Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
- Source
- The Scarlet Letter
- Date
- 1850
Meaning of “No man, for any considerable period, can wear…”
Hawthorne warns that sustained conflict between a private self and a public performance can eventually confuse a person’s own sense of identity.
Where does it come from?
The Scarlet Letter, Chapter XX, “The Minister in a Maze,” Project Gutenberg #33. Hawthorne’s narrator says that a man who long wears one face privately and another before the multitude may become bewildered about which is true while describing Arthur Dimmesdale’s divided identity. It remains literary moral and psychological characterization rather than a clinical diagnosis.
