Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

72father“thou wilt not reveal his name?”is preceded by the injunctions of thefatherDimmesdaleto Hester to keep the secret. Chillingworth, a neurotic, conceals hissadistic fantasy of torturing and psychologically destabilizing Hester and her lover. His fantasyserves to kill, and conversely to blaze up, the desire of the otherDimmesdale. This sadisticfantasy is explained by his participation in the game of the other and his ultimate revenge on him.Idealized by his congregation and affected by the private dynamics of shame, Dimmesdaleis carrying the burden of his shame and secret privately. Unable to communicate with either hisdaughter or with Hester, he decides to publicly confess and to name the origin of his shame aftergiving his most powerfully crafted sermon and thereby having tried to keep social integrity.Keeping society’s norms, Dimmesdale manages to escape the unbearable burden of his shame.His shame, epitomized by the half-seen A seared into his breast, explains his ambiguous death.Dimmesdale is aman, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, hadextended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself shouldappear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate. We impute it, therefore,solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to thezenith, beheld the appearance of an immense letterthe letter Amarked out in lines ofdull, red light. (116)In Freudian terms, Dimmesdale’s libido is directed towards his lost objectan act that isinitiated by the ego and activated by the id. Since the ego and the id are not given free rein in theFreudian model, the super-ego intervenes and activates the feeling of guilt and goes as far as topush the ego into thinking about death and suicide. The unequal distribution of libido leads towhat Freud calls in his Instincts and their Vicissitudes a reversal into the opposite (Verkehrung