Chillingworth Human Nature

Desires, reason, and action are fickle things; they manifest themselves in a variety of was, but they are all undergirded by the same driving force: inherent human nature. Throughout history writers have told stories in which the actions of characters are understood through the virtue of their motivations. Modern human psychology attempts to provide a framework for understanding human motivations and behaviors, yet long before psychology existed, authors delved into the complexity of human nature. Psychoanalysis has had a deep-seated relationship with literature since its inception: Freud termed his theory of childhood neurotic symptom development the Oedipus complex based on the play Oedipus Rex, and just like how in literature the reader

After finding out about his wife’s infidelity, Chillingworth takes steps to take revenge against Dimmesdale, in in doing to fulfilling his primal desires of curiosity and schadenfreude (pleasure derived from others pain) (Hawthorne 113). Chillingworth’s tormenting of Dimmesdale becomes “a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce though still calm, necessity…” (Hawthorne 113). What may once have been a repressed desire when Chillingworth was a student of medicine, has become a fully manifested action. Repressed desires are pushed down into the depths of the unconscious, where the Id resides, yet because Chillingworth is influenced so heavily by the Id, his innate desires are able to fully manifest themselves. In Puritan society, human desires are largely considered to be sinful, and so acting upon these desires is the literal enactment of sin. Chillingworth certainly portrayed as evil, even to the extent that Pearl, Hester’s daughter, who has an uncanny intuition, recognizes Chillingworth’s nature and warns her mother to “Come away, or yonder old Black man will catch you!” (Hawthorne 118). Chillingworth’s predisposition to his Id is, for the Puritans, a predisposition to

Literary Psychoanalytic Criticism lets one view the underlying motivations, conflicts, and desires of the characters, but the true value in the ways in which authors represent themselves in their writings. The introduction to The Scarlet Letter is a near forty-five-page tirade against Hawthorne’s previous coworkers at the Salem Custom House. Hawthorne was lost his position due to a “political shakeup,” and he later expressed his anger in saying “I detest this town so much that I hate to go out into the streets…” (Shmoop Editorial Team). Hawthorn wrote The Scarlet Letter as an allegory to the range of emotions from “the rage he felt toward fellow Salemites,” to the grief he felt by the death of his mother “six weeks after his firing” (Shmoop Editorial Team). Every author conveys their own inner world through their writing in some way, and a full understanding of this inner world is necessary to gain full comprehension of a text. While Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism is limited to human psychology, its use to understand the characters of a text enable a full understanding of the text and give context to the