Dimmesdale and Hester's search for identity in The Scarlet Letter While the allegory is an explicit and tantalizing reading of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, I also see in this novel the potential for psychological reading, interpreting it as a search for one's self. Both Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne go through this process and ultimately manage to find the duality of their personality and the impossibility of completing the division between individual and communal identity. However, they were forced to take different paths on this journey, and they react very differently when they finally reach the conclusion of this quest. Dimmesdale and Hester start from the same point: their adultery. This "sin" shakes them off their tracks 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 highly respected minister, he is at the center of his community, being the upholder of the religious and moral standards of that Puritan society. While Puritans are on the whole stern and severe about evils and sins, he is even more aware of them than anyone else. The values ​​he embodies condemn him with a strong sense of guilt, precisely because he is his own attorney. The pain is acute because not only has he sinned, but he must carry the secret of it: the agony with which this public veneration tortured him was inconceivable! … He longed to speak out, from his pulpit, at the top of his voice, and tell people what he was. … 'I, your shepherd, whom you revere and trust so much, am absolutely a pollution and a lie!' (143)Not only must he bear the guilt of his crime, but h...... middle of paper ...... would have matured for this, in the days of Heaven, a new truth would be revealed, to found all the relationship between man and woman on safer ground of mutual happiness. (263)Since 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, albeit in different ways, is one of itself: that we need both individual freedom and social belonging. Although it is impossible for them to have both and complete each other, at least they have come to recognize this truth. Works Cited Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Girgus, Sam B. Desire and Political Unconsciousness in American Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.