Conversely, Roger Chillingworth stands anonymous in the crowd which has turned out to watch Hester’s public shame on this day. Arthur is, at this stage, sitting in company of the would-be judges and dignitaries of this Puritan settlement.
At this juncture, Arthur Dimmesdale sits in the balcony of a structure overlooking the town-square, in which the pillory is situated. Thus, the first pillory scene occurs in the first two chapters of the book when the entire Puritan settlement of Boston has turned out in broad daylight to witness Hester Prynne’s punishment as a result of her moral as well as legal lapse. Artistically (that is, in terms of the general symmetry of the narrative of the book) and dramatically, these three scenes are at the very core of Hawthorne’s imagination in the book.
While there are many artistic features of this book which could stand up to the closest critical scrutiny, the above question necessitates a consideration of only one of them-namely, the placing and significance of the three pillory scenes in The Scarlet Letter‘. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is artistically one of the tightest books of fiction ever written (with the concomitant virtues and limitations of such a definition). Three Pillory Scenes in the Scarlet Letter
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