In this chapter, Hawthorne interrupts the plot to comment on the state of politicians in his time. He describes the early politicians of the colony as lacking mental brilliance but full of “ponderous sobriety.” They had great fortitude and inner strength, and, in an emergency, they made wise decisions and stood up to any attack on the colony. Hawthorne even feels they would have peers in the Old World who would see in them the same authority as English statesmen. The people revere them in the Puritan colony, but by Hawthorne’s time, that esteem had diminished. He writes that the people of the 1600s had a “quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force, in the selection and estimate of public men.”
After this pleasant sojourn into seventeenth century politics, Hawthorne turns the focus on Hester. When Hawthorne describes Hester’s reaction to Dimmesdale’s remoteness, he virtually eliminates the possibility that they have a future together. In her mind, Hester compares Dimmesdale as he appears at the celebration (“He seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach”) with how he was just three days earlier in the forest (“how deeply had they known each other then!”). She begins to think she must have dreamed that meeting in the forest because now Dimmesdale seems wholly unsympathetic and removed to his Puritan world. While she can still feel his emotions, she also can hardly forgive him for withdrawing from her and their plans to share their lives.
