b) Accordingly, there is an insistence on the gaze of the audience: references to “eyes”, “looked”, “seemed”, “appeared”, “to perceive”. Hawthorne thus insists upon the voyeurism of the community and on the public nature of this ritualised humiliation. Moreover, Hester is described as “fully revealed” before the judging eyes of the community, much as nudity is used as a metaphor for being before God at the Last Judgement.
c) Moreover, the reader is clearly made to share the crowd’s voyeuristic point of view. Just like the audience, the reader waits in the crowd, hearing what the townspeople are saying, before witnessing the emergence of Hester. The description of the beadle and Hester appearing also insists on this: they are seen “emerging into the sunshine” and are described in the order in which they appear. The interior of the prison, by contrast, is undescribed. Just as Hester appears before the crowd for the first time, so too she appears before the reader for the first time, and Hawthorne uses this entrance to make important points about her and the Puritan society.
II ~ Opposing symbols
a) Hawthorne’s technique of symbolic portraits is clearly used and expounded here. He uses two characters to represent two different, opposed, worlds. The beadle, we are told, “prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law”, while of Hester we read: “Her attire… seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood”. So the physical appearances of both are explicitly stated as representing the characters themselves, while the beadle also stands in for his society more generally.
b) These two portraits are clearly contrasting. Everything about the beadle is dark: he is a “black shadow” and “grim and grisly” (note the unpleasant alliteration), while he carries a sword and staff: symbols of a religious authority that is violently imposed. Interestingly, Hester is said to “repel” him – the two symbolic characters are perfect opposites.
c) Hester is indeed unlike the beadle: where he is associated with shadow and dark, she is associated with light, notably through the use of “halo”, but also when her hair is described as “[throwing] off the sunshine with a gleam”, which repeats the word “sunshine” from earlier in the passage to insist on the contrast with the beadle. Moreover, she is beautiful and elegant. As such, Hester is quite different from what the townspeople expected, and Hawthorne’s portrait of her is a thoroughly subversive one that plays on Puritan expectations.
III ~ A subversive portrait of Hester
a) Having insisted on the scene being viewed through the eyes of the Puritans, Hawthorne can more fully subvert their expectations. We see that they expected her to be “dimmed and obscured” by her sin. As such then, associating her with light is part of the subversion of their expectations. Moreover, she is presented as “ladylike” and two references are made to her “dignity”; once again a clear inversion of the idea of a lowly sinner within an upstanding, principled society.
b) These inversions are clearly in play in the description of the scarlet letter too. Whilst it is supposed to be a “token” of her sin, and indeed much like her it stands for “fertility”, its description is also positive, concentrating on its beauty and attractiveness. Hester has succeeding in turning her shame into something positive. In the same way, the scarlet letter succeeds in “taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself”, yet only insofar as it seems to raise her above the rest of humanity.
c) Indeed this religious aspect might allow us to consider one final way in which Hawthorne paints a subversive portrait. His description of Hester insists on her “luxuriance” and dark rich colours in clear contrast to the Puritans. The idea that Hester belongs to a world of more excess is present in the religious depictions: her portrait as a saint (“halo”) or the Virgin with the infant in her arms (consider Hugues Merle), as well as the used of “transfigured” which recalls the transfiguration of Christ all point to Catholic iconography which was explicitly outlawed in Puritan New England. Consider also that the first letter of manuscripts were often in red, and that a “red letter day” is a term to mean a feast day in the Catholic Church, from the practice of marking them in red on ecclesiastical calendars. Hawthorne’s depiction of Hester thus seems to point to the richness of pre-Puritan religion, and thus seems to protest against the excessive austerity of the Puritans.