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Revenge In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

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Revenge often twists people into the worst version of themselves. From hunting people down, to destroying property, even harming themselves to inflict pain on oneanother, revenge can be an incredibly wicked thing. However, few cases of revenge are as strange and demented as Roger Chillingworth. Roger Chillingworth is the main antagonist in the novel, The Scarlet Letter, and is an easy comparison to Satan himself with has a taste for revenge to match. Revenge often makes people into monsters. Roger Chillingworth changes in dramatic ways once he discovered the deep, dark secret of his wife. Before he came over to New England he was a brilliant, studious man: “There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamplight that had …show more content…

However, once he came to New England he started to inflict pain and hurt onto his wife's secret lover. The first thing Roger witnesses upon his arrival to the quaint Puritan settlement was his wife standing on the top of a scaffold; she is standing on the scaffolding because she was found guilty of adultery and was pregnant with another man’s child. “At his arrival in the marketplace, and some time before she saw him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne” (Hawthorne 57). This is what started it all. No one knew that he was married to her because he had sent her ahead of him a couple years before to come to the New World. After discovering this, Chillingworth made it his life Bender 2 goal to make her secret lover, Dimmesdale, suffer and feel anguish for the rest of his days. It seems as if his whole life goal is to ruin Dimmesdale’s life and make it miserable, then he

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