chillingworth and dimmesdale

Here is Lars Hanson as Rev. Dimmesdale, with a sinister Chillingworth in the back. Dimmesdale is supposed to be a "pretty boy," so I like this actor better than Gary Oldman from the '95 movie.

Each of Hawthorne’s major characters in The Scarlet Letter can be seen to represent one of his Romantic philosophies. Pearl is associated with a beautiful but wild Nature and also the untamable will of the human nature. Hester represents individuality for she refuses to live by the confining system of the Puritans and is true to her personal nature, which is more in touch with earthly Nature. She is also one of the characters Hawthorne uses in dealing with morality: not only does she wear a symbol of shame, but personally deals with the emotional, mental and spiritual consequences of her adultery in a state of saint-like penance.

Here is a look at the Romantic qualities in the two male characters, Reverend Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth.

DIMMESDALE:

Chillingworth notes that Dimmesdale, “pure as they deem him, - all spiritual as he seems, - hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother” (89).

“For the sake of the minister’s health, and to enable the leech [Chillingworth] to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops” (84).

-Dimmesdale habitually takes “meditative walks…along the shores of the peninsulas, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring country” (125).
So he is a follower of peripeteaetism, but his personal burden and philosophies prevent him from receiving the education and healing of walking and meditating.

-Other Romantic ideas that Dimmesdale fail at is that of Blake’s Innocence and Experience, and solitude. He keeps himself in seclusion, “simple and childlike…in the shadowy by-paths” but this leads to something amiss in his character (46). While Pearl often shows adult perception and knowledge of Experience, the reader has the sense that she is simply accelerated in adopting Experience into her world of Innocence. With Dimmesdale, however, he seems to be rejecting Experience in his reluctance to take adult and mature responsibility for the consequences of his affair with Hester. He is unnatural, then, because he is using Innocence as an evasion of Experience, when one should embody both. It does raise the interesting question: if Innocent children can live in a world of Experience (for example, in Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper), can an adult who should be (?) Experienced live in an Innocent world? Is it wrong here because Dimmesdale self-constructs his childlike world out of fear?

CHILLINGWORTH:

-Chillingworth is like an evil Goethian scientist in the sense that he understands the connectivity between mind, body, and soul, but desires to expose his findings in ill will rather than to illuminate or educate. He is also like Wordsworth’s Man of Science, who “seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude” (unlike “the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion” (Wordsworth 606)).

Chillingworth experiments with Dimmesdale’s soul: he wants to observe the reverend “in his ordinary life…and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character” (85). Like the European Romantics we have studied in class, Chillingworth believes that “[w]herever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its ground-work there” (85).

-Chillingworth observes that within Dimmesdale, there is “[a] strange sympathy betwixt soul and body,” for the sickness of his soul manifests in his physical body (95).

-The novel warns against worshipping Science, even (or especially) Chillingworth’s science of soul and body. Here is one of the key passages of The Scarlet Letter, a climactic scientific moment for Chillingworth:

“It came to pass…that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on the table…To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that, hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!” (95).

-Hawthorne never does reveal what, if anything, was on Dimmesdale’s chest. He tells the theories of the town after Dimmesdale literally bares his chest on the scaffold. Some think he has carved an “A” on his own body, some think Chillingworth’s mysterious medines have caused one to raise onto his skin from within, some swear there is nothing there at all (176-7).

-It is not purely Chillingworth’s identity as a scientist that makes him unnatural, but that where the world’s “great heart would have pitied and forgiven,” he is “Pitiless” and “Unforgiving,” showing an Unromantic sensibility towards fellow man (96). Specifically, “the revenge which he had stooped for” has over time corrupted him, and compromised the scholarly intelligence he once was known for (115).

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1994.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1808).” The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. 606.