What is a scarlet letter?

What is a modern day person who is comparable to Arthur Dimmesdale from the Scarlet Letter?

• Answer:

  Arthur Dimmesdale Arthur Dimmesdale is a fictional character in the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Puritan minister, he has fathered an illegitimate child, Pearl, with Hester Prynne and seeks to hide the truth of his relationship with her. Next to Hester Prynne herself, Dimmesdale is often considered Hawthorne's finest character. His dilemma takes up a significant portion of the novel, bringing out Hawthorne's most famous statements on many of the concepts that recur throughout his works: guilt and redemption, truth and falsehood, and others. Dimmesdale faces a problem that is both simple and paradoxical. He is keenly, even morbidly, aware of his sin with Hester; his desire for punishment is, however, thwarted by his cowardice, which prevents him from confessing. He attempts to ameliorate the pressure of this position by punishing himself (both physically and mentally), and by insisting to his parishioners that he is a base, worthless creature. Yet without the awareness of his specific crime, his flock takes his protestations of worthlessness as further evidence of his holiness (a fact of which he is well aware); since, in the Puritan conception, awareness of one's sinful worthlessness is a necessary component of whatever virtue is available to humans. Thus, Dimmesdale has been taken as an example of a conflict typical of Puritans (or seen as such by Hawthorne from his historical distance).