Meaning

Hawthorne is pointing to the psychological cost of sustained dishonesty. When a person presents one version of themselves to the world and keeps a different, private self hidden, that internal division does not stay neat and stable over time. The effort of maintaining the gap gradually erodes a person's sense of which self is real, leaving them genuinely confused about their own identity. The quote is ultimately a warning about the corrosive effect of inauthenticity on the self.

Context

This observation appears in The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, one of the landmark works of American fiction. The novel is set in a Puritan community and explores themes of guilt, hypocrisy, and the difference between public reputation and private truth. A central tension in the story is the contrast between a character whose hidden guilt festers in secret and another whose shame is worn openly. Hawthorne used the Puritan setting as a lens through which to examine moral psychology, and this particular line reflects the novel's deep interest in what secret-keeping does to a person's inner life.

About the author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American novelist and short story writer, born in Salem, Massachusetts, a place whose history of religious severity and public judgment shaped much of his imagination. He is considered one of the major figures of American Romanticism, known for work that probes guilt, sin, and moral ambiguity with unusual psychological depth. The Scarlet Letter remains his most celebrated novel and a standard of American literary study.