The reader never learns when or how the crime is exposed, the event that presumably initiates Hester’s confinement in prison, because Hawthorne makes the punishment the novel’s opening scene, before the reader knows the nature of the crime. But the community inflicts a punishment even more devastating to Hester than the official sentence of humiliation and exposure: Her expulsion from human society drives Hester to lawless and nihilistic reveries, and Pearl to sociopathic defiance.

From the novel’s beginning, however, individuals in the community show the compassion that is absent from the magistrates’ sentence. While gathered to witness Hester’s exposure, five matrons, well fed on “the beef and ale of their native [England], with a moral diet not a whit more refined,” expound on the appropriate punishment for Hester. Four of the matrons agree that Hester’s official sentence is too lenient, and advocate branding her with a hot iron or death, the sentence associated with the crime of adultery in both the New England statutes of the 1640s and in the Bible. But one woman, who, like Hester, is young and has a child in her charge, imagines Hester’s humiliation and responds sympathetically, enjoining her companions to silence to protect Hester from hearing their cruel judgment.

This lone voice of sympathy, coming from a spectator who is more nearly a peer to Hester, sharing with her the circumstances of youth and motherhood, seems a fitter judge than the patriarchs who assemble to witness the execution of Hester’s punishment, and who are so removed from Hester in their age, gender, and passionless rigidity. The narrator comments on these men after John Wilson, a clergyman among them, calls to Hester to demand that she reveal Pearl’s father:

But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude (p. 55).

The narrator inserts throughout the novel observations on the natures of the characters and their actions that mix compassion and insight with an unquestioning conviction that a serious wrong has occurred. The narrator’s view of the Puritan elders is especially apt, for though the patriarchs mitigate Hester’s sentence from the one prescribed by statute, their reasons for doing so relate to her lover’s transgression and the wrong done to her husband, rather than to the circumstances of Hester’s character or actions that might place her crime in a less culpable context. The magistrates seem to judge her solely by her effect on the two men implicated in the adulterous triangle. Accordingly, they spare her from death for two reasons. Hester’s youthful beauty leads them to surmise she was “doubtless strongly tempted to her fall.” In addition, they believe Hester’s husband, the victim with whom the panel of patriarchs is most likely to empathize, is dead, and so the offense against him is perhaps less.

As time passes, the Puritan community proves more inclined to judge Hester by the sum of her actions than are its elders, who have the same prejudices as the community, only “fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning” (p. 134). The disjunction between the organic ability of the community to mediate its view of the crime through appreciation of the criminal’s subsequent acts and the greater intransigence of mostly aged, conservative, and male statesmen of the community is strangely prescient of a recent episode in American history involving President Bill Clinton and an intern. But the passage of time does not diminish, and for Dimmesdale, at least, only exacerbates, the effect in the minds of the characters most intimately affected by the crime.

Dimmesdale is the character most devastated by his role in the crime, which is, of course, that of coadulterer. Dimmesdale has sinned according to his own system of beliefs; to his credit, he does not tailor or dilute his belief system to accommodate what he has done. Dimmesdale’s religiousness is genuine, and while his English heritage and inhibited passion set him apart from the Puritan elders “amongst whom religion and law were almost identical” (p. 43), his religious faith is nonetheless uncompromising concerning the sin he has committed. Understood as a reaction to a violation of faith, rather than law or even morality, Dimmesdale’s response is, even by today’s standards, neither disproportionate nor dated. Laws supposedly reflect social mores, and they change to mirror changing opinions about the inherent wrong in certain behaviors, the threat of a particular behavior to society, and reasonable responses to behaviors deemed worthy of punishment. Religion, reason, and public mores no doubt influence one another, but in ways that are complicated and rarely direct. Whether Dimmesdale’s response to his violation of faith is reasonable is irrelevant; his anguished response is authentic and timeless.

Faith is cause enough for Dimmesdale’s torment, but other factors compound his misery. Although he flagellates himself, he cannot allow himself to borrow another means of atonement from the Catholic faith, namely, confession. When Hester meets him in the forest to divulge Chillingworth’s identity, Dimmesdale justifies his failure to confess his crime:

Of penance I have had enough! Of penitence there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat (p. 159).

Immediately, Dimmesdale contradicts himself by relating his misery to the concealment of his crime:

Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly on your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am! (p. 159).

In this scene, Dimmesdale seems to talk himself into at last confessing his crime. He does so only after delivering the most inspired sermon of his career, the Election Sermon, thus postponing his spiritual salvation so as not to interfere with the climax of his professional career. Dimmesdale’s inner torment derives in part from the knowledge that the confession necessary to purge his soul will dash his professional aspirations.

Like Dimmesdale, Chillingworth conceals his relationship to the adulterous act. Unlike Dimmesdale, who turns his anguish inward upon himself, Chillingworth focuses his misery upon an outward target. Chillingworth determines to prolong his rival Dimmesdale’s agony by ministering to his physical health while insinuating himself into the minister’s interior life, where Dimmesdale seeks to keep his secret buried.