Scott Pero
AP English Language-Mr. George
After reading The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, compose an argument on the subject of sin that incorporates characters from all three texts. Do you believe it is more successful to publicly bear your sins, or to deal with them privately? Be sure to distinguish a character’s end from how they deal with their sin.
Private Sin vs. Public: Round Two
Everything has its opposite. Every yang has its yin, every shadow has its light, and every evil has its greater good. Duality is an integral part of nature. For anything to truly be what it is, it needs something to exist to make it such. Without night, would day be what we imagine now? The contrast between something and its opposite is the best way to define anything. Even human nature consists of duality. Everyone sins, but it is our vices that best define our virtues. The good we draw from sinning is magnified by the sin itself. But how do we deal with that sin? Do we bear it in silence, or proclaim it from the mountaintops? Sin is best dealt with publicly, as demonstrated by the characters of The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and The Picture of Dorian Gray; the characters suffered from concealing their sins and benefited from revealing them to the world.
Like all secrets or emotions, if one keeps it bottled up inside, the result will be anything but propitious. Abigail Williams, the lecherous vixen of The Crucible, exemplifies this fact. Abigail sinned by sleeping with a married man, but she does not confess. Instead, she keeps it a secret, and uses it to fuel her actions. She ignores the fact that she has sinned, instead passing it off not as a sin, but as a loving act with truth behind it. Abigail obsesses over John so much that she tries to accuse his wife of witchcraft, using her sin as her motivation: “It were a fire you walked me through, and all my ignorance was burned away…God gave me the strength to call them liars, and God made men listen to me, and by God I will scrub the world clean for the love of Him! Oh John, I will make you such a wife when the world is white again!” (Miller 150). Abigail ignores her sin, and even goes so far as to bask in it, saying that it was strength sent from God. Denial is not just a phonetic version of a river in
Because Abigail dismissed her sin, the sin was never resolved. It festered inside her, building and building without release. This is an excellent commentary on Miller’s part. The characters that do not confess their sin end up with horrible fates, but those who reveal their sin to the world for judgment are rewarded with absolution. Abigail’s plans are foiled by the man she so vehemently desired, and because of this, she flees, taking her sin with her. The bottled up sin haunts her, weighing her down like a constant rain cloud hovering over her. No matter what she does to stay dry, she will always end up drenched: “The legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston” (146). Abigail could have sought redemption for her sin, but instead, she denied its existence and kept it secret. Because she did not confess her sin, her iniquity followed her and she eventually became a prostitute. Undoubtedly, this fate could have been avoided if she had come clean about her sin. Dorian Gray, similar to Abigail, ignored his sin and kept it private, believing it to be pleasure in disguise.
Dorian Gray was extremely handsome. It is his one defining characteristic that stays true throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian’s beauty compels the artist Basil Hallward to paint a portrait of Dorian. The picture’s celestial beauty, coupled with the influence of Basil’s friend Lord Henry Wotton, leads Dorian to his first great sin out of vanity: “‘I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But his picture will remain always young. […] If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that […] there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!’” (Wilde 28). Dorian unconsciously sells his soul so that he may live perpetually beautiful. He will never age, never wrinkle, and the portrait will bear the consequences of his actions instead of Dorian himself. Dorian soon discovers that not only does the portrait decay with age, but that it changes with each sin he commits. Dorian is unaffected, and everything he does has no repercussions on his own beauty. Dorian sees all of it as pleasure with no negative side effects. The effects in question slide off of him and affect the portrait, much like water sliding from a duck’s down.
Dorian’s sins affect the portrait, not himself. This is the ultimate free pass to life for Dorian—to have a scapegoat that bears all of life’s pain and suffering, while he only experience life’s ecstasies and joys. The portrait grows wretched from his sins, and so he hides it in his attic, shutting it off from the world: “No one could see it. He himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?”(125). Dorian’s portrait allows him to see the effect his actions have on his soul, a luxury no one has ever had before. Dorian, however, hides it away so that no one, not even himself, can see it. Dorian is the physical representation of keeping one’s sin private, or in Dorian’s case, locked in one’s attic. He simply sees the sins affecting his soul, but does nothing about them. Eventually, the culmination of this sin will lash out at Dorian.
Throughout the entire novel, Dorian has concealed his sin from the world in the form of his hidden portrait. Toward the end, however, he starts to feel the repercussions of his actions, especially for the murder of his friend, Basil Hallward. Dorian begins to see for the first time the extent of the damage he has done to his soul, and knows what he must do: "Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven.” (228). Dorian makes the choice to do good in hopes that the portrait will reverse itself. He actively wants to do the right thing. Despite the fact that he had ignored everything for the entire book, in the end he knows what to do. He knows he should confess, but he is simply unable to. No one would believe his story. It is far too preposterous. The important fact is that he knows and wants to both do good and confess. He simply does not have the means by which to do so. He may not actually confess or make his sin public, but the mere mindset of wanting to do so offers him a different fate than Abigail. She ignored her sins until the end, but Dorian knows he should make his sins public, and wants to do something about it.
So what does Dorian do? He stabs the only thing that will rid him of the burden he feels weighing him down—the painting. He wants his sin absolved and freed from his conscience, and the only way for Dorian to do that is by using the knife he had used to kill Basil: "As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it" (229). By stabbing the painting, Dorian has stabbed his soul, effectively killing himself. The portrait is where his soul lies, and to finally release it, Dorian must destroy the cage that keeps it. His soul is now free to affect Dorian as it would have if he had not sold it away. This does two things. The portrait is free of Dorian's wretched soul, leaving it pure and perfect, just as it was meant to be. Dorian, however, must now take back the burden of his soul, and all the baggage that comes with it. The portrait's soul was dead long before Dorian took it back, and so Dorian was killed from the sheer severity of sin his soul had endured over all these years. The desire to be rid of his sin, which stemmed from and included the desire to make it public, drove him to his fate. What, though was his fate?
Dorian never told anyone of his painting, and those he did ended up dead. His sins are private and never shown to anyone, but he earnestly wanted to change. The desire to change still counts towards one’s redemption: it is the idea, not the action that counts. Because Dorian wanted to change for the better, he is redeemed in death. In the one moment in which all of sins caught up with him, Dorian was punished for them, and, as Dorian believes: "There was purification in punishment" (226). Dorian endured the punishment that has been waiting for him all his life, and in that punishment, he was purified. Dorian saw his portrait and said that, "when that was dead he would be free" (229) and that, "without its hideous warnings he would be at peace" (229). The portrait is dead, and Dorian must no longer endure its hideous warnings. Therefore, he is free and at peace. Dorian dealt with sin privately, but at his pivotal moment in the text, tried to deal with it publicly and come clean about his sins. The mere purpose of trying to release one’s sins publicly can redeem any sinner, as Dorian has exemplified. John Proctor also, like Abigail and Dorian, dealt with his sin privately, but unlike Dorian, he actually took action in regards to his sin.
John Proctor, the man who committed lechery with Abigail in The Crucible, tried to restrain his sin like Abigail. He too ignored his sin, but did not deny its sinful nature. Proctor knew he sinned, and it plagued him every day. He felt the remorse of his sin, but he also knew he had to keep quiet. It would ruin his name in the town of
In due time, Proctor revealed his sin and was met with salvation. Abigail, in her seige of terror on the town of Salem, condemned many—including Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth—as witches, all to have Proctor to herself. Proctor knew this was the real reason behind her actions, and the thought only added to the weight bearing down on him. He was constrained by his remorse, Abigail’s treachery, and the threat to Elizabeth’s life to reveal his sin to the world: “I have made a bell of my honor! I have rung the doom of my good name” (111). Not only does he confess to lechery, but he besmirches his own name in doing so. The sin and its aftermath grew to be too much, and burst violently out into the open. This will, ultimately, lead to his redemption, as
Like Proctor, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter internalized the pain of his sin. Dimmesdale committed adultery with another woman, Hester, and sired a child with her. Dimmesdale, being the man of the cloth that he is, hated himself every moment for indulging in sin. He desired to be free of the sin more than anything, and he wanted the truth to be known. He could not, however, because he was so highly esteemed by the people. If their perfect reverend had sinned, it would cripple their entire faith. When he tries to hint at the wicked iniquity that plagues him, they only venerate him more: “They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more…he had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore…he loathed his miserable self!” (
The only way for Dimmesdale to be free of his anguish is to make his sin public, but he is unable to because of the priesthood. This predicament troubles him for seven long years, during which he deteriorates physically and spiritually from both the pain he has inflicted upon himself and the pain of his sin. He is unable to rid himself of his sin until his last dying moments, where he admits the evil he has done to his entire congregation without fear: “With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed!...the minister stood, with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory” (228). Dimmesdale won against his sin when he was finally able to confess. He was freed of the burdening chains his sin had constricted about him, and he was able to die at peace with the world. Dimmesdale, in making his sin public, conquered his enemies and was accepted by his daughter, who had, until his confession, shunned him. Everything was right with Dimmesdale, and all because he publicly confessed his sin to the people.
Hester Prynne, one of the protagonists of The Scarlet Letter, exemplifies the advantages of publicly bearing one’s sin. Hester slept with Dimmesdale even though she was already married, sharing in his sin of adultery. She deals with her sin like the rest of the characters, but the difference between Hester and the rest is that they chose to reveal their sin; Hester was forced to confess because she grew pregnant with her child,
For seven long years, Hester endured the pain of the scarlet letter, but it was not all bad. In the beginning, she was ostracized from society and had to endure the condescending looks of others, but Hester took her pain and put all of her shame to good use: “Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them” (77). Hester used her skill with a sowing needle to embroider for the town, without asking anything more. Having already accepted her role as a devilish sinner, she endeavors to partake in charity as a saint. She uses her public suffering to better herself. After years of Hester’s beneficence, the people began to see her differently: “Individuals in private life…had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin…but of her many good deeds since” (147). Not only did Hester improve as a person, but her sin proved an effective way of bettering her stance in the public eye as well. People thought more of her, because she was able to do so much in spite of sinning so seriously. In the end, after her story had long since finished, she was even buried at King’s Chapel, a prestigious cemetery that anyone would be honored to lay to rest in.
All of the characters of the three stories had to cope with their sins, and all of them suffered in some way from that sin. The defining characteristic that shines through their tenebrous transgressions, however, is how they dealt with them. They were all sinners, but what they chose to do with their sin is what defines their end. Abigail ignored her sin, and viciously used it to her advantage; as payment, she spends the rest of her life in prostitution. Dorian indulged in hedonistic sin, letting his portrait take the brunt of the repercussions, but when he wanted to do something about it and make his sins public, he was redeemed. Proctor tried to let his sin pass, but he was soon left with no other alternative but to divulge his secret publicly. Because he did, he was able to die for a noble cause with his name untarnished. Dimmesdale punished himself in private for seven years before he was able to confess his sin to the public, but when he finally did, he was freed from the pressure of it and was able to die at peace with the world. Hester openly bore her sin for all to see, and used its publicity to better herself. Three out of the five characters publicly confessed their sins, with one extra trying to publicly confess, and those same few are the ones who die at peace. As The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and The Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrate, publicly bearing your sins is better than locking them away inside. Publicity is the first step towards freeing yourself from the sin. Privacy only allows the sin to consume you until all that is left is the desire you had confessed sooner.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Bantam Dell, 1986
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
