Corruption In Scarlet Letter

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne gives readers a taste of what life was like in a society controlled by Puritans. It is a miserable life, as Hawthorne shows readers through the degradation of Hester Prynne, the adulterous protagonist, who has to bear being isolated from society. In the sidelines, there is Reverend Dimmesdale, who is tortured internally by his secret “sin” of having an affair with Prynne. And while all of this is going on, Roger Chillingworth, Prynne’s revenge-ridden husband, is gleefully enjoying watching all the torture taking place. Hawthorne makes Chillingworth’s sadistic character even more clear by referring to him as the “leech”. Hawthorne then makes clear the depressing fact that most of the people in this …show more content…
As a result of being empty of anything that would make him a moral person, he is free in Puritan society. In contrast, there is Reverend Dimmesdale, an individual who feels guilt over what he did, which indicates that he has morals. But then he is in a dilemma because Puritan society condemns those who admit sin, but Dimmesdale feels guilty and wants to admit his guilt. The only thing left for him is to torture himself. He physically beats himself with a whip and carries this burden everywhere he goes. Even when he is giving a sermon, he is constantly in “agony which this veneration tortured him” (130). In comparison, there is no scene in the novel in which Chillingworth is feeling remorse or suffering. There is a scene that he apologizes to Prynne, but there is no feeling of remorse, and he is only apologizing to get Prynne to tell him information (70). He never feels guilty or shown to have any reasonable moral code due to him mentally torturing people. In fact, comparing him to everyone else in the novel, he seems to be in a wonderful state. He does not care what others think of him; he shows no sign of that. He shows traits of being a sociopath, as shown when he is manipulating Prynne in Chapter 4, in keeping a secret, and Dimmesdale in Chapter 9, by torturing him and making his life even more miserable. He is the only one who is not bound and restricted by society because he simply does not care, but in a strange twist, he also makes society his servant. The only reason that he is able to torture Dimmesdale, in the beginning, is because he threatens to reveal Dimmesdale’s secret sin to the world. Dimmesdale is only able to break free from Chillingworth’s control when he reveals his sin to society himself on the public scaffold, making Chillingworth 's threats useless hence why he is only safe from Chillingworth “on this very scaffold” (226). Since Chillingworth uses the threat of