In chapter 2, what is accomplished by Hawthorne's allusion to the Madonna and child? The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne'sto
the Madonna and child is
particularly interesting in the first chapter since it was against the
Church
of England, a church which broke from the Roman Catholic Church but yet maintained
its
same liturgy, that the Anabaptists of England broke.  In their attempt to
purify religion
from corruption, the Anabaptists eliminated a hierarchy of
clergymen and stripped the churches
of statues, stained glass windows,
crucifixes, and anything that they felt was superfluous or
distracting to
true worship.

But, in so doing, the austerity of the
Puritans
stripped people of their aesthetic and passionate needs; in so
doing, they corrupted what is
natural to humanity. With the image ofas mother
and child in a religious beauty in his first
chapter entitled "The Prison
Door," Hawthorne points to the loss of such a stringent
religion--one that
would deny true humanity and its beauty--and to the negative severity of a

creed that denies the basic needs of people. 

There are other such
portrayals
of the defeating severity of Puritanism in . 
For instance, when Hester
bringsin Chapter VIII to 's mansion for
questioning, he and the Reverend Wilson remark that
Pearl reminds them of the
children at holiday time in the court of James I.  And, in Chapter
XXI,
Hawthorne as narrator recalls what the Puritans have lost:

The persons now in the market-place of Boston had
not been born to an inheritance of
Puritanic gloom....Had they followed their
hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have
illustrated all events
of public importance by bonfires, banquets, apgeantries and processions. 
Nor
would it ahve been impracticable...to combine mirthful recreation with solemnity....The
dim
reflection of a remembered splendor....

In Chapter I,
Hester on the scaffold with her scarlet A, standing in
her beauty with her precious child, is
"a dim reflection of a remembered
splendor" a beauty of life that has been denied to
the Puritans.  Hester is
not so much in contrast to the sinless Mary as the
"bitter-tempered" and
envious grey-clad women believe.