THE ORIGIN OF HATRED AND LOVE IN “THE SCARLET LETTER”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel The Scarlet Letter is replete with complex and profound subjects and themes; the symbolism and metaphor represented by the characters and their actions continuously function as mediums for Hawthorne to relate them to the reader. However, the most influential and consistently present subject is that of hatred and love. Hawthorne writes, in the conclusion, that, “It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at the bottom.” Chillingworth’s hatred of Dimmesdale, and Dimmesdale’s love of God are, in their deepest forms, the same thing – thus proving the aforementioned passage from Hawthorne’s conclusion. These two characters’ basic personalities are developed from their intense hatred and love, respectively. To hate and to love require of a human that he must have intimacy with the recipient of his emotion, that the recipient exhibits some emotion in return, and most important, that the one who is loving or hating must experience a depression equal in the magnitude of their passion when the recipient is taken away – all of which characteristics are present, and equal in enormity, in both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth.
Chillingworth, Hester’s husband in England, is a character whose fundamental hatred of Dimmesdale motivates his every move. Upon arrival in the colony, learns of Hester’s adultery and swears of Hester’s accomplice in her crime, “I shall seek this man…I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!” Chillingworth lives with Dimmesdale and by “luck” one day finds something of consequence (that perhaps resembles or, at least, is equal in spirit to Hester’s scarlet ‘A’) under Dimmesdale’s vest. This is confirmation to Chillingworth’s suspicion that Dimmesdale is guilty of fathering Pearl. Although Chillingworth, in the beginning, blindly hates whomever he believed to have sinned with Hester, upon discovering a real focus, his hatred and passion only increases. Hester confronts Chillingworth one day by the ocean, to tell him he must stop torturing Dimmesdale. The narrator further expounds on Chillingworth’s hatred of Dimmesdale becoming the sole focus of his existence: “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, is he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.” Chillingworth even goes so far as to blame Dimmesdale for this change in himself. The depth of his hatred had transformed the essence of his personality, and even, by the end of the novel, was indeed the only reason for his mortal life to continue. The narrator remarks that after Dimmesdale died, “Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place…in the appearance and demeanor of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy – all his vital and intellectual force – seemed at once to desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shriveled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge…” This hatred was the quintessence of his personality, and has become the fundamental motivation for every action Chillingworth took in his seven years in New England.
