what is the significance of Hester's walk to the scaffold?what is her expectation? what is the community's expectation?

Hester is led through the crowd to the scaffold of the pillory. She ascends the stairs and stands, now fully revealed to the crowd, in her position of shame and punishment for the next few hours. Hawthorne compares her beauty and elegance while on the scaffold to an image of Madonna and Child, or Divine Maternity.

The ordeal is strenuous and difficult for Hester. She tries to make the images in front of her vanish by thinking about her past. Hester was born in England and grew up there. She later met a scholar who was slightly deformed, having a left shoulder higher than his right. Her husband, later revealed to be Roger Chillingworth, first took her to Amsterdam and then sent her to America to await his arrival.

Hester looks out over the crowd and realizes for the first time that her life condemns her to be alone. She looks at her daughter and then fingers the scarlet letter that will remain a part of her from now on. At the thought of her future, she squeezes her daughter so hard that the child cries out in pain.

This scene is the first of three scaffold scenes in the novel. In this scene Hester is forced to suffer alone, facing first her past and then her present and future. The scene at once reveals Hester's past without presenting us the details of her crime, and it ends with the revelations of the consequence of this past: "These were her realities—all else had vanished."