Fiend

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the Fiend is a recurring symbolic figure that represents the internal and external torments of concealed guilt. Rather than appearing as a tangible entity, the Fiend operates as a psychological and moral force, haunting the consciences of the characters and shaping the narrative's dark, Gothic atmosphere. It is invoked by the community's superstitions, by the characters' own self-accusations, and by the narrator's interpretive framework, serving as a measure of the spiritual decay that accompanies unconfessed sin.

The Fiend as a Symbol of Guilt and Temptation

The Fiend is most directly associated with the inner torment of Arthur Dimmesdale, whose hidden sin makes him vulnerable to what he perceives as diabolical influence. During his midnight vigil on the scaffold, Dimmesdale shrieks aloud, and the narrator describes the sound as if "a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro" . This image externalizes the minister's agony, transforming his private guilt into a spectacle for imagined demons. Later, as Dimmesdale walks through the town after his forest meeting with Hester, he is assailed by impulses he attributes to Satan: he is tempted to utter blasphemies to a deacon, to whisper a denial of the soul's immortality to an elderly parishioner, and to corrupt a young maiden with a single wicked word (E01014–E01020). The narrator explicitly states that "Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or—shall we not rather say?—this lost and desperate man" . These episodes frame Dimmesdale's moral crisis as a direct struggle with a fiendish tempter, one that he barely resists through sheer force of clerical decorum.

The Fiend in the Community's Superstitious Imagination

The Puritan townspeople frequently interpret events through a lens of diabolical agency, and the Fiend becomes a figure in their collective mythology. The scarlet letter itself is rumored to be "red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time" . This folk belief transforms the symbol of Hester's shame into a mark of demonic possession. Similarly, the meteor that appears during Dimmesdale's vigil is interpreted by the sexton as a portent: "a great red letter in the sky—the letter A, which we interpret to stand for Angel" , but the narrator notes that such phenomena were commonly read as "revelations from a supernatural source" , and Dimmesdale himself sees in it a confirmation of his own guilt. The figure of the Black Man, a forest-dwelling fiend who tempts sinners to sign his book with their blood, is a staple of local superstition, and Pearl asks her mother directly whether the scarlet letter is "the Black Man's mark on thee" . Hester confirms that she once met the Black Man and that the letter is his mark , thereby aligning herself with the diabolical in the child's understanding.

Roger Chillingworth as a Fiendish Figure

The most sustained embodiment of the Fiend in the novel is Roger Chillingworth, whose transformation from a learned scholar into a demonic avenger is explicitly traced by the narrator. When Chillingworth discovers the secret of Dimmesdale's guilt, his reaction is described with a simile that directly invokes Satan: "Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom" . The narrator later states that Chillingworth "had effected such a transformation by devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analysed and gloated over" . Chillingworth himself acknowledges his fiendish nature, telling Hester, "I have already told thee what I am—a fiend!" . He describes his role as that of a "fiend at his elbow" tormenting Dimmesdale, a "mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment" . The narrator reinforces this by noting that Chillingworth's "visage was getting sooty with the smoke" from his laboratory fire, which the vulgar believed was "brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel" .

The Fiend as a Narrative and Thematic Device

Beyond its role in character psychology and community belief, the Fiend functions as a narrative device that heightens the novel's moral and Gothic dimensions. The narrator uses the figure to articulate the stakes of Dimmesdale's hypocrisy: "The only truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have been no such man!" . The Fiend also appears in the visions that haunt Dimmesdale during his vigils, where "a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them" torments him. These spectral visitations are not presented as literal events but as projections of his guilt, yet they carry the full weight of diabolical temptation. The narrator's final reflection on the story's moral—"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" —implicitly condemns the secrecy that gives the Fiend its power. The Fiend, in this reading, is the embodiment of the lie itself, the hidden sin that festers and corrupts, and its ultimate defeat comes only through public confession and the acceptance of shame.