Who is pearls father in the scarlet letter

His single-minded pursuit of retribution reveals him to be the most malevolent character in the novel. Read an in-depth analysis of Roger Chillingworth.

Dimmesdale is a young man who achieved fame in England as a theologian and then emigrated to America. In a moment of weakness, he and Hester became lovers.

Although he will not confess it publicly, he is the father of her child. He deals with his guilt by tormenting himself physically and psychologically, developing a heart condition as a result.

Dimmesdale is an intelligent and emotional man, and his sermons are thus masterpieces of eloquence and persuasiveness. His commitments to his congregation are in constant conflict with his feelings of sinfulness and need to confess. Read an in-depth analysis of Arthur Dimmesdale. Governor Bellingham is a wealthy, elderly gentleman who spends much of his time consulting with the other town fathers.

Despite his role as governor of a fledgling American society, he very much resembles a traditional English aristocrat. He remains blind to the misbehaviors taking place in his own house: his sister, Mistress Hibbins, is a witch.

Pearl clearly senses her father as Dimmesdale; she kisses him in the end. He gives one last sermon, his best yet, after which he climbs the scaffold again. There, he finally confesses his sin. He dies in Hester's arms, his soul finally clean. When Hester later dies , she is buried next to Dimmesdale. In short, he claims The Scarlet Letter is a true story : Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter Pearl never existed but Hawthorne, who read extensively about Puritan history, may have based his novel on the story of Mary Bailey Beadle.

Hester names her daughter Pearl because she is beautiful and was created through pain. When an oyster makes a pearl , it is because an irritating piece. While the "A" initially symbolizes "adultery," later various people assign meanings such as "able" or "angel" to the letter , as the community's views of Hester change.

For Governor Bellingham's servant, the letter signals Hester's upper-class "aristocratic" or "authoritarian" status. Pearl , the symbol of the scarlet letter, does not become the destructive force, but brings Hester pride. Pearl becomes Hester's spiritual support because she brings love and happiness to her. When the governor plans to take Pearl away from Hester , she argues for the happiness that Pearl brought to her.

Hester and Chillingworth are both aware that Hester never loved him. I felt no love, nor feigned any. Nonetheless, he was initially content to marry her because he appreciated her youth and beauty. For Hester , to remove the scarlet letter would be to acknowledge the power it has in determining who she is. Hester chooses to continue to wear the letter because she is determined to transform its meaning through her actions and her own self-perception—she wants to be the one who controls its meaning.

Wilson to test Pearl's knowledge of the catechism. Pearl deliberately pretends ignorance. In answer to the very first question — "Who made thee?

Horrified, the governor and Mr. Wilson are immediately ready to take Pearl away from Hester, who protests that God gave Pearl to her and that she will not give her up.

Pearl is both her happiness and her torture, and she will die before she relinquishes her. She appeals to Dimmesdale to speak for her. Dimmesdale persuades Governor Bellingham and Mr. Wilson that Hester should be allowed to keep Pearl, whom God has given to her as both a blessing and a reminder of her sin, causing Chillingworth to remark, "You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness.

Hester refuses the woman's invitation to a midnight meeting of witches in the forest, saying she must take Pearl home, but she adds that, if she had lost Pearl, she would willingly have signed on with the devil. This chapter brings back together the major characters from the first scaffold scene — Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth — as well as representatives of the Church, the State, and the World of Darkness.

Note, too, that underneath the surface action, Hawthorne offers several strong hints concerning the complex relationships of his characters. In Hester's appealing to Dimmesdale for help, in Pearl's solemnly caressing his hand, and in the minister's answering kiss lie solid hints that Dimmesdale is Pearl's father. Such being the result of society's management of the matter, let us see what success attended the efforts of an individual to take the law into his own hands.

This accomplice is unknown; that is, society has not found him out. But he is known to himself, and consequently to Roger Chillingworth, who is a symbol of a morbid and remorseless conscience. Chillingworth has been robbed of his wife. But between that and other kinds of robbery there is this difference, — that he who is robbed wishes not to recover what is lost, but to punish the robber.

And his object in inflicting this punishment is not the robber's good, nor the wife's good, nor even the public good; but revenge, pure and simple.

The motive or passion which actuates him, is, in short, a wholly selfish one. It was deeply provoked, no doubt; but so, also, in another way, was the crime which it would requite. Unlike the latter, moreover, it involves no risk; on the contrary, it is enforced by the whole weight of social opinion. If the man had really or unselfishly loved his wife, he would not act thus. His wish would be to shield her, — to protect the sanctity of the marriage relation, as typified in her, from further pollution.

His hostility to the seducer, even, would be more public than personal, — hatred of the sin, not of the individual; for men support with considerable equanimity the destruction of other men's married happiness. But, by bringing the matter to the personal level, Chillingworth confesses his indifference to any but personal considerations, not to mention his disbelief in God.

As regards religion, indeed, he declares himself a fatalist. By thy first step awry thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment it has all been a dark necessity.

Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! The revenge of society consists in publishing the sinner's ignominy. But this method would baffle Chillingworth's revenge just where he designed it to be most effective; for, by leaving the sinner with no load of secret guilt in his heart, it is inadvertently merciful in its very unmercifulness.

The real agony of sin, as Chillingworth clearly perceived, lies not in its commission, which is always delightful, nor in its open punishment, which is a kind of relief, but in the dread of its discovery.

The revenge which he plans, therefore, depends above all things upon keeping his victim's secret. By rejecting all brutal and obvious methods he gains entrance into a much more sensitive region of torture. He will not poison Hester's babe, because he knows that it will live to cause its mother the most poignant pangs she is capable of feeling. Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine! But it was the constant shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge!

And it demonstrates the truth that the only punishment which man is justified in inflicting upon his fellow is the punishment which is incidental to his being restrained from further indulgence in crime.

Such restraint acts as a punishment, because the wicked impulse is thereby prevented from realizing itself; but it is intrinsically an act not of revenge, but of love, since the criminal is thereby preserved from increasing his sinful burden by accomplishing in fact what he had purposed in thought. The Puritan system was selfish and brutal, merely; Chillingworth's was satanically malignant; but both alike are impotent to do anything but inflame the evils they pretend to assuage.

Society and the individual have both demonstrated their incapacity to deal with the great problem of human error. Neither suppression nor torture is of any avail.

The devil is always anxious to be enlisted against himself, but his reasons are tolerably transparent. When, at length, Hester and Dimmesdale meet again, they are ripe to fall more deeply and irrevocably than before. The woman faces the prospect boldly, thinking more of her lover than of herself; he trembles in his flesh, but is willing in his heart; but there is no sincere hesitation on either side. One hour of genuine remorse would have given them insight to perceive that no such shallow device as flight could bring them peace; for it would have shown them that the source of their misery was not the persecution suffered from without, but the inward violation committed by themselves.

Chillingworth comprehends the situation perfectly, and quietly makes his preparations, not to obstruct their escape, but to accompany it. This is the most hideous episode in the story, and well represents the bottomless slough of iniquity which awaits the deliberate choice of evil. And it elevates Chillingworth into the bad eminence of chief criminal of the three. Not only is his actual wickedness greater, but the extenuation is less. The lovers might plead their love, but he only his hate.

This interpretation of his character may profitably be pondered by the student of the human soul. From the fate of Hester and Dimmesdale we may learn that it avails not the sinner to live a life of saintly deeds and aims, but to be true; not to scourge himself, to wear sackcloth, or to redeem other souls, but openly to accept his shame. The poison of sin is not so much in the sin itself as in the concealment; for all men are sinners, but he who conceals his sin pretends a superhuman holiness.

To acknowledge our sins before God, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, is a phrase, and no more, unproductive of absolution.

But to acknowledge our sins before men is, in very truth, to acknowledge them before God; for the appeal is made to the human conscience, and the human conscience is the miraculous presence of God in human nature, and from such acknowledgment absolution is not remote. The reason is that such acknowledgment surrenders all that is most dear to the unregenerate heart, and thereby involves a humiliation or annihilation of evil pride which eradicates sinful appetite.

All sin is based on selfishness; but the supreme abdication of self, postulated by voluntary and unreserved self-revelation, leaves no further basis for sin to build on. The man who has never been guilty of actual sin is peculiar rather than fortunate; but in all events he has no cause to pride himself on the immunity, which indicates at best that he has been spared adequate temptation. Hester and Dimmesdale, in the story, stop short of taking this step, but Chillingworth actually begins by taking it.

It is the unpardonable sin, not because God is wanting in mercy towards it, but because its very nature is to cause its perpetrator to withdraw himself from all mercy. He hugs it to himself as a virtue, as the virtue of virtues; and the more lost he becomes, the more virtuous does he fancy himself to be. It consists, broadly speaking, in disowning one's human brotherhood and laying claim on whatever pretext to personal and peculiar favor at God's hands.

Such a person will contemplate with complacency the damnation of all the rest of mankind, so that his own hold upon the divine approbation be secure. In his earlier pieces notably in The Man of Adamant, and Ethan Brand , Hawthorne has more than once touched upon this subject, but in the story Roger Chillingworth he gives it a larger development. Chillingworth starts with the notion that he has a right to inflict vengeance.

It is a very common notion; many respectable persons possess it; indeed, it is not only compatible with social respectability, but is favorable to it. But vengeance, when prosecuted with the deliberation and circumspection observed by Chillingworth, has this singular quality, — that it gives free indulgence to the most cruel and infernal passions of which the human heart is capable, unmodified by any fear of social odium; though here, and throughout, a marked distinction should be made between the idea of society as at present organized and that of mankind or humanity; the former being a purely artificial parody and perversion of the divinely beneficent order of which we already catch occasional glimpses in the latter.

This peculiarity of vengeance first stupefies the voice of conscience in the perpetrator, and thereafter has him in complete subjection, and can lead him through the depths of the bottomless pit without his once suspecting that he is out of arm's reach of the archangels. Roger Chillingworth is a good citizen, his private and public reputation are spotless, he is on the best of terms with the governor and the clergy, and his intellectual ability and scientific attainments beget him general respect and admiration.

No social test can be applied to him from which he will not emerge unscathed. His hypocrisy is without flaw; it deceives even himself. He is the complete type of the man of the world, the social ideal, — courteous, quiet, well informed, imperturbable. Nevertheless, his moral nature is a poisonous and irreclaimable wilderness, in which blooms not a single flower of heavenly parentage. For he has put his devilish lust of vengeance in the place of God, and day by day he worships it, and performs its bidding.

That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Hawthorne, however, with characteristic charity, forbears to claim a verdict even against his reprobate.