What were Hester's three appearances on the scaffold?1 was prosecution and another was dimmesdale's death and confession. What was the third?
I remember when Pearl was seven she they went back up on the scaffold. The only reason I rememeber is that Pearl asked dimmsdale if he was going to satnd up there with her and Hester. This was before the reader knew dimmsdale was the father.
The Scarlet Letter is regularly taught at the high school level, but surely this is a mistake. The novel is difficult and challenging even for honors students. The architectured sentences, with their points and counterpoints, their parallel construction, their old school rhetorical cadences are strange and even wondrous to the modern eye. It is a good practice for the teacher and for the student to read aloud Hawthorne's prose so as to grow accustomed to his words the way one must for Shakespeare. If this is done and the edifice of Christianity and especially the fatalism of the Puritan mind brought to bear, then with leisurely pace and a steady concentration, the terrible beauty of Hawthorne's novel might be made immediate. s
I think that's where she meets Dimmesdale at night with their daughter, and they watch the comet fly over their heads. She was coming back, from doing work with her needlework (it's either the gloves or the shroud, if that helps). Dimmy sees her, they meet, and the red comet shoots by. The residents thing that it means Angel, since I think that it made an A shape in the sky.
