TSL end

"While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her forever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the market-place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!" (221).

This shows a good margin of difference between the two. Hester, as this sentence says, is just a girl in the market place. Dimmesdale, it says, is the saintly minister. One is loved by the village and the other is just a member of it. It also seems as if it shows Hester's guilt, and leaves out Dimmesdale's. She is lost in this cycle, while Dimmesdale stands on a pulpit every Sunday without speaking frankly of his sin. This sentence is just reminding us of how life is for the two of them, and how their punishments- Hester's A and Dimmesdale's silece- affect them.

"But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed,- of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it,- resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale" (234).

This was a little sad. They never explain Pearl's character as a grown woman. I feel sad also that Hester would have left her behind. It's also strange that she would come back once she was free of her sin. Why did she feel the need to live out the rest of her life in shame? It is not as if the people of the town still care that she had sinned. It was years ago that this happened, and by now, everyone had quite forgotten and stopped caring. She came back for no real reason other than to satisfy her own guilt. She feels she is doing what is right, although it is not. There is no penitence to be found there any more for that sin.