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

Hawthorne's allusion to 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 of Hester
as 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 The Scarlet Letter.  For
instance, when Hester brings Pearl in Chapter VIII to Governor Bellingham'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:

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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.