Chillingworth: Friend or Fiend?
Some people, seek vengeance when they suffer a wrong. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the character Roger Chillingworth is no exception, but the burden of his revenge becomes so heavy that it leads to a transformation of character that is unprecedented. Though at first a humble physician, Roger Chillingworth, slowly, through acts of his seeking revenge on his wife’s lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, he transforms into a parasitic leech, which eventually leads to his downfall.
In the beginning of the novel, Roger Chillingworth is a humble, old physician. For example, on the night after Hester’s shame on the scaffold. Roger Chillingworth is called to treat Hester and her baby as he acts as he acts as her physician.
[Chillingworth] ‘Prithee, friend leave me alone with my patients […] my old studies and alchemy observed he, and my sojourn for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly propertied of simples have made a better physician of me then many that claim the medical degree […] What should ail me, to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The medicine potent for good as it were my child […] I could do no better’ (Hawthorne 66-67).
Chillingworth’s humble beginning is also depicted when he is introduced by Hawthorne as the physician that he is, and telling about the great knowledge of the herbs that he beholds.
The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant inquisitor. He soon manifested ...