The first scaffold scene takes place right at the beginning of the novel in chapters 2 and 3. One of the characters that are involved in this scene is Hester. The book starts out with Hester in a prison and then they took her out to go and sentence her. They sentenced her to wear the scarlet letter and to stand on the scaffold in front of everyone. She feels that there is a heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes staring at her while she was up there. Another character involved in this scene is Pearl. This scene occurs when Pearl was just a little baby . Pearl got all of Hester’s turmoil, anguish, and despair from this event. Now Pearl had the same convulsion of pains and the moral agony that Hester had throughout the day. Another one of the characters is Roger Chillingworth. He is Hester’s husband . Both of them don’t want anyone to know that they are married. While Hester was on the scaffold she noticed Chillingworth walking in the crowd. When he was walking around he asks a townsperson

who the lady on the scaffold was and what is being done to her. Chillingworth vows to the townsperson that he is talking to that the person that fathered the Hester’s baby, Pearl, will be known. Rev. Dimmesdale is also in this scene. He is asked by Mr. Wilson to go and talk to Hester, go and make her confess the truth. He talks to Hester asking her to tell him who the fellow-sinner is. After Hester says she will never tell who is the father, Dimmesdale says that “She will not speak!”(p.68)When he says this he pts his hand to his heart and holds it. The first scaffold scene occurs on a Sunday morning so everyone in town can see her.

This is how Nathanial Hawthorne connected the theme of The Scarlet Letter. The theme was sin and concealment. He used the scaffold scenes to connect it.

In this scene a comet streaks across the sky. When it streaks across the sky it leaves the people to believe that it is a red “A”. Dimmesdale sees the “A” in the sky and he interprets it as standing for adultery (the scarlet letter.) The other people who see the “A” in the sky interpret it differently then Dimmesdale interprets it. They interpret it as a sign of their governor who has just passed the past night. They think that his angel left this sign of him. In the morning a church official found Dimmesdale’s glove on the scaffold. No one saw Dimmesdale or knew that Dimmesdale was on the scaffold other than himself, Hester, Pearl, and Chillingworth. The church official said, “ It was found ... always is.” (p. 158) The people thought that Dimmesdale was such a good man, so he couldn’t have been there. So the townspeople think that Satan took it and placed it there. The second scaffold scene takes place late at night as a sign of fear, cowardness, evil, and concealment.

The third and final scaffold scene takes place at the end of the book in chapter 23. One of the characters that is involved in this final scaffold scene is Dimmesdale. After Dimmesdale

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