Which is ironic because as a minister he is a prominent leader in his community and is supposed to both follow the rules and actually believe in the common convictions. Chillingsworth has the root Chill' in it, which is an accurate characteristic of the character.
His lack of empathy and emotion result in rather drastic actions and leave the reader slightly disturbed. The names "Chillingworth" and "Dimmesdale" accurately describe their characters in The Scarlet Letter. He doggedly pursues and torments Dimmesdale while trying to figure out who the other adulterer was. The "worth" can describe how he acts stuck up and better than others. This name, I think, describes him very well. He comes from a dull, boring, no-nonsense Puritan society who has a bleak outlook on life.
He also cannot bear the shame and guilt of committing a sin, which makes him weak, like a 'dim' light. He is solely interested in revenge and enjoys seeing Dimmesdale deteriorate. While Hester was expected to be loving and loyal, Chillingworth showed her little affection and ignored her often.
His heart is destined to give out because it simply cannot take the guilt. The author's use of the name Chillingworth gives off an ominous and disturbing feeling. Not only does his name include "chilling", it also includes "worth".
Chillingworth finds it worth his time to cause Reverend Dimmesdale indirect and prolonged agony and guilt in order to get revenge. Without even knowing Chillingworth's motivation to hurt Dimmesdale, the reader is given a disturbing feeling from the medicine man. Reverend Dimmesdale, as stated many times before, contains the word "dim".
This exemplifies the fact that Dimmesdale believes he is to suffer eternal damnation for his actions with Hester as well as being a hypocrite and giving sermons each Sunday. Dimmesdale does not believe that his situation will ever get better and therefore has a grim outlook on life. Chillingworth's and Dimmesdale's names can be symbolic in variety of ways.
As most would say Chillingworth's name has "chilling" in it thus symbolizing his personality and his actions. Additionally, his name has "worth" in it, maybe asking the question; what is he "worth"? He certainly was not worthy enough to Hester. Chillingworth could be seeking revenge to prove what he is worth, and he trying to find his value in the situation. Furthermore, the common analogy of Dimmesdale is that his name contains "dim" in meaning that he is in the shadows of the towns people.
He lives with guilt and sin but the people do not know his sin due to the way he lives without telling the truth. In the his eyes his representation would then dim due to the sin he committed and in the end his future is dim with his death. Hawthorne uses the names "Chillingworth" and "Dimmesdale" as symbols to describe the nature of the two characters. Dimmesdale's name contains the word "dim," connoting his dim outlook on life and waning vitality due to his severe guilt, as well as his dim fate of death after years of emotional torment.
Chillingworth's name contains the word "chilling," referencing his merciless determination to annihilate Dimmesdale's life force.
The name Chillingworth suits his character well, portraying he is "cold" and lacks compassion as he seeks revenge in his wife. Hester's contrasting courage and strength serves to emphasize Dimmesdale's weakness as a character. The name "Dimmesdale" is symbolic in that it contains the word "Dim" which represents how he is always grim, stressed and guilty throughout the book. This portrays him as a very weak and even scared character.
Once he comes to Boston, we see him only in situations that involve his obsession with vengeance, where we learn a great deal about him. Hawthorne begins building this symbol of evil vengeance with Chillingworth's first appearance ". Having just ended over a year of captivity by the Indians, his appearance is hideous, partly because of his strange mixture of "civilized and savage costume.
Even when he is better dressed, however, Chillingworth is far from attractive. He is small, thin, and slightly deformed, with one shoulder higher than the other. Although he "could hardly be termed aged," he has a wrinkled face and appears "well stricken in years.
The reader feels a bit sorry for Roger Chillingworth during the first scaffold scene when he arrives in Massachusetts Bay Colony and finds his wife suffering public shame for an adulterous act. At that point, however, he has several choices; he chooses revenge.
His rude awakening is described a second time in Chapter 9 when Hawthorne calls him "a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people.
Chillingworth is not a Puritan. While he was a captive of the Indians for "upward of a year," he did not judge them as heathens and infidels, and, unlike the Puritans, he did not seek to convert them. Instead, as the scholar, he studied their knowledge of herbs and medicines to learn. He has, indeed, spent his life as a lonely scholar, cutting himself off when necessary in the quest for knowledge from the world of other men.
This study of herbs and medicines later links his work to the "black medicine" and helps him keep his victim alive. Hawthorne further develops this "other world" involvement — whether fate or predetermined by some higher power — when he describes the physician's appearance as being just in time to "help" Dimmesdale. The Puritans believed that the hand of God, or Providence, was in every event. So Hawthorne skewers their belief in mentioning Chillingworth's arrival when he states, "Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth's opportune arrival.
She is the scarlet letter in the flesh, a reminder of Hester's sin. As Hester tells the pious community leaders in Chapter 8, ". See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a million-fold the power of retribution for my sin?
Pearl is also the imagination of the artist, an idea so powerful that the Puritans could not even conceive of it, let alone understand it, except in terms of transgression.
She is natural law unleashed, the freedom of the unrestrained wilderness, the result of repressed passion. When Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest, Pearl is reluctant to come across the brook to see them because they represent the Puritan society in which she has no happy role.
Here in the forest, she is free and in harmony with nature. Her image in the brook is a common symbol of Hawthorne's. He often uses a mirror to symbolize the imagination of the artist; Pearl is a product of that imagination.
When Dimmesdale confesses his sin in the light of the sun, Pearl is free to become a human being. All along, Hester felt there was this redeemable nature in her daughter, and here she sees her faith rewarded.
Pearl can now feel human grief and sorrow, as Hester can, and she becomes a sin redeemed. Chillingworth is consistently a symbol of cold reason and intellect unencumbered by human compassion. While Dimmesdale has intellect but lacks will, Chillingworth has both. He is fiendish, evil, and intent on revenge. In his first appearance in the novel, he is compared to a snake, an obvious allusion to the Garden of Eden.
Chillingworth becomes the essence of evil when he sees the scarlet letter on Dimmesdale's breast in Chapter 10, where there is "no need to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
Eventually, his evil is so pervasive that Chillingworth awakens the distrust of the Puritan community and the recognition of Pearl. As time goes by and Dimmesdale becomes more frail under the constant torture of Chillingworth, the community worries that their minister is losing a battle with the devil himself.
Even Pearl recognizes that Chillingworth is a creature of the Black Man and warns her mother to stay away from him. Chillingworth loses his reason to live when Dimmesdale eludes him at the scaffold in the final scenes of the novel.
Besides the characters, the most obvious symbol is the scarlet letter itself, which has various meanings depending on its context. It is a sign of adultery, penance, and penitence.
It brings about Hester's suffering and loneliness and also provides her rejuvenation. In the book, it first appears as an actual material object in The Custom House preface. Then it becomes an elaborately gold-embroidered A over Hester's heart and is magnified in the armor breast-plate at Governor Bellingham's mansion. Here Hester is hidden by the gigantic, magnified symbol just as her life and feelings are hidden behind the sign of her sin. Still later, the letter is an immense red A in the sky, a green A of eel-grass arranged by Pearl, the A on Hester's dress decorated by Pearl with prickly burrs, an A on Dimmesdale's chest seen by some spectators at the Election Day procession, and, finally, represented by the epitaph "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules" gules being the heraldic term for "red" on the tombstone Hester and Dimmesdale share.
In all these examples, the meaning of the symbol depends on the context and sometimes the interpreter. For example, in the second scaffold scene, the community sees the scarlet A in the sky as a sign that the dying Governor Winthrop has become an angel; Dimmesdale, however, sees it as a sign of his own secret sin.
The community initially sees the letter on Hester's bosom as a mark of just punishment and a symbol to deter others from sin. Hester is a Fallen Woman with a symbol of her guilt. From what the reader is told of his early years with Hester, he was a difficult husband. He ignored his wife for much of the time, yet expected her to nourish his soul with affection when he did condescend to spend time with her.
Unable to engage in equitable relationships with those around him, he feeds on the vitality of others as a way of energizing his own projects. After Dimmesdale dies, Chillingworth no longer has a victim. Having lost the objects of his revenge, the leech has no choice but to die.
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