The Scarlet Letter is a story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story's setting is in the 1850's during the puritan times in Boston, Massachusetts. Roger Chillingworth was one of the main characters along with Hester Prynne and Author Dimmesdale.
Roger Chillingworth was a small, thin, and was slightly deformed in appearance with one shoulder being higher than the other. He was described on page fifty-six by Hester Prynne as being 'remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mold the physical to itself, and become manifest by unmistakable tokens.' He spent so much of his time gaining knowledge he seemed to cut himself of from humanity.
He is a victim even before his arrival to the American Colony's, first by being captured by savage Indians. While being held captive he was presumed dead his wife Hester had a child by another man out of wedlock.
The Scarlet Letter (1860) by T. H. Matteson. Oil o...
English: Hester Prynne & Pearl before the stocks
This is the title page for the first edition of Th...By the end of the book we see that Chillingworth's sins are far greater than either Hester's or Author's. This is first evident in the fact that he married Hester knowing she would never love him and yet he made her marry him anyway. He admits this while talking to her in the jail cell. 'Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.'
His second sin is allowing himself to become obsessed with vengeance against Dimmesdale].
'But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather,