Roger Chillingworth Character Analyis

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Roger Chillingworth The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Expanded ed. New York : Bantam Books, 2003. 247. Print. Roger Chillingworth is a knowledgeable man; however, he is also obsessive and vindictive. When Chillingworth arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he found his wife standing on the scaffold with a baby in her arms: a baby that definitely was not his. This incident led him to seek revenge against the man who stole his wife and later betrayed her. He used the knowledge he had gained from years of reading to disguise himself as a doctor and entered the society. He made it his life’s mission to find Hester’s lover and punish him. Chapter nine, The Leech, and chapter ten, The Leech and His Patient, focus mainly on Roger Chillingworth and his relationship with Revered Dimmesdale; therefore, they reveal a great deal about Chillingworth’s true values. IN these two chapters, because of his thirst of revenge, we see Chillingworth evolve from a gentle gracious man to a malicious one. Dimmesdale’s deteriorating health caused him to become acquainted to the Chillingworth, the physician and soon, Chillingworth moved in with Dimmesdale. This gave Chillingworth the opportunity to discover Dimmesdale’s previous relationship with Hester; with this knowledge, Chillingworth began to slowly torture the minister. Hawthorne openly refers to Chillingworth as “the leech” in the titles of both chapters. The term “leech” was a colloquial term used to refer to physicians. It comes from the practice of using leeches to suck out the blood of patients in order to cure them. Ironically the ‘physician’ Chillingworth leeches onto Dimesdale not to cure him, but instead to slowly kill him. “Roger Chillingworth – the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician- strove to go deep into his patient’s bosom, delving among his
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