The first scaffold scene opens Hawthorne's novel. Hester Prynne, a married woman whose aged husband has been gone for two years, stands on the scaffold (a raised platform) in front of her community and confesses to adultery. She has had a child with a lover whose name she will not reveal. This clandestine lover is Arthur Dimmesdale, her minister. For her sin and secrecy, she is branded with the scarlet letter of the novel's title. During this scene, her husband, Roger Chillingsworth, returns to town and demands to know who has slept with his wife.
Arthur Dimmesdale, tormented by guilt, decides to take a noble but futile stand. In the second scaffold scene, he stands on the town scaffold under cover of darkness and calls Hester, as well as her daughter Pearl, to his side. The only person watching is Roger Chillingsworth, who now has all the proof he needs of Dimmesdale's illicit parentage. He plots against Dimmesdale, not out of any real love for Hester but out of a desire to see his twisted honor avenged.
At the end of the novel, Arthur Dimmesdale decides to do the right thing. During the third scaffold scene, he confesses to the assembled townsfolk that he is Pearl's father. He then exposes the scarlet "A" seared into his own chest, and dies with Pearl and Hester by his side. Pearl forgives him with a kiss as he is dying. His truthfulness allows him a symbolic escape from the Devil, represented by Roger Chillingsworth, into the saving grace of God.
The primary character evolution in these three scaffold scenes is that of Arthur Dimmesdale. In the first scene, he is a meek witness to his lover's humiliation, afraid to implicate himself in her public crime. In the second scene, he takes the moral action he wishes he had pursued in the first scene, but it has no effect because it happens at night, when Dimmesdale believes himself to be alone. In the final scene, he summons the courage to identify Hester as his lover, and Pearl as his daughter, in front of the community.