Competing internal and external demands on the individual often are in conflict with respect to personal well-being. Our well-being might be greatly increased if we were free to secure our futures by robbing a bank, but there are external demands that prevent us from doing so. This is a good thing because it maintains social order and offers equal protection to all individuals, but it can be harmful where personal well-being is concerned. On a less legal example, perhaps no work of literature shows the impact of the relationship between internal and external demands on well-being than Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of the doomed love affair between the Puritan preacher Arthur Dimmesdale and the married mother Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.
It is clear from a reading of The Scarlet Letter that Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne genuinely love each other, something that brings them great individual well-being. Hester justifies her behavior as driven by a higher and purer demand than external social demand for fidelity in marriage. As she tells Arthur, "What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so" (Hawthorne 170)! Despite this, as a priest Dimmesdale has sinned by engaging in sexual relations, while Hester is charged with adultery and made to pay a harsh public penance.
In Puritan society, as hypocritical as it could be, there were strict and rigid demands on individual behavior. This was particularly true in the cases of women and sexuality. Further, external demands about the sacred and inviolable nature of the marriage contract among Puritans were also intense. Despite these external demands, Hester, married to an evil and much older man, and Dimmesdale, unable to resist his passion for Hester, follow their internal demands (desire, passion, etc.) and consummate their relationship. Dimmesdale is viewed as a "polluted priest" and Hester is publicly punished and ostracized from ...