From fairy tales to mythologies, fables to romance to even the simplest short stories of a third grader’s book, almost all of them often comprise a scheme of Heroes vs. Villains, and Good vs. Evil. Similarly, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne also contains many of the same situations and characters with their own symbolic meanings that allow them to express strong and demanding feelings through the symbols that they carry. Hester Prynne, whom appears as a sinful woman, a shame to the society, is created to represent the goodness of the story. Ironically, her husband, Chillingworth, who initially appears to be an intelligent and honorable man, is created to symbolize a daemonic evil. He is symbolic of the hidden sin and immorality that exists within the Puritan society. As an honorable and intelligent man who fatuously enslaved himself to the Devil’s work, Roger Chillingworth revolves his life from kindness and intellect into endless obsession of revenge, eventually leading him to self-destruction. Roger Chillingworth, originally named Roger Prynne, lived an old and lonesome life as a scholar in England who spent most of his life in isolation under the shadow of a dim lamplight with abstruse studying that turned him into a man with “remarkable intelligence in his features” (58) Roger Chillingworth first committed his sin when he chose to marry Hester Prynne, a stunning, young woman in which they shared no mutual acquisitiveness except for a great gap of age. Foreseen ahead of time, Roger Chillingworth knew that he was incapable of keeping the young, beautiful Hester Prynne by his side, yet he disillusioned himself with the hope that if he could spoil her with all the indulgences a woman ever fancied about, then she woul... ... middle of paper ... ...iend that his very existence was dependent on Dimmesdale. As Dimmesdale climbed up to the scaffold to confess, the physician agonized that his victim was about to escape from his hand. When Dimmesdale eventually did confess, the means by which Chillingworth was kept alive, through the secret of Dimmesdale, vanished. And like Dimmesdale himself, Chillinworth too vanished soon after. From the intellectual noble man, Roger Chillingworth became the worst sinner and a pawn of the devil when he let obsession, vengeance, jealousy and hatred overpower his morals and intelligence. Chillingworth’s symbolism of evil and sin was strong, powerful and successful as he represented the self-destructive power of vengeance that people let in their lives, as well as the innate evil that results from jealousy and hatred, which can turn the purest man into the worst of sinners.
Roger Chillingworth’s suffering arose from a domino effect that he had no control of. Roger was merely a casualty of a sin that he had no partake in, but it turned his life upside down for the worse. The big punch that started Roger’s suffering was the affair between Hester and Dimmesdale. His suffering from this event was unlike the suffering it caused Hester and Dimmesdale as they suffered for their own sin, but Roger Chillingworth did not suffer from his own sin. Roger’s suffering comes directly from his own wife having a child with another man, an event he had no say or action in: “his young wife, you see, was left to mislead herself” (Hawthorne 97). Left all by herself Roger’s wife, Hester, mislead herself as no one was there to watch
The Powerful Symbol of the Scarlet Letter In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne's Scarlet. token liberates her more than it punishes her. First of all, Hester's soul is. freed by her admission of her crime; by enduring her earthly punishment, Hester.
Throughout all forms of literature, the author will often provide situations and characters, each which can contain a strong symbolic meaning. Symbolism allows a character to be expressed as almost anything. Through the symbolism of a single character, any type of character trait, story, or way of life can be told. Also, a character can represent a strong and demanding feeling. One of these feelings is that of revenge, a controlling obsession possessed by a character. It is a problem that may lead to feelings or acts of sin and evil. The actions, feelings, thoughts, and looks of one character may symbolize that chain of evil and sin, including the root of all evil. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, symbolism is used throughout the novel to describe the character Roger Chillingworth's acts of revenge, representing sin and evil, including the devil, which lead to the decomposition of his character.
¨Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy -all his vital and intellectual force -seemed at once to desert him, insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun,”(Hawthorne 177).
Roger Chillingworth is completely baffled by both his patient’s condition and his state of mind. He works around the clock, making medicines and tending to Dimmesdale’s needs. One day, the reverend asks Chillingworth where he found an unusually dark, flabby herb. The doctor replies that he found them growing on an unmarked grave, and implies that the weeds are a result of a “hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime” (74). This sparks a conversation about confession and sin. Dimmesdale argues that there are various reasons for keeping one’s sin a secret, such as that no good will come from revealing the truth. Chillingworth replies that these people are only deceiving themselves and
Even with the major sin of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger's sins are much greater. First Roger knows that he never really did love Hester and says he did wrong by marrying such a young wife that also didn't love him. But Roger doesn't notice his second sin, taking revenge on Arthur Dimmesdale. An example of this is, "We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!" Because Chillingworth's sin was the blackest his fate was the most horrible of the
The man introduced as Roger Chillingworth was an intelligent, introspective, but somewhat deformed older gentleman. We come to know that he was able to convince Hester to marry him, even though he was several years her senior. She had never felt love for Chillingworth and always described him as “without warm emotions.” When this couple moved to America, he sent her ahead to set up their new home while he remained behind to finish their affairs in England. On Chillingworth's journey to America, he had "grievous mishaps by sea.₁" He was then captured by the Indians and had spent the following two years trying to earn his freedom so he could be reunited with his wife again. He sees Hester as the one bright spot in a life that was otherwise cheerless.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, depicts the effects of an adulterous affair committed by a Puritan woman in seventeenth-century Boston, Massachusetts and the punishment she must endure. Hester Prynne, the heroine in the novel, assumes the role of the adulteress as she bears a child in the absence of her husband Roger Chillingworth. Chillingworth, a man whose spite drives him to a mad pursuit of vengeance, seeks the deliberate destruction of the man he believes to have wronged him and avenges himself by preying on the accused man’s vitality. Chillingworth ultimately discovers the culprit is Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and devotes his life to tormenting him psychologically, feeding on his frail mental state. Hawthorne presents
In the book The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth is portrayed a few different ways throughout the story. As the story develops, Chillingworth's personality begins to be viewed differently. In the beginning when Chillingworth shows up, he is perceived as the poor man whose wife cheated on him, but that quickly changes.
Throughout the progression of the story, Chillingworth was a character whom the author characterized negatively. The author wrote Chillingworth as a man with “slight deformity of figure” (Hawthorne 57), implying that there were flaws within the character. Moreover, Chillingworth was noted as a character that “violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart” (Hawthorne 185). Overall, Chillingworth was depicted as an ominous figure, thus further suggesting that he is the principal villain of the book. However, it is also crucial to understand that Dimmesdale is as much of an antagonist as Chillingworth. Hawthorne provides subtle implications to reinforce the claim that Dimmesdale is the predominant villain. Throughout the story, Chillingworth did not contribute much to the plot other than to seek revenge. On the other hand, Dimmesdale embedded the five main themes of alienation, guilt, individual versus society, consequences of sin, and initiation to the story. Furthermore, Chillingworth was not a villain by choice, rather, he inevitably became a villain due to the actions of Dimmesdale. Prior to Dimmesdale’s influence, Chillingworth was a man who cared about the welfare of others. It was only after Dimmesdale’s affair with his wife that shifted Chillingworth’s motive for the worse. The juxtaposition between the past and present motives of Chillingworth manifests the idea that Dimmesdale held the utmost importance in the story: without Dimmesdale, Chillingworth would not be a
Roger Chillingworth is a learned man, a rationalist, and a liberal. On his own confession, he was never a man of humanly compassion, though he was at least kind and true before becoming an instrument of the devil with the decision to take revenge. Initially, his intellectual gifts were at the service of humanity, but in the face of calamity of betrayal, Chillingworth’s cold rationalism becomes more than a method of investigation. It becomes impossible to distinguish his originally pure rationalism from the refined cruelty and sinister enthrallment which he demonstrates in torturing Dimmesdale. His rationalism - initially solely based upon the pure understanding of philosophy and science - metamorphosizes into an evil which makes him blind
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
In chapter 4, Chillingworth reveals one of his earliest signs of malevolence. After his delayed travel, Hester’s husband arrives in Boston to find Hester publicly disciplined on a scaffold for her conviction of adultery. Ashamed by his wife, he goes incognito as a doctor, taking the name “Rodger Chillingworth”. Now, it is the first opportunity Hester and Chillingworth have had to have a face to face communication with each other in two years. He visits her in prison to provide her with medical assistance, where he also construes his vengeance for the man his wife committed the affair with. He tells her, “Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self-relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me Hester, there are few things—whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought—few things hidden from the man who devotes hi...
The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a book which goes far into the lives of the main characters. After establishing the main characters--Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--he shows how each decision they made affects all the others. Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth all felt guilty at one point in the novel.
The Scarlet Letter is a novel packed with religious symbolism, and Hawthorne subtly assigns the role of the devil to Roger Chillingworth. Throughout the novel, there are many references and associations that confirm the fact that Chillingworth is representative of the ultimate evil.