Roger Chillingworth Scarlet Letter

From Friend to Fiend The human race is an evolving species over millions of years or in a character’s case, over a few hundred pages in a book. Roger Chillingworth is a character that falls in the category of evolving and changing throughout the text. In the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, he can be viewed as someone who can be related to the poem “If” written by Rudyard Kipling, but as the plot is twisted and turned so is the character of Chillingworth. His innocence and sympathy is quite quickly traded for hatred and cruelty. A poem crafted to tell the story of an ideal man is once fitting to Roger Chillingworth but as the story of Hester Prynne in Boston is told, the matching characteristics told of in “If” and Chillingworth moves further …show more content…
His hatred begins the very moment he sees Hester again in the prison. He reveals his plan to watch the man suffer and live with the pain he deserves. He keeps to his word as he tortures Dimmesdale as his physician and watches the minister suffer in means of self harm. He even speaks of an ugly, black plant that “grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime” (129). Essentially, he plays mind games with Dimmesdale to further his weak state physically and mentally and cause him to self-harm and brutally torture himself with the guilt of hiding his sin. By this time in the book, he has even deformed himself more with all the hatred and cruelty he carries around. He no longer is a man of intellect but expresses his transformation exclaiming, “A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment” (165). He strayed so far from the poem that he no longer can even be recognized as the man Hester married causing her to reveal her lack of love for him. As the poem spoke of not allowing other people’s negativity get to you, Chillingworth has altogether abandoned that as his only needs for surviving is the suffering of Dimmesdale. In the end, all it leaves him is more broken and dead after his victim falls …show more content…
In the early portion of the book, based on first introduction, Chillingworth was an appropriate example for the type of person spoken of in Kipling’s “If.” As the plot developed so did Chillingworth’s contrast to who he once was and hate motivated the deformed man to stray from the words of the poem. At one point he was kind-hearted gentleman possessing good intentions but by the end finds himself struggling to find the man he use to be. It is a revelation of personality that can be seen in not only characters but in people of the world. Chillingworth takes on the role of a changing man who in the end loses everything to disregarded the fine qualities of a being a “Man”