Roger Chillingworth In Scarlet Letter

In the book “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Roger Chillingworth is the husband of the main character Hester Prynne. Hester, however, has had an affair and become pregnant with a local pastor’s(Arthur Dimmesdale’s) child. Roger, enraged that she has cheated on him and had a child, and is determined to find the father. Throughout the novel, he gets more and more obsessed with finding the father, so when the pastor dies-and Roger no longer has a target of his rage-he dies a year later. At the time of his death, he gives all his money to Pearl, Hester’s child, in what seems to be a ploy to redeem himself in his final moments. Overall, in the story Roger goes from an old scholar to a vengeful torturer of Dimmesdale, and general annoyance to his wife.

She confronts her, saying that her having an affair, and especially a child, is a disgrace to him. Luckily for him, however, no one knows that he is Hester’s husband, because he has been in England being intellectual. He tells her that he does not want to know who the father is, but if she tells the town that they are married, he would hunt down the father and basically torture him psychologically (which is exactly what he does to Dimmesdale). This initial introduction to Roger gives the reader the impression that he is an old man that does not care much about his wife, and that while he is angry about the affair and the child, he is not psychotic