Chlorinating the true villain In the Scarlet Letter, the role of the villain Is vague and not truly defined; It seems to be left up to the reader to make their own decision. In the first three chapters we are lead to believe that the villain will be an abstract one, the prejudice of Hester Prune’s pregnancy. Hester Prone could also be considered the villain. A married woman goes to a new world to make a home for her husband, who will follow shortly after.
She then proceeds to fall for the new world’s minister and become pregnant. There is then, what could be argued the last and final possible villain; Timescale. The fact that he seduced and impregnated a married woman is reason enough for him to be thought a villain. I believe that the true villain Is the husband, Roger Chlorinating. Roger Chlorinating arrives and discovers Heater condition. He then becomes obsessed, with finding out the Identity of the child’s father. And while doing so he becomes evil and was no longer the man Hester knew.
The reader feels a bit Orr for Roger Chlorinating 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. What should have en a warm and loving homecoming after being apart from his wife has become terrible. Chlorinating 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” Timescale. The Puritans believed that the hand of God, or Providence, was in every event. So Hawthorne skewers their belief in mentioning Clownishness’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 Clownishness’s opportune arrival. When Chlorinating arrives In the colony and learns of Hester situation, he leaves her alone nearly seven years as he single-minded pursues Timescale. He does, however, see his role in her downfall. Because he married her realizes that their marriage did not follow “the laws of nature. ” He could not believe she, who was so beautiful, could marry a man “misshapen since my birth hour. ” He deluded himself that his intellectual gifts dazzled her and she forgot his deformity. He now realizes that from the moment they met, the scarlet letter would be at the end of their path.
His love of learning and intellectual pursuit attracts Timescale. In the New World, men of learning were rare. Hawthorne says, “there was a fascination for the minister in the company of the man of science, in whom he recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas that he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own profession. ” This love of wisdom is what will draw the two men soother, thus facilitating Clownishness’s plans. Hawthorne also uses Hester to show Nat has happened to Chlorinating in isolating himself from humanity.
By Chapter 14, when Hester meets him in the forest, Chlorinating has blackness in his visage and a red light showing out of his eyes, as if “the old man’s soul was on fire, and kept on smoldering dustily within his breast. ” In seeking vengeance, he has taken on the devil’s Job. His obsession with revenge is what makes him ? in Hawthorn’s eyes ? the worst sinner and, therefore, a pawn of the devil. It is appropriate that Hester tests him in the dark forest, a place the Puritans see as the abode of the Black Man.
This man of science, so lacking in sentiment, is coldly and single-minded seeking “hat is only God’s prerogative: vengeance. Chlorinating has become such a fiend that his very existence depends on Timescale. When he knowingly smiles to Hester at the Election Day ceremony, he is acknowledging that he, too, will be on that ship bound for Europe, the faithful companion of the minister. It is their fate to be together. When Timescale surprises the physician and climbs the scaffold to infers, Chlorinating knows the minister is about to escape him.
His mental torture of the minister is his only reason for living; when his object is beyond reach, Chlorinating does, indeed cease to exist. In the Conclusion, we discover that Chlorinating “positively withered up, shriveled away. ” Obsession, vengeance, and hatred consumed him, but, despite all this, he leaves his fortune to Pearl, a child of love and passion, the living symbol and personification of the scarlet letter. Perhaps this act can, to some degree, redeem the person whose sin was the blackest.
