Source identified1
Image design Lavender
Read & copy
“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.”
Meaning & context
Hawthorne warns that sustained conflict between a private self and a public performance can eventually confuse a person’s own sense of identity.
Source details
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.