Chillingworth In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Improved Essays
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses numerous techniques such as imagery and allusions to characterize Chillingworth and Hester. Hawthorne makes it clear that Chillingworth is an evil person who will do anything to quench his thirst for retribution. Chillingworth reveals to be an evil person who not only feigns goodness but also enjoys other’s hardship. While Hester does seem to fear him, she also stands up to Chillingworth at times proving her devotion and courage. Hawthorne distinguishes Chillingworth as a wicked ugly person while he distinguishes Hester as a beautiful brave person.
Immediately after his introduction, Roger Chillingworth is seen as a manipulative and evil character who has power over Hester. Hawthorne associates Chillingworth

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    (Hawthorne 11-12). Another example of contrast between two characters in The Scarlet Letter, is with Hester and Dr. Chillingworth. Dr. Chillingworth s very much in love with Hester but…

    • 844 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hester Prynne Dark Quotes

    • 514 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Roger Chillingworth is up to no good when it comes to Hester Prynne and eventually Roger Chillingworth. In conclusion, all of the people in the story have a different way of presenting the good and evil within them. Throughout this book, Hawthorne presented good and bad symbols within the characters Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale. This essay shows the good and bad qualities in each of the characters, This helps the reader get to know the characters in a different…

    • 514 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Chillingworth and Dimmesdale Essay The two characters Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are two characters in the scarlet letter. They are both main characters and have secrets that hold a very important part in their lives. They both have secrets but are affected in very different ways. I am going to start off with Dimmesdale’s secret.…

    • 354 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To elaborate on Chillingworth's vengeance, the moment that sparked his revenge must first be discussed. After seeing Hester on the scaffold with a baby, Chillingworth decides at that exact moment, that revenge is the path he will take. Hawthorne describes Chillingworth's change in nature, it is stated “A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them… his face darkened with some powerful emotion...finally subsided into the depths of his nature”(Hawthorne, 56). In this Chillingworth is described as, in a way, being possessed by evil. Chillingworth is horrified at first, his wife has obviously had an affair with someone else.…

    • 1009 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Up to this point, readers are aware of Chillingworth’s history and his purpose for returning back to New England, but have no indication of how far Roger will go to expose Pearl’s father. From chapters four to eight, Roger is known to the public eye as an expert physician with a mysterious past who had come across the Puritan town and is now treating Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale’s illness. He is a small and thin older man with a rugged face (due to the harsh conditions while being held captive by the Indians) who is a miracle to the people of this town because he is as devoted to religion as he is to his profession. To everybody else aside from Hester, Roger seemed like a gift from the gods. However, his true colors begin to reveal themselves when…

    • 804 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As a older man Roger married Hester for the deep love he had for her knowing she didn't love him the same way. Once returning back to Massachusetts from being held a hostage after he was shipwrecked. Once he found out Hester committed adultery, Chillingworth immediately becomes obsessed with Hester and Dimmesdale to determine the truth. This is where Rogers true morality takes place. Devoted to seek revenge on Hester's lover Chillingworth torments Dimmesdale by giving him no space what so ever while he harassess him on how keeping secrets are bad for the soul thus totally transforming Chillingworth to what send to be the devil.…

    • 725 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Through the transformation Dimmesdale, the symbol of the forest , and the development of the character Chillingworth, Hawthorne portrays that secret sin will eventually destroy a person and isolates a person. From the beginning of the Scarlet Letter, Hester Pryne was the only person being publicly punished for a sin that she not only committed, but someone else. The other person was Aurthur Dimmesdale, no one knew who also committed this sin, so when regret started to derive he was being internally and externally destroyed. The reader of the Scarlet Letter would come to this conclusion by analyzing the drastic changes that Dimmesdale went through throughout the story.…

    • 597 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1) The story and the narrator have given us plenty of reasons to be wary of Chillingworth before now. How does this section of the novel alter your reading of him? Choose some examples from today's reading to demonstrate the narrator's darkening opinion of him. Discuss.…

    • 1061 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In The Scarlet Letter Roger Chillingworth and Arthur Dimmesdale get into an argument over the root of Dimmesdales’ sickness and why men keep dark secrets. Roger Chillingworth takes the emotional approach as he tries to undermine Dimmesdale and explain to him that only moral problems such as hidden secrets may be the root of the sickness and confessing them will heal a mans soul. Dimmesdale obviously afraid to expose his sins tries to argue against him and claim that if they confess their sin it may keep them from coming to God and facing the judgment of the other people around them. Chillingworth presents the strongest argument even though Dimmesdale does not give in to his persuasion. Chillingworth in chapter 10 argues the emotional appeal by first saying where he found the herbs he was using, he claimed he found it by a dead mans memorial and that perhaps a hideous secret was also buried with him that was never shared.…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hester Prynne Evil

    • 545 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, he develops a distinction of his ideas on what is good and what is evil through the usage of symbolic evidence and the development of the character’s personalities. Hawthorne’s idea of what is “good” is the beauty of forgiveness, as this is what the story develops upon and how the story plot ends. Hawthorne’s idea of “evil” is the dark personalities inside of us all that affects the way we treat others. The main character, Hester Prynne, is portrayed as evil to the faint eye but Hawthorne is able to show the reader the good in Hester’s actions. Hawthorne’s writing is very true to himself, he writes in an elevated style that is, at some point, hard to comprehend.…

    • 545 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In choosing to hide his marriage to Hester and pursue her lover, Chillingworth loses his soul and thus himself to the Devil. The reader first meets Chillingworth during Hester's humiliation on the scaffold where Hawthorne describes the man as having "a remarkable intelligence in his features" (56). Later in the woods Hester remembers him as an "intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet" (148) and so the pattern continues, in his past life Chillingworth was a scholar "accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value or import" (56). But why then does Hester finish her thought in the woods by realizing that the man she had known "had already vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce" (148)…

    • 316 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER (ABC, 2014): The Roger Chillingworth Version from The Scarlet Letter (FINAL DRAFT) As the great Roman Satirist, Juvenal once said: “Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind.” In The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth purely embodies the sin of revenge. Chillingworth, a man of great intellect and wisdom, a practical genius some may suggest, is a parasitic man.…

    • 1619 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth is portrayed as the devil because he tries to take revenge, a sin that is very grave. Hester contemplates what Roger Chillingworth is doing, and realizes that “the old man, on the other hand, had brought himself nearer to her level, or perhaps below it, by the revenge which he had stooped for”(151). Since Roger Chillingworth is trying to take revenge, he actually lowers himself and makes himself morally corrupt. Later in chapter nine, the book talks about Roger Chillingworth’s origins, and his purpose in coming to the Puritan colony. It says that Roger Chillingworth has “ a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties”(107).…

    • 1430 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Laura Hanft Korobkin’s “The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice,” she believes that The Scarlet Letter is an example of Lincoln’s doctrine of obedience to law. Hester and Chillingworth play two different roles. Hester follows Lincoln’s philosophy, which is that she submits herself to the law. Hester receives a “humane sentence most striking in its failure to include physical punishment” (Korobkin).…

    • 475 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Roger Chillingworth commits perhaps the worst sin in “The Scarlet Letter”. From the moment Chillingworth found Hester standing in public ignominy on the scaffold, he sought revenge on the man who betrayed him. He devoted the rest of his decaying life to enact malevolent vengeance on Hester’s fellow adulterer. After suspecting Dimmesdale to be the father, Chillingworth became the pastor’s personal physician.…

    • 1065 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays