Scarlet Letter Good Vs Evil Quotes

Misunderstood

Are the “bad guys” of the world always truly evil? Of course not, sometimes they're just misunderstood. A classic example comes from the movie King Kong when King Kong, a gigantic ape, gets kidnapped and put on display. Chaos ensues when he inevitably breaks free. The viewer sees him as the bad guy when really the wild ape just reacted to what happened to him. Sometimes the villain isn’t as bad as they are meant to seem. This happens in real life just as it does in a fictional life and it is exactly what happened the to one of the main characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Roger Chillingworth, from The Scarlet Letter, is a character that is justifiable viewed as immoral or just down right evil, but the events in which he has endured may lead the audience to sympathise with him and make him less of a villain in the novel than the author intended him to.

Old Roger Chillingworth’s story starts in the marketplace as he arrives to town just in time to witness his wife get publicly shamed for sinning against him.

Hester, Chillingworth’s wife, had committed adultery and conceived a child with another man in Chillingworth’s absence. At this point in the novel Chillingworth becomes the victim. He has not wronged anyone and his only crime is being extremely late to the new world, which it is later discovered isn’t even entirely his fault. Once the reader finds out what has happened to Chillingworth they begin to sympathise with him and condemn Hester as the “bad guy” of the situation. Their roles flip later in the story as Chillingworth becomes bent on revenge against Dimmesdale and Hester works to redeem herself in the eyes of the

lord.
Chillingworth seeks revenge by mentally torturing Dimmesdale every waking moment of the day while ironically serving as his personal doctor. His actions are inexcusable and most definitely evil in nature, but yet again the reader finds it hard to write him off as a totally evil person. Why? Because it’s very easy to remember the time when he was the victim and then think maybe it isn’t that unreasonable of a reaction for a man that was wronged the way he was. The novel addresses the point when Hester and Chillingworth fight about his plot for revenge “I am a fiend and who made me so?” Chillingworth asks, Hester replies,”It was Myself”(Hawthorne 259). At that point Hester assumes responsibility for driving him to revenge and turning his appearance into what it has become. Hester's betrayal and Chillingworth’s drive for revenge has literally transformed him into a villainous looking man. The narrator describes his appearance as a “deformed old figure with a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they liked” (262). This takes some of the heat off of his devilish persona and makes it easier to see him as the victim once again. The reader, knowing of Hester’s betrayal, isn’t so quick to label Chillingworth as a truly evil character that the author so desperately tried to portray him as.
Chillingworth only made it into town that fateful day because his Indian captors had just so happened to ransom him on the day his wife got publicly humiliated. Just before that the author hints that he had lived among Indians for some time before they inevitably brought him to town. Not a great way to make the main antagonist of the story look evil as it really only makes the audience want to sympathise with him and know his full story. Chillingworth made his first appearance wearing a “strange disarray of civilized and savage costume” (91). The fact that Chillingworth is dressed in a mix of his normal and Indian clothing leads the reader to believe he has lived among the tribe for decent amount of time. Although the novel never goes into detail about how Chillingworth got captured by the tribe, it can be assumed with prior knowledge of the time period that it wasn’t pleasant. Once again Chillingworth takes a victim role and not a villain role. The author tries to push the villain card on him later when Chillingworth starts to exact his revenge on Dimmesdale. For some reason it’s always very easy for the reader to remember the things that he has been through and still see him as the victim even after learning about his heinous intentions for revenge.
The final piece of evidence proving that Roger Chillingworth isn’t completely evil is that he has always had a soft spot for Pearl, a child not even born of his own actions . Pearl, just a baby in the prison scene with Hester, would not stop crying and seemed to be in all sorts of distress. Chillingworth used some knowledge he picked up from the Indian tribe he had lived among to make a remedy to help sooth the crying child. As if this isn’t enough evidence to convince the reader that Chillingworth has soft spot for Pearl, after Chillingworth dies it is revealed that he has left a sizable inheritance to Pear in his last will. The narrator describes the inheritance as “a very considerable amount of property both here and in England” (389). By doing so Chillingworth effectively makes Pearl the “richest heiress of her day in the new world” (389). If Chillingworth really took the “devil” role that the narrator wants him to, he would never even consider helping out a child that isn’t even his own. Chillingworth’s soft spot for Pearl proves that he can’t be all bad after all.
Old Roger Chillingworth may have lived for revenge in his later years in life, but to label him as a straight up immoral person would be a stretch. When considering that he got betrayed by his own wife and captured by Indians, it seems like only a normal human reaction to want revenge on the man that the played a huge role in destroying the life he once had. Chillingworth doesn’t even seek a physical revenge instead he only wants to make the guilt eat away at Dimmesdale’s conscience. Not to mention that he left his entire fortune to the child of the man that stole his wife away. Sometimes the villains of a story aren’t really all that bad, but instead the bad things they have done and the way in which their story gets told leads the reader forget all the good things they have done and the awful things they have been through. The villains of some stories really are just misunderstood.