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“This scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine . . . . The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron” (Hawthorne 62-63). A scaffold's effect on the novel can be seen through an examinat ....

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... to die” (Hawthorne 59). The scaffold allows Hester Prynne's sin to be publicized and marveled at by the New Englanders. It is here that the reader becomes aware of Hester being shunned as an outsider, when she is placed on the scaffold: “Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a mans shoulders above the street . . . . The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes” (63-64). At the same time, the first scaffold scene is the setting for the introduction of Roger Chillingworth, ...