Roger Needs to Put the "Chill" in Chillingworth

How heavy does a secret lay on a man's soul? That seems to be the real question, as we encounter both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale in these chapters. Both are being turned into something else as they sequester their secrets from the world. Does a guilty conscience or a hidden part of you really change your outward appearance?

From Dimmesdale's entrance into the forest, we can see that he is not the man he used to be. Hester describes him as, "haggard and feeble, and [betraying] a nervous despondency in his air..." (Hawthorne 170). He seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders, but is it his Reverend-ly duties or the power of the secret he holds that causes this change? It reminds me of a part of Egyptian mythology: in the Underworld, judgment is determined by the weight of your heart. The more bad things you have done, the heavier your heart is. If your heart is heavier than what sits on the other side of the scale, the Feather of Truth, then a monster of the Egyptian afterlife named Ammit eats your heart and you are doomed to the Egyptian equivalent of purgatory forever. No wonder Dimmesdale seems so terrified and weak--if he believed in that Egyptian afterlife, he would dread his judgment day for fear Ammit would eat his heart.

Now, Roger Chillingworth. This is where it gets interesting. At the beginning, he doesn't seem like a super sinful guy. I get it, while you were away, your wife cheated on you (in her defense, she thought you were dead, but I digress). But as the chapters roll on with Chillingworth, he is revealed as a bad person. He is even described as morphing into a figure of the devil himself, he is so eaten up with hate inside. He holds two secrets: that he is actually Hester's husband, and that Dimmesdale is the man Hester had the affair with. Chillingworth is so eaten up with hatred and these secrets that he doesn't even seem human anymore. Every time we see him, his anger gets worse and worse until he becomes the epitome of darkness in this small Puritan town. And one of these secrets isn't even his! Still, he continues to hide it, and for what purpose? To torture his wife and her lover even more than he already has. Relax, Chillingworth. You're only burying yourself under the weight of sins in your soul. But he believes it is what was in root all along, not a choice he is making. If he can't let go of this anger and need for revenge, it will eat at him until he goes full monster, or disappears all together.

So the answer to the question is: heavy. Very heavy.