Dimmesdale and Hester's Quest for Identity in The Scarlet Letter Although the allegory is an explicit and tempting reading of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, I also see in this novel the potential for a psychological reading, interpreting it as a search for oneself. Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne go through this process and ultimately come to discover the duality of personality and the impossibility of completing the divide between individual and community identity. However, they have been forced to take different paths during this journey, and they react quite differently when they finally reach the end of this search. Dimmesdale and Hester start from the same point: their adultery. This “sin” shakes them and begins their long and difficult journey. Dimmesdale's crime is kept secret, but that doesn't mean he can forget or deny it. As a well-respected minister, he stands at the center of his community, defending the religious and moral standards of this puritanical society. While the Puritans as a whole were severe and strict regarding evils and sins, he was even more aware of them than anyone else. The values ​​he defends condemn him with a strong feeling of guilt, precisely because he is his own prosecutor. The pain is acute, because not only has he sinned, but he must bear the secret of it: it was inconceivable the agony with which this public veneration tortured him! … He wanted to express himself, from his own pulpit, with the full height of his voice, and to tell the people what he was. … 'I, your pastor, whom you respect and trust so much, am totally a pollution and a lie!' (143) Not only must he bear the guilt of his crime, but his...... middle of paper... would have been ripe for it, in Heaven's time a new truth would be revealed, to establish all the relationship between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (263) As Dimmesdale represents the person bound by society, oppressing his passions, and Hester the exile from society, proudly denying her need for social support, the sad truth they discover, although in different ways, is the even: that we need both individual freedom and social belonging. Although it is impossible for them to have both and complement each other, at least they have come to recognize this truth. Works Cited Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The scarlet letter. Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998. Girgus, Sam B. Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.