's flashback from atop
the scaffold is credited to her superior memory, which was, as the narrator says,
"preternaturally active." She remembers all kinds of scenes from her childhood: being
in school, playing, fighting with other children, and so forth.
Further, the
narrator says that "it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the
exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the
reality." Her mind, by way of defending and preserving itself from the terrible judgments
of the people come to gawk at her, has traveled back in time.
Soon, Hester's
memories focus on her "paternal home" back in Old England; she was evidently from a
noble family that had fallen on very hard times financially. Hester recalls looking into a
mirror and seeing her own youthful reflection, as well as the reflection of a "man well
stricken in years, a pale, think, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the
lamp-light that had served them to pore over many ponderous books." He was quite a bit
older than she, evidently a scholar who had spent his youth engaged with books.
However, in addition to illuminating his age and his deformity ("the left shoulder
a trifle higher than the right"), Hester also recalls that "those same bleared optics
had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human
soul." Thus, this man seems to have a somewhat off-putting intuitive power: he can see the
truth about people, see who and what they truly are. It is this very power that so frightens
Hester later when he promises to find her co-sinner and seek his revenge. This description
alerts us to this man's seemingly preternatural ability to see through someone's
pretenses.
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