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Critical summary of scarlet letter
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There are many evil people in this world. They are evil because that is how we view them. The country that is being attacked by a terrorist views the terrorist as evil, whereas the country that the terrorist is from views the terrorist as a hero. There are few people that are truly evil. To be truly evil everyone must agree that the person is evil. In the novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Roger Chillingworth is truly evil.
Hester is the only person who knows that Chillingworth is evil, taking into account of the things he is doing to her. Chillingworth is old when he marries Hester. He thinks she makes a good home for him and doesn’t think about how this will affect her. He doesn’t think that Hester will have an affair when he isn’t there. .Hester is alone in the new world and thinks Chillingworth is dead. Shortly after their marriage, Hester has an affair; however, he tells her it is his fault. Chillingworth says “ ‘I [betray] thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.’ ” (66) He realizes that he wrongs her when marries her because she is young, but they are even because she had an affair. He unknowingly gives her the opportunity to find out that he is evil.
Chillingworth does not want to suffer with Hester, but he wants to see her suffer. “He [resolves] not be pilloried beside [Hester] on her pedestal of shame.” (105) Chillingworth enjoys seeing the problems that Hester must deal with, as a result of her sin. He is not willing to speak up to say that he is her husband, because he would miss out on the pleasure that he gets when he sees her alone or when he hears people talking about her. Chillingworth likes seeing the bad things happen to Hester because she has a child w...
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...end Chillingworth spends his whole life seeking revenge. He dies and never gets the family he yearns for. He gives all his money to Pearl for the reason that she never hurts him, and she is the family he could have had. He doesn’t give any money to Hester because she wrongs him, and he still holds a grudge.
In the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chillingworth is baleful. He spends the last years of his life trying to get revenge. Revenge doesn’t do anyone any good. It can cause serious problems for both parties. The person that is seeking revenge can end up getting hurt, but the individual shouldn’t want to hurt someone else in the first place. By seeking revenge on someone that has done something evil, a person becomes evil themselves. People need to kill each other with kindness and try making amends with others, so in the end there will be no evil.
In American society today and in puritan society people respond the same to people who have done wrong to them, someone they love, in the community, or who have violated the social norms. In the scarlet letter Roger Chillingworth gets revenge through guilt and making Arthur Dimmesdale feel hurt and can never be relieved of the guilt he feels toward Chillingworth. And in an example from today's society Mr. Allison Snr. gets revenge by killing and hurting Duncan to avenge his son's death. Another way authority and government gets revenge in The Scarlet Letter is with the scarlet letter itself and the entire town and authority get revenge by using this to isolate her. In today’s society we use jail as revenge for people who have broken the law in communities and as a way to punish them for their wrongdoings. The desire for revenge in today's and the puritan society has remained the
Years ago, Hester promised Chillingworth to keep his identity a secret, thus allowing him to do evil to Dimmesdale. Chillingworth believes that it was his fate to change from a kind man to a vengeful fiend. He believes that it’s his destiny to take revenge and thus would not stop until he does so.
Chillingworth, the injured husband, seeks no revenge against Hester, but he is determined to find the man who has violated his marrige: “He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, and thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart.” Chillingworth comments: “Believe me, Hester, there are few things.
Mania is an excessive enthusiasm or desire, typically with a negative intention, and that is what Roger Chillingworth suffered from. Throughout the novel, he goes out of his way to make the life of Arthur Dimmesdale awful. He tortures Dimmesdale from the inside out, psychologically outsmarting him at every turn. Chillingworth claims that Hester is the reason he has acted so awfully, but it is not common for others to agree with him. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chillingworth’s deep desire for revenge is understandable, as he was a decent person before he found out about the affair, but then turned into a maniac in his quest to exact revenge on Dimmesdale.
When asked to describe Roger Chillingworth, peers say he was an upstanding, respectful, concerned citizen. They would have been right, but he didn’t let anyone know just how much he cared. With the loss of Hester, he became filled with anger and jealousy and eventually let his emotions overtake him. At the close of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the malevolent state of Roger Chillingworth’s heart made him the guiltiest.
In a sense, revenge is slowly killing oneself and dragging another into death as well. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his novel The Scarlet Letter, evinces this reality in the eventual fate of Roger Chillingworth. Aroused by a vehement zeal for payback towards the Reverend Dimmesdale, Chillingworth drains the life out of himself, shown in his gradually decaying body and soul. With a raging desire for knowledge and a single-minded pursuit of retribution, Chillingworth’s demonic actions lead him to damnation, demonstrating the need for reconciliation in times of conflict. Chillingworth’s unquenched thirst for knowledge leads him to a state of vengeance, foreshadowing its eventual control over his actions.
Hester experienced on three occasions of heart shaking blows, which most would only encounter once in a lifetime. Marrying Roger Chillingworth was Hester Prynne's first documented mistake. She even went as far to call it her most significant sin, despite the array she had to choose from. Not only had Hester married Roger Chillingworth when she did not even love him, she also was partly responsible for bring so much pain on her true love, Authur Dimmesdale. When Chillingworth derived that the Reverend Dimmesdale was Hester's partner in shattering the purity of their marriage, he made it his duty to obtain revenge by torturing Dimmesdale:
Even though many saw the difference in Hester there was still Chillingworth who still wanted his revenge. He becomes obsessed with the punishment of the "A" and does a devilish dance when he realizes the powerful effect it has had on Dimmesdale. (Blake, "Hester's Bewitched Triangle: Within the Spell of the "A") Chillingworth pretends to be a friend to Dimmesdale and becomes his physician. Dimmesdale becomes miserable because he hidden his true identity. Hester, hast thou found peace? Whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable! ( Hawthorne 208–209) Dimmesdale begins to torment himself with all of his thoughts and tells Hester he wants to be apart of the family they’ve made together.
In the literary classic, The Scarlet Letter, readers follow the story of a Puritan New England colony and the characteristics of that time period. Readers begin to grasp concepts such as repentance and dealing with sin through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s indirect descriptions of these detailed and complex characters by their actions and reactions. The character Roger Chillingworth symbolizes sin itself and deals with internal conflict throughout the course of the story. The narrator describes Chillingworth in a critical attitude to reveal to the reader the significance of repentance and revenge by the use of many literary techniques such as
In this chapter, Hester meets Chillingworth at the beach to prevent him from making the minister suffer. In their conversation,
Also Chillingworth tries very hard to find out who her secret lover is and even tries asking Hester. “‘ Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,’ resumed he , with a look of confidence , as if destiny were at one with him” ( Hawthorne 70). This quote says that Chillingworth tries to ask Hester who her secret lover is and even though she refuses to answer him, he feels confident that he will find out. This means that Chillingworth is going to harm her secret lover after he finds him. Therefore he will do whatever he can to torture him and get his
Although perceived as two utterly different men, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth share some remarkable similarities. Lying is one of these connections, as both men lie to one another concerning their connections to Hester and she conceals the secrets of their connections to her as well. Inquisitive as to whom Hester loved Chillingworth questions her, and she replies, “That thou shalt never know!” (86), so Chillingworth says to Hester “Breathe not, to any human soul, that thou dost ever call me husband!” (88), and she replies, “I will keep thy secret, as I have this” (88). Even though one would suppose both men to have significant roles in Hester’s life, they distance themselves and pretend as
When the reader first meets Roger Chillingworth standing watching Hester on the scaffold, he says that he wishes the father could be on the scaffold with her. “‘It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not, at least, stand on the scaffold by her side” (46). At this point, Chillingworth wishes that Mr. Dimmesdale was also receiving the sort of shame Hester is being put through. Throughout the first few chapters of the novel, however, Chillingworth’s motives become more and more malicious. By the time Chillingworth meets Hester in her prison cell, he has decided to go after Mr. Dimmesdale’s soul. Chillingworth turns to this goal because Mr. Dimmesdale did not endure Hester’s shame on the scaffold. Had Mr. Dimmesdale chosen to reveal himself at the time of Hester’s shame, he would not have had to endure the pain of Roger Chillingworth’s tortures of his soul.
From the very moment Chillingworth is introduced, he is deceitful towards the Puritan society. Chillingworth appears in the novel, seeming to know nothing of the scene at the scaffold. He asks of a townsperson: "...who is this woman? - and wherefore is she here to set up to public shame?" (Hawhtorne 67). Yet, we find in the next chapter that he indeed knows who Hester is, because Chillingworth is the lawful husband of her. He decieves the people of Boston to avoid the humiliation his wife brought upon him. In this respect, Chillingworth sins against the eight commandment, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour" (Gerber 26).
As the novel progressed, Chillingworth fits the profile of ‘vengeance destroys the avenger’. When Roger Chillingworth is first introduced to the reader, we see a kind old man, who just has planted the seeds for revenge. Although he did speak of getting his revenge, when Hester first met her husband in her jail cell, she did not see any evil in him. Because Hester would not tell him who she had slept with, Chillingworth vowed that he would spend the rest of his life having his revenge and that he would eventually suck the soul out of the man, whom she had the affair with. “There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares” (Hawthorne, 101) As the novel develops, Roger Chillingworth has centered himself on Arthur Dimmesdale, but he cannot prove that he is the “one.” Chillingworth has become friends with Dimmesdale, because he has a “strange disease,” that needed to be cured; Chillingworth suspects something and begins to drill Dimmesdale. “… The disorder is a strange one…hath all the operation of this disorder been fairly laid open to me and recounted to me” (Hawthorne, 156).