Certain circumstances can drive even the most positive man to insanity. There is an example of this in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel T the Scarlet Letter--a book about lust, hate, and betrayal. Roger Chillingworth is a model of someone who is betrayed and almost forced into hatred and vengeance. Chillingworth has an unquenchable passion for books and his studies; so passionate that he leaves Hester for two years to study Indian medicine. While he is gone, his wife, Hester Prynne, commits adultery with the young pastor, Arthur Dimmesdale. He comes back to find out she has a child and is not telling anyone who the sinful man is. He swears to her that he will find the man and seek vengeance on him. Roger Chillingworth, once a man of happiness and content, is driven to become a malicious, vindictive man, due to his unquenchable desire to seek vengeance on Hester’s lover, Dimmesdale. Before Roger Chillingworth becomes a malicious man, he is happy and content with his life. He is satisfied with Hester before the corruption is brought into their relationship. Chillingworth talks about how he was wrong to think that the “simple bliss [Hester]...might be [his]” (Hawthorne, 1994, p. 51). …show more content…
Roger is an unsightly man, “he [is] small in stature, with a furrowed visage...one of [his] shoulders rose higher than the other...and [these is a] slight deformity [in his] figure” (Hawthorne, 1994, p. 42); as the story progresses he becomes his malice. His body and appearance become “uglier... his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen,—since the days when she [Hester] had familiarly known him” (Hawthorne, 1994, p. 77). Chillingworth swears to Hester that he will find the man responsible for the sin. His vengeance overtakes him and creates a completely new, but much-deteriorated