Sin and Roger Chillingworth
Roger Chillingworth is the name of a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book The Scarlet Letter. His real name was Prynne and he was the husband of young Hester Prynne but when he comes into Boston and discovers his young wife up on the pillory platform wearing the scarlet letter A marking her out as an adulteress he wants nothing to do with her. He wants nothing to do with her for two reasons, the second being much more important to him than the first. Firstly, he doesn’t want to be identified with her because it would mean he would have to bear the discomfort that comes with the being the husband of a shameful wife. But connected with that, and as part of it, he knows that if people could see the two of them together they might well sympathize too much with Hester. Hester is young and beautiful and alive and her husband is aged, misshapen and cold. The aged and somewhat hunch-backed scholar knows that he had made his own contribution to Hester’s grievous sin. This and other factors constitute his first reason for putting his finger to his lips when first their eyes met—forbidding her to reveal his identity.
Secondly, and most important by far, is this: Hester will not tell the name of her fellow-sinner and her husband who now calls himself Chillingworth wants to be free to roam, like an undercover detective in search of the man.
The literary giant J.B Priestly said that psychoanalysts should erect a monument to Nathaniel Hawthorne for his early introduction of so many early insights into the human heart and mind. We see this gift in Hawthorne as he develops the malevolent character of Roger Chillingworth.
Paul wrote to the young man Titus about our need to be humble and considerate toward all people because we ourselves have been foolish and sinful (3:1-7). Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth never learned that and apparently never cared to learn it.
When he goes to Hester’s cell she is sure that he has come to drag her over the coals for her base betrayal of the man with whom she made a covenant of marriage; but she was wrong. He makes his own confession. He speaks of her arrival at her wretched state and says, "It was my stupidity and your weakness. I, a man of thought, the bookworm of great libraries, a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge—what had I to do with youth and beauty like yours? Misshapen from the time I was born, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! ...From the moment when we came down the old church steps together as a married pair I should have foreseen the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path."
And when she exclaims that she has wronged him greatly he insists, "We have wronged each other. Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay."
So while he acknowledges her sin he knows that he too is a sinner and assures her that he hasn’t come seeking vengeance or plotting evil against her or the child. "Between you and me," he says, "the scale hangs fairly balanced." And then he gets to why he has come. "But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both."
He is perfectly willing to overlook her sin and his own but—and this is where he comes short of Paul in Titus 3 and Jesus in Matthew 18—he isn’t prepared to overlook the sin of Hester’s sin-partner and the man that humiliated the great Roger Chillingworth. But that is only the beginning of his sin and it isn’t the depth or the malevolent breadth of it.
He hunted Hester’s companion-sinner the way wild dogs hunt prey, with this difference, the wild dogs are bent on killing their prey with a view to eating it and Chillingworth wanted his prey to live. With the shining and burning eyes of a man possessed he whispers to his wife, "I will hunt this man as I have hunted truth in books; as I have searched for gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unexpectedly. Sooner or later he will be mine."
But he isn’t done. "You will not tell me his name? None the less, he is mine. He bears no infamous letter sewn into his garment as you do, but I will see it on his heart. But don’t be afraid for him! Don’t think that I will lay a finger on him and interfere with Heaven’s work of punishment or that I will betray him into the grip of the legal system—that would be loss to me. And don’t imagine that I will get someone else to kill him or that I will do anything to undermine his fame if indeed he is a person of great reputation. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honor if he chooses to. Just the same, he will be mine!"
He brings her under an oath that she will not reveal to a soul who he is and having made the oath Chillingworth smiles and she is now very afraid that he has tricked her into some self-destructive bond. "Why do you smile at me? Are you the Evil Spirit that haunts the forest around us? Have you enticed me into an oath that will ruin my soul?" she asked him. He answers, with another smile, "Not your soul. No, not yours."
As good as his word to Hester Chillingworth hunted the sinner and found him in the person of the colony’s beloved young minister Arthur Dimmesdale. But in finding him he saw what he had known he would see, a sinner living in agony but without the courage to publicly confess his sin with Hester. And rather than confront him the profoundly evil Chillingworth would hint and insinuate the depravity of the man so cowardly that he would not be open. But at the same time, so that he wouldn’t drive the young sinner over the edge into confession he gives good reasons why the sinner should not confess. And so he roasts him on a moral and an emotional spit. And when finally the sinner can endure the agony no longer and is heading to the steps of the scaffold to make a clean breast of it all Chillingworth hoarsely begs him not to do it and again gives him reasons to keep silent. But he is too late. The young man confesses before the colony and collapses and the misshapen and snake-like Chillingworth in despair repeatedly and fiercely snarls into his ear, "You have escaped me!" And within a year Chillingworth shrivels, dries up and dies because his reason for living is gone.
We all sin. Some of us would rather that sinners live without the sin becoming public just so that we can have the ceaseless pleasure in their agony; just so we can hint and insinuate and whisper—a prolonged blackmail. This kind of sinner is destined to shrivel up and wither away for one day all secrets that need to be made public will be and some of us will find ourselves snarling as we vanish, "You have escaped me."
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