While the community calls for Hester’s blood, those who are equally sinful remain silent. The irony of public appearance and private knowledge are themes throughout this story. The only escape from public scrutiny is the forest. The lovers are caught up in a web of lies and deception. They can safely meet and discuss Chillingworth’s identity and their plan of escape in the forest, haunt of the Black Man. Here Hester and Dimmesdale plan their escape to Europe where they can follow their hearts and forget the rigid rules of their Puritan society. But the Puritan conscience is too deeply ingrained in Dimmesdale, and though he dabbles in sin on his way back to the Puritan stronghold, he is still a Calvinist at heart. If he is to remain true to himself and honest, as Hester says he must for his conscience’s sake, then he must go back to the world in which he is comfortable, even if it eventually means his public humiliation and death. He would not feel at home in the forest where the laws of nature surpass the bars that imprison individuals in Boston.
In the end Hester escapes the iron rules of Massachusetts Bay Colony, later to return of her own volition. She assures other sinners that “at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” This is Hawthorne’s way of saying that this stern and joyless society will eventually move more toward the laws of nature as a basis for public and private behavior. By the end of the novel, his sympathies lie with Hester as a prophetess of a better time and place where personal relationships can be based on more compassionate beliefs.
In choosing Puritan New England as his backdrop, Hawthorne has provided a rich texture for his drama of human suffering. His ending, written in the nineteenth century, seems a hopeful sign that future generations will move toward a less gloomy, less repressive society where human compassion and tolerance will balance the community laws.
