Revenge 2 Essay, Research Paper

REVENGE

Love is a strange thing. It is strong, free, and blind. With it come many pleasures. However, what often occurs after love is the antithesis of love. Once love is lost in a person, a barrage of feelings inhabits that person. One of the darkest, strongest, most eminent emotions that occur in a person is the feeling of revenge. The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter are both classic and dated stories that are mostly based upon love, lost love, and revenge.

In The Scarlet Letter, Chillingsworth and Hester are supposed to be in love. They are married, which is a sacred bond tying two people together that love each other very much. When Hester senses that she may never again see her husband, who had all but abandoned her, she seeks comfort in the arms of another man. She thought that Chillingsworth would never find out. When he did find out, he became very angry at losing his wife; she had betrayed him. He responded by trying to kill the other party, Arthur Dimmesdale. Revenge had turned a once normal man into a blood seeking, greedy, stingy, and decrepitly weak old man.

Revenge was also the driving force behind the Abigail Walker s, a character in The Chamber, accusations of Elizabeth Proctor being a witch. John Proctor and Abigail Williams once had an affair. John was lonely and in need of human comfort, comfort his wife was unable to give in her dying state. However when she regained her health, John left Abigail and went back to his wife. Abigail was furious at his decision; she would love to get back at the hurt he caused. Abigail found her opening once the witch trials transpired. She knew that to John Proctor, losing his wife meant losing his life. Abigail saw this as the way to get him back, so she screamed witch upon Elizabeth, saying Proctor. Abigail was willing to kill a woman just to get back at John Proctor.

Since both of these incidents of violence were the spawn of revenge, we can say that revenge is more than just an angry feeling . Revenge is a deadly feeling. Revenge is the vile product of love gone awry, and both Roger Chillingsworth from The Scarlet Letter and Abigail Williams from The Crucible were both afflicted by it. Once possessed by this dark emotion, they acted with maliciousness and with utter disregard for human life.