ester is forced to stand on the scaffold with everyone in town ridiculing her until she confesses who her partner was in the sin, but instead she stands there for three hours, when she was allowed to come down. Her subjection for the Puritan onlookers was excoriating to bear, and Hester holds the child to her heart, a symbolic comparison between the child and the scarlet letter, implying that they are truly both intertwined (Chuck). The Puritans, one of the most devoted groups of bible scholars, forget one of Jesus’ most famous of quotes, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Marcus). The women forget to look inside themselves before they cast their opinions upon Hester. It is not these people’s right to determine Hester’s punishment, not the women’s nor the magistrates’; such a right is reserved only for God (Marcus).After Hester’s public scaffold punishment is over, Hawthorne changes the roles of the towns’ people and Hester, making Hester the only one who is not sinning and makes all the towns people vain and self-righteous. She is obviously repentant, as she chooses to remain in Boston, even when she is free to go elsewhere and start her life anew. “Here had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like because the result of martyrdom” (Marcus). She becomes a very modest and humble woman, not taking any worldly pleasures for herself but instead giving them all to her one and only precious gift, her daughter, Pearl. Hester takes up the occupation of seamstress, a job that, as shown by the golden embroidery around the scarlet letter, suits her well. Hawthorne again shows the flaws in the Puritan ways, by the way they committed the sin of van...
