Ironically, Hester Prynne, who is on the Puritan scaffold because she has committed the sin of adultery, is compared to the Virgin Mary and Child of the Papists (Catholics).
Of course, another, more subtle irony is that were Mary actually standing on the scaffold, the Puritans would probably scorn her as well, since the Anglican Church, like the Catholic Church, reveres Mary as the mother of Christ. On the other hand, the Puritans sought to reform the Anglican Church by removing all traces of Catholicism from it. They certainly did not recognize Mary as holy or venerable as does the Anglican Church and sought to remove her from any type of veneration.
In this second chapter of The Scarlet Letter, as well as in the first, Hawthorne depicts the Puritans as stringent, "grimly rigid," and interested in "whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue." The sinner, Hester Prynne, who apparently resembles a saintly figure as she stands on the ignominious scaffold, seems unjustly humiliated, especially with the ironic comparison.
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