tale of Two Cities. Both characters were allowed to die in peace because of the penitence each went through.Although there were some similarities in the penalties, there were more differences. Even in the death penalty, the two authors inflicted them upon their characters in different manners. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, in Hawthorn*s novel, died by a physical reaction to the inner deterioration of each man. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens had his characters go through violent and unnatural demises. Another difference was the fate of the others. Hawthorn let Hester Prynne live, but she lived alone and without comfort for her past. On the other hand, Charles Darnay and Dr. Manette both escaped the consequences of their dupery and went on to live with happiness.
Whether by death, humiliation, or difficult trials, Nathaniel Hawthorn and Charles Dickens imprint upon the readers mind, that deception is an offense and must be punished.
