After the scaffold scene, Hester assumes compliance with the rigid Puritan code. She looks and acts like someone trying to atone for her fault. She takes up acts of charity to the poor and patiently bears their insults. Over the years, she becomes a Sister of Mercy, giving generously of herself to the sick, the dying, the troubled.

But Hester's seeming admission of her sin, and her gestures of penitence, are if not hypocritical at least superficial. She has never "bought" society's assessment of her love as a vile crime. She has said and believed that what she did had a consecration of its own. That never-quite-suppressed belief combines with society's high-handed insults to turn Hester into a rebel.

There is an old proverb that says it is better to be hanged for stealing a sheep than a lamb. That proverb can tell us a lot about Hester. Condemned as a sinner, never permitted to atone for her sin by society, Hester becomes an outlaw in earnest.

Though she continues to sit in her cottage quietly sewing, though she walks the streets of Boston with a patient, down- cast expression on her face, Hester thinks thoughts that are like a dagger pointed at society's heart.

Hester rejects a social code, a religious creed, that permits the cruelty she has endured. She creates a whole rationale-a party platform-for what the Puritans call deadly sin. By the time she meets Dimmesdale in the forest, she is strong enough to turn common morality on its head. She nearly succeeds in convincing the minister that flight from duty, and commitment to a life-long adulterous union, are goods to be reached after and fought for.

Sin, as some critics have pointed out, turns Hester into a beautiful but terrible and polluted goddess, at least while she is young. Do age and Dimmesdale's death change her? Maybe. Maybe not.

Hester's return to Boston in later years and her resumption of the scarlet letter may be signs of her final acquiescence to society's verdict. Perhaps she is giving repentance one last try. Or perhaps she is wearing the letter in age, as she did in youth, with pride in her difference from other people. Hester's message at the end may be "I am a sinner," a statement made at last with conviction. Or it may be, what it always was, "I am passionate and free." -

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