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Hypocrisy In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

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Title The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a novel that centers on Hester Prynne who is a young adulteress living during Puritan times. This adulteress is young, beautiful, and through the novel receives her punishment for her sin and has to learn how to cope with the negativity from her fellow Puritans in the community. Many believe the novel revolves around the obvious sin, adultery. Albeit, the true and more severe sin that is the foundation for the book, is hypocrisy. A character Hawthorne introduces early on in the book, Roger Chillingworth, proves to display hypocrisy in a way many overlook. “‘Yet feat not for him! Think not that I …show more content…

Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life; nor against his fame, if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute.’” (Hawthorne 70). This quote explains that Chillingworth will not interfere with the plan of the Heavens. Yet, his actions contradict his words and he dedicates his life to befriending Dimmesdale, the father of Hester’s baby, and hypocritically torturing him to death by posing as his physician. Another quote that supports the hypocrisy is during the final scaffold scene. “’ there were no one place, where thou couldst have escaped me, -save on this very scaffold!’” (Hawthorne 230-231). Chillingworth notifies Dimmesdale, as he begins to publicly confess, that not even death or “The Black Man” could let Dimmesdale escape him, only that scaffold could. This is important in the fact that Chillingworth hypocritically goes against his word, and

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