in which Governor Bellingham says: "Good Master Dimmesdale, the responsibility of this woman's soul lies greatly with you. It behooves you, therefore, to exhort her to repentance, and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof." He is defined by his peculiarly excruciating relations with Roger Chillingworth, a creature of somewhat uncertain significance even to his creator, who sometimes invites us to think of him as the devil incarnate, sometimes as an avenging fury, sometimes as the Puritan conscience, but never as merely a wronged husband. He is defined by his relations to a series of his parishioners in the great temptation scene of the twentieth chapter, where the baser elements of his nature are exhibited in riot and all but victorious. He is defined by the passionate exaltation of his Election Sermon and by his last words on the scaffold. His is the character that is most adequately realized and presented and that affects us as most unquestionably human. And yet when all is said and done, he does not become an individual; he remains a type. The forms of his temptation, sin, suffering, struggle, and aspiration are all strictly determined for him by the pressure of Puritan society and his clerical profession. Our special interest in him is due not to any noteworthy differentiation of his character but to the tremendous irony of his situation.
In Hester, on the other hand, it is manifest that Hawthorne intended to present an individual. She
