Comparison between Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is the unmarried pastor of Hester's congregation; he is also the father of Hester's daughter, Pearl. He is a symbol of the secret sinner; one who recognizes his transgression but keeps it hidden and secret, even to his own downfall. On the other hand, Roger Chillingworth is the pseudonym assumed by Hester Prynne's aged scholar-husband. He is a symbol of evil, of the "devil's handyman," of one consumed with revenge and devoid of compassion.

Dimmesdale is the secret sinner whose public and private faces are opposites. Even as the beadle proclaims that the settlement is a place where "iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine," the colony, along with the Reverend Mr. Wilson, is in awe of Dimmesdale's goodness and sanctity. Inside the good minister, however, is a storm raging between holiness and self-torture. At worst, Dimmesdale is a symbol of hypocrisy and self-centered intellectualism. When Hester tells him that the ship for Europe leaves in four days, he is delighted with the timing. He will be able to give his Election Sermon and "fulfill his public duties" before escaping. Dimmesdale's inner struggle is intense, and he struggles to do the right thing. He realizes the scaffold is the place to confess and also his shelter from his tormenter, Chillingworth.

On the other hand, Chillingworth is consistently a symbol of cold reason and intellect unencumbered by human compassion. While Dimmesdale has intellect but lacks will, Chillingworth has both. He is fiendish, evil, and intent on revenge. In his first appearance in the novel, he is compared to a snake, an obvious allusion to the Garden of Eden. Chillingworth becomes the essence of evil when he sees the scarlet letter on Dimmesdale's breast in Chapter 10, where there is "no need to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom."

At the end, Dimmesdale dies after his public confession and Chillingworth dies consumed by his own hatred and revenge. Chillingworth loses his reason to live when Dimmesdale eludes him at the scaffold in the final scenes of the novel: "… he positively withered up, shrivelled away, and almost vanished from mortal sight." In the Conclusion, It can be said that Dimmesdale represents the secret sinner who fights the good fight in his soul and eventually wins and in contrast, Chillingworth was consumed by obsession, vengeance, and hatred and eventually loses.