Maybe cause you know how in the beginning, when Chillingworth was talking with Hester, he was like, “oh it’s my fault too because I should have known better than to marry a young person”. He kind of takes the blame there because he married a young naive wife that he obviously had no time for and married her selfishly just for the sake of getting married(so he kind of like took the rest of her life away from her). Hawthorne might have wanted to show that Chillingworth was accepting partial blame for the whole situation and that he was sort of good, but got more and more wicked as the book progressed. He spends all day with his studies and never really goes out to the real world and this is what probably makes him want to torment Dimesdale?

I agree that Chillingworth is not evil because he believes what he is doing is right. In this time period everything was done to please God, everything. If you did something that God might not like you were punished. Chillingworth believed this situation ws calling for punishment, but punishment in the right place. He was smart. He knew that he was partially to blame, Hester was partially to blame, and that there was one other person who needed to answer to what happened. To make Chillingworth evil would be totally against the point because it’s not that they were mean or that he wanted revenge, he wanted punishment for all guilty parties under the laws that God set for their community.

youre gonna hate this, but the scarlet letter is a fantastic book. chillingworth is not a serious “bad guy” because he really BELIEVES that he is doing the right thing. remember, in those times, they believed that.

hawthorne needed to make the book as real as he could, so he didnt make chillingworth “bad”, so the reader could understand the book and his intention more clearly.

i hope that made some sense, if it didnt, you can email me, i know that book back to front.

“the S on my chest, stands for sooooperman luvver!” lmao