When Hester is first alone with Chillingworth, for instance, and in several preceding descriptions, she appears to be undergoing a process of destruction herself. She is immensely ashamed, and very aware of the eyes that dart furtively towards the letter emblazoned on her chest; she is too weak to think straight when Chillingworth administers a medicine to Pearl that could, for all Hester knows, be poison, and she is far too weak to resist Chillingworth's insistence that she keep his secrets.
Hester is the first of the three major characters, however, to make a transition to a stronger and more secure position with herself and with her sin; she has clearly found an inner redemption long before the others. The reason for this is the same as the reason that she is the first, and for the bulk of the book the only, character to acknowledge her sin -- Pearl. The vagaries of biology would not allow Hester Prynne to hide her sin in the way that Reverend Dimmesdale did; she was forced to acknowledge her wrongdoing by the simple impossibility of denying it. This thrusts Hester into the public eye, and though her existence is not an especially happy one during the action of the story, she and she alone of the hree major characters manages to develop some sense of life away from her sin, and motherhood is for Hester a major part of that life -- she must protect and guide Pearl, and cannot wallow in her own sin.
By the end of her life, when Hester has returned to the city and resumed life in her lonely cottage, "the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's...
The very symbol not of Hester's sin, but of her public shame, actually gave Hester a strange and separate strength in her life. Her openness with her sin, though not initially a matter of her choosing, enabled her to grow and progress in a way that both Dimmesdale and Chillingworth were prevented from doing due to their secrecy. It did not make her life easy, by any means, but it did provide her with the strength to endure the life she was leading. This life eventually became something with its own place in the community, another opportunity not afforded to either Dimmesdale or Chillingworth, because of the strength of Hester's character and her own surety regarding her redemption.
Conclusion
The destruction that is wrought by the keeping of secrets in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is near-complete when it comes to Chillingworth, as he is the only character never to acknowledge his role in the novel's action. Both Reverend Dimmesdale and Hester manage to find a redemption of their own despite their sin, and in fact because of their acknowledgement of their sin. Redemption is a product of sin, and therefore there is some good that sin can lead to; without acknowledging this sin, it only festers in its secrecy. Hawthorne uses the Puritan religious ethic to reveal some basic human truths, which has secured this novel's place in the American canon.
Work Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Dover, 1994.
