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Letter scaffold1/1/2024 They're heading back from Governor Winthrop's house, where she's measured his body so she can make his burial robe. Dimmesdale imagines what would happen if he were still there in the morning, and he's apparently tickled by imagining his community discovering that their beloved minister is a huge sinner because he busts out laughing.He doesn't notice Dimmesdale lurking up on the platform, and Dimmesdale doesn't speak.He's coming from the deathbed of Governor Winthrop, looking all holy and saint-like with the glow of the lamp like a halo surrounding him.Dimmesdale calms down enough to notice that his friend and fellow clergyman Reverend Mr.Mistress Hibbins (the witch-lady from chapter 8) hears him, but the narrator tells us that she probably thinks that it's just her friendly neighborhood witches making a ruckus.He gives a little shriek, trying to rouse people to come shame him, but the only people who stir are Governor Bellingham and his sister.(Maybe next time try going during the day, dude.). He stands there just waiting for someone to throw rotten fruit, but no one shows up.Dimmesdale goes to the scaffold where Hester Prynne had lived through her public ordeal.We may speculate on how a Hester Prynne would have been treated under the conventions of Colonial justice in the 1640s, but her punishment in Hawthorne’s novel follows very closely, if not exactly, the law passed in 1694. Furthermore, persons convicted of incest, after the requisite shaming and whipping, had to wear the letter I on their clothing forever. In 1695, a similar punishment was prescribed for those convicted of cohabiting with someone to whom they were not legally married. The 1694 act reads: “f any man be found in bed with another man’s wife, the man and woman so offending, being therof convicted, shall be severely whipt, not exceeding thirty stripes… And if any man shall commit adultery, the man and woman that shall be convicted … shall be set upon the gallows by the space of an hour, with a rope about their neck, and the other end cast over the gallows, and in the way from thence to the common gaol shall be severely whipt, not exceeding forty stripes each also every person and persons so offending shall forever after wear a capital A of two inches long and proportional bigness, cut out in cloth of a contrary colour to their cloaths, and sewed upon their upper garments, on the outside of their arm, or on their back, in open view…” (If they didn’t wear the capital A, they would be publicly whipped, not exceeding 15 stripes.) The earliest reference we have found is in a law passed in 1694 in The Charters and General Laws of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (Published by order of the General Court, Boston, 1814), pages 277-278. We can’t say for sure how they punished people for “adultery” as early as 1642. Hester Prynne had been married, but her long-lost husband was thought to have been lost at sea, and she never exposed the identity of the man involved in her affair, nor whether or not he was married. She also had to stand on the scaffold for three hours as a form of public humiliation. The novel was set in 17th century Boston, Massachusetts, specifically the years 1642 to 1649.
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