Most of the novel is full of hidden secrecy, and it is first seen before the first scaffold scene when Hester spots Roger Chillingworth at the edge of the crowd. His character darkens “like a snake gliding swiftly over them,” (58) and finally “subsided into the depths of his nature.” (58). Hawthorne uses simile when comparing Chillingworth to the snake, because snakes are both in nature and historically seen as wicked and secretive creatures. The fact that Chillingworth is described like a snake shows how he has a hidden secret that recedes into the “depths of his nature,” just as quickly it came. More hidden secrecy is seen on the scaffold when Reverend Dimmesdale is nervously questioning Hester to reveal the man that has sinned with her in which she refuses to give any sort of suggestion of who it could be. Multiple times Hester and Dimmesdale lock eyes, either he “looking down steadfastly into her eyes,” (65) or she “looking into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman.” (66) The fact that both Hester and Dimmesdale looked into each other eyes in such an intense way despite being strangers in public suggests that the two characters are secretly involved with each other under the noses of society.
