Hawthorne Was Right To Fear The Clinical Gaze
Readers of The Scarlet Letter, if they think to mention him at all, regard Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth as a Satanic or Faustian figure. He seems like a minor character, notable only for being Hester Prynne’s cuckolded husband and for seeking revenge as her lover’s personal physician, preserving the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale physically in order to torture him psychologically.
But Chillingworth is more complex than meets the eye. He carries himself with all the coldness of a clinician, yet he commingles science and alchemy and even incorporates herbalism into his medical repertoire after emerging from captivity with an unnamed indigenous tribe.1 In that way, Chillingworth is a historical enigma — a palimpsest, if you like — and each of his layers says something significant about Hawthorne’s view of medicine in the nineteenth century. Indeed, I think Chillingworth’s character is a potent touchstone for our own troubled times.
It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly distrusted scientific physicians were in 1850 when The Scarlet Letter was published. Mary Shelley reflected many of those fears thirty years earlier in Victor Frankenstein, and Hawthorne had already created his most monstrous scientist, Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, who poisons his own daughter. A rival scholar says of Rappacini: “His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.” There’s not much ambiguity in Rappaccini’s character; Hawthorne’s warnings about scientific hubris are sometimes heavy-handed.
There are a lot of Rappaccinis presently promoting AI in medicine, placing more faith in technology than in human connection, and touting efficiency over “I and thou.” Some of them are physicians, some of them are hospital administrators, and some of them are medical insurance executives. Hawthorne’s fears have become our own.
