The Scarlet Letter

The courts of Judge Judith hereby charge Mr. Roger Chillingworth with concealing his identity with the intent of harm to another human being.

Throughout the whole of the book, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Roger Chillingworth only once admits to being the husband of Hester Prynne. He says this only when they are both alone in the prison after Hester is publicly displayed for the day, Chillingworth says, “There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not, to any human soul, that though didst ever call me husband!”(pg. 71). One must assume that Chillingworth’s actual last name is Prynne, since this is the last name Hester, his wife, uses when she is residing in Boston, Massachusetts. There are many mitigating factors that are involved in this crime, but certainly none that excuse it, since this choice was made with Chillingworth’s own positive voluntariness.

Chillingworth’s subjective moral judgment was very selfish. This is so because one of the mitigating factors was fear. Chillingworth was afraid to be known as the husband of an adulterer because that would be very shameful, after all he left her alone for an unmentioned amount of time, but enough time for her to get fairly close with all those around her and be used to her surroundings. Another reason for his fear was as the years went by he began to get very close to Mr. Dimmesdale, who is an extremely well respected minister in Boston. Mr. Dimmesdale also happens to be the person who Hester Prynne had an affair with, making their child Pearl. During the climax of the book Dimmesdale admits that he is the father of Pearl and dies almost immediately after doing so. Therefore, if the town knew that Chillingworth was acting as the doctor for the person that Hester (his wife) had an affair with, Dimmesdale, they may get suspicious as to why he hasn’t gotten any better over the seven years that Chillingworth has been with him, but instead has gotten progressingly worse.

An additional mitigating factor involved with Chillingworth’s first charge is passion. When he first came into town and visited Hester after she was publicly displayed he was what society today would consider a good guy. He said to Hester, “We have wronged each other. Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.” As his time in the town continued, he began to want revenge on the man who ruined his marriage more and more. In Chapter ten it it said that, “He [Chillingworth] had begun an investigation…But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again until he had done all it’s budding. He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart…” This shows an enormous change of attitude from when Chillingworth was seemingly only frustrated (but at the same time Chillingworth was happy that Hester would not let go of the secret name of the person who she had an affair with because that meant that the secret of his identity would be kept as well) at the jail when Hester would not confess the man’s name.

The extreme severity of his formal corruption with evil is evident in the scene where Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale are on the platform together holding hands when the meteor strikes and Chillingworth suddenly appears. Dimmesdale can not see him entirely since it is the middle of the night and he exclaims, “Who is that man, Hester?” gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror. “I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester...Who is he...I have a nameless horror of the man.” (pg. 135) Since a ministers view of the world is believed to be holy, and in the middle of the seventeenth century the church basically had control of the whole society, the ministers godly intuition about the man who he was terrified by should have had some affect on how he felt about Chillingworth, but instead Dimmesdale ignored it. Another thing to take into account is after calling yourself Roger Chillingworth for seven years, it becomes habitual.

The courts of Judge Judith hereby charge Mr. Roger Chillingworth with criminal negligence.

Roger Chillingworth clearly knew that Mr. Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne were both involved together in the crime of adultery. Since Chillingworth had a formal cooperation with evil he kept this a secret so that he could torture Mr. Dimmesdale with the fact that he knows Dimmesdale’s deepest darkest secret. An example of this torture is when Dimmesdale