Chillingworth In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

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Who committed the greatest sin? Roger Chillingworth committed the worst sin of them all. Even Hester and Dimmesdale’s sin could not compare to Chillingworth’s. Chillingworth sold his soul to the Black Man and destroyed another soul for his on revenge.

Roger Chillingworth sold his soul to the Black Man. Many times throughout the Scarlet Letter Hawthorne refers to the Black Man and Chillingworth together. Pearl even calls Chillingworth the Black Man upon seeing him, “Come away, Mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you!...” Later when Hester speaks to Chillingworth at the water, she tells us, “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of a man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of tim, undertake a devil’s office...” There are many more places where Hawthorne refers to Roger Chillingworth as the Black Man or his servant. Roger …show more content…
In the beginning, Chillingworth told Hester “I shall seek this man as I have sought truth in books, as I have sought 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 unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!” He destroyed Dimmesdale’s soul and sanity throughout the book. When Chillingworth found out that Dimmesdale was the sinner he, as Hawthorne says, “But, with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor!” In the end, he uses up all his energy on destroying Dimmesdale that he just withers away when Dimmesdale
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