But Chillingworth’s efforts to relieve his misery by transferring it to another wear on him in the same way Dimmesdale’s efforts to conceal his relationship to Hester and Pearl destroy the reverend. When Hester confronts Chillingworth to abandon her promise to keep secret his identity as her husband, she observes the ugly transformation effected by his seven years of obsession with finding, then destroying, her coadulterer: “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty for transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office” (p. 140). Though Hester has no passionate memories of Chillingworth, her memories from her married life are of a decent man. The fiend that drives Dimmesdale to his death—or hastens Dimmesdale’s death, as Dimmesdale’s health has already deteriorated before he ever encounters Chillingworth—has also driven out the gentle scholar, leaving a man as misshapen morally as he is physically. Chillingworth dies within a year of Dimmesdale’s death, as though only the fiend remained of the old man, and without a victim to feed on, the fiend could no longer survive.

While ruthless in his pursuit of Dimmesdale, Chillingworth is from the outset forgiving of Hester. If nothing else, the old cuckold is perceptive, for he understands his own fault in marrying a woman who would never love him, and who was probably too young to understand fully the meaning of her vows. Like Hester, who tells Dimmesdale that their crime “had a consecration of its own,” Chillingworth sees the crime in the context of its particular facts. Hester’s marriage to an older and deformed man whom she never loved, and his betrayal of her “budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with ... decay” mitigate her wrongdoing and transfer some portion of the blame to him. He tells her, “between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced.” When Chillingworth dies, he leaves his estate to Pearl, as if he also accepts a share of responsibility for Pearl’s circumstances. Chillingworth views the crime in the context of the moral circumstance of each person tarnished by association, and the person’s relation to him. In this context, Pearl is innocent and Hester may be forgiven. Only Dimmesdale has erred against Chillingworth.

The child, Pearl, does not fully understand the circumstance of her birth, but knows well its consequence of isolation. Sensing that she and her mother do not have a choice in their separation from the community, she responds with an angry sociopathy, hurling rocks at other children, mocking Reverend Wilson when Hester visits to implore Governor Bellingham not to take Pearl from her, and tormenting Dimmesdale with her intuitive association between the scarlet letter and his gesture of keeping his hand on his heart. Pearl’s defiance is her lifeblood; she seems to know that to accept the Puritans’ estimation of her mother and herself would be to deny her right to exist. She rejects their estimation as though her life depended upon it—because it does.

Hester’s response to her crime combines the morbid inwardness of Dimmesdale, the intelligent perceptiveness and relativism of Chillingworth, and the defiance of Pearl, along with other reactions of her own, including the sublimation of her misery in art. Further, while Dimmesdale’s and Chillingworth’s responses intensify but do not change qualitatively, Hester’s response to her crime evolves during the seven-year term of the novel. Her embellishment of the scarlet letter with fantastic embroidery, similar to the finery in which she dresses Pearl, and her ornate dress during her exposure on the pillory, show her flouting the Puritan’s censure of her conduct, as though so confident in her own values that she need make no outward concessions to the community’s judgment. The “turmoil,” “anguish,” and “despair” Hester endures during this exposure seem, initially, exclusively related to her public disgrace, rather than to an inward-looking response, such as guilt. During her interview with Chillingworth inside the prison, Hester reveals another aspect of her experience of her crime, when she voices genuine remorse for her trespass against her husband. Initially, then, Hester responds to her adultery as a private matter, with important consequences for those immediately affected by the act and otherwise only to the extent that it inappropriately becomes public.

But Hester’s rearing of Pearl and the bold digression of her thoughts during her long solitude add another dimension to Hester’s view of her crime. Though Hester’s intellectual forays become increasingly subversive, her instruction of Pearl remains conventional. She schools her child in The New England Primer and the Westminster Catechism, standard fare of the day for school children, and admonishes Pearl for giving voice to the same dark speculation in which Hester engages when Pearl denies having a Heavenly Father (p. 81). Hester wants not only to spare her child the misery brought down on her for her defiance of the community’s social norms. She also fears for the child’s moral health, and endeavors to constrain her child’s spiritual development at the same time she herself internally ventures past the constraints of received moral wisdom. Moreover, the iconoclastic reveries in which Hester indulges reflect acquiescence in her guilt more than active subversiveness; accepting her fallen state frees Hester to question the whole order of society because she accepts the society’s judgment that she can scarcely fall farther. To the extent Hester finds moral truth in her digressions, she sees herself as too sullied to be an instrument of its expression, having

long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! (p.