How many times did we lie to our parents before we began to tell the truth? If we .
shattered mom's favorite glass vase while she was out, admitting that the baseball was .
ours would certainly grant us a month in our room. We would often breakdown under the .
heavy burden of guilt, however, and we would realize the relative ease of time in our .
room. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne similarly develops the concepts of guilt .
and the freedom gained by confession. In the first of three distinct scaffold scenes, Hester .
Prynne stands alone under direct scrutiny from the public. By the second of such scenes, .
the story is in the middle of its development, and the guilt of Arthur Dimmesdale has .
fully developed. Though he is unable to confess to the townspeople, he tries to soothe .
some of his inner pain by revealing his secret to the night. It is not until the books .
conclusion, however, that Dimmesdale finds peace through the full confession of his sins .
to the crowd. Examining Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth in .
the context of the scaffold scenes, shows that honesty overcomes deception.
The first scaffold scene establishes the root for all further development of the .
stories central characters. As Hester Prynne is brought out before the crowd, her sin is .
born with their discovery of her adultery: "When this young woman "the mother of this .
child "stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp .
the infant closely to her bosom - (46). By the very fact that this child, Pearl, is the product of her affair, the infant stands as the living symbol of her sin. The embrace that she gives her baby is, thus, her own embrace of her sin. Hester also reveals that this embrace covered her scarlet letter, but that " wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm,"with a glance that would not be abashed - (46).
