Hawthorne Clearly, Pearl has the ability to sense the truth around her. After discovering that Dimmesdale is her father pearl questions her mother about him, asking her if hell stand alongside them in the scaffold in front of all of the townspeople.
Her purity allows her to see the truth of all that is surrounding …show more content… However, her symbol has evolved into symbolizing a gift from god and hope.
Being raised away from puritan society also drove pearl away from having religious beliefs. Moreover, Pearl symbolizes hope not only to Hester, but to herself as well. Towards the end of the novel when her father, Dimmesdale, died on the scaffold, she was no longer angry with the world. Hope arose in her and she no longer wanted to be in a battle with the world, but be a woman in it.
Get Access. Good Essays. Read More. Satisfactory Essays. Scarlet Letter, Pearl Words 2 Pages. Scarlet Letter, Pearl. The Scarlett Letter: Pearl Analysis. Better Essays. Womanhood in Thicker than Water Words 4 Pages. Womanhood in Thicker than Water. Highly intellectual he is, too, though, as the author finely discriminates, not too broadly so. As with one passion, so with another!
He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart! As Hester suffers public exposure and frank ignominy, so he is wrapped in secret torments; and either mode of punishment is shown to be powerless for good. Dimmesdale cares more for his social reputation than for anything else.
His self-respect, his peace, his love, his soul, — all may go: only let his reputation remain! And yet it is that selfsame false reputation that daily causes him the keenest anguish of all. Pearl, however, is the true creation of the book: every touch upon her portrait is a touch of genius, and her very conception is an inspiration.
Yet the average mind would have found her an encumbrance. Every pretext would have been improved to send her out of the room, as it were, and to restrict her utterances, when she must appear, to monosyllables or sentimental commonplaces.
Not only is she free from repression of this kind, but she avouches herself the most vivid and active figure in the story. Instead of keeping pathetically in the background, as a guiltless unfortunate whose life was blighted before it began, this strange little being, with laughing defiance of precedent and propriety, takes the reins in her own childish hands, and dominates every one with whom she comes in contact.
This is an idea which it was left to Hawthorne to originate: ancient nor modern fiction supplies a parallel to Pearl. Yet Pearl was, all the while, the most unrelentingly real fact of her mother's ruined life. Standing as the incarnation, instead of the victim, of a sin, Pearl affords a unique opportunity for throwing light upon the inner nature of the sin itself. In availing himself of it, Hawthorne touches ground which, perhaps, he would not have ventured on, had he not first safeguarded himself against exaggeration and impiety by making his analysis accord so to speak with the definition of a child's personality.
Pearl, as we are frequently reminded, is the scarlet letter made alive, capable of being loved, and so endowed with a manifold power of retribution for sin. Like nature and animals, she is anterior to moral law; but, unlike them, she is human, too. She exhibits an unfailing vigor and vivacity of spirits joined to a precocious and almost preternatural intelligence, especially with reference to her mother's shameful badge.
This contrast, or, perhaps it is more correct to say, mingling, of the opposite poles of being, sin and innocence, in Pearl's nature is an extraordinary achievement; enabling us, as it does, to recognize the intrinsic ugliness of sin. Pearl is like a beautiful but poisonous flower, rejoicing in its poison, and receiving it as the vital element of life. But the beauty makes the ugliness only the more impressive, because we feel it to be a magical or phantasmal beauty, enticing like the apples of Sodom, but full of bitterness within.
It is the beauty which sin wears to the eyes of the tempted, — a beauty, therefore, which has no real existence, but is attributed by the insanity of lust. Now, if Pearl were a woman, this strong external charm of hers would perplex the reader, in much the same way that the allurements of sin bewilder its votaries.
The difficulty is to distinguish between what is really and permanently good and what only appears so while the spell lasts. Pearl being a child, however, no such uncertainty can occur.
She has not, as yet, what can in strictness be termed a character; she is without experience, and therefore devoid of either good or evil principles; she possesses a nature, and nothing more. The affection which she excites, consequently, is immediately perceived to be due neither to her beauty not to her intellectual acuteness; still less to the evil effluence which exhales from these, and is characteristic of them. These things all stand on one side; and the innocent, irresponsible infant soul stands on the other.
Each defines and emphasizes the other: so that so far from one being led to confuse them, so far from being in danger of loving evil because we love Pearl, we love her just in proportion to our abhorrence of the evil which empoisons her manifestations. The same discrimination could not be so sharply made if, indeed, it could be made at all in the case of a Pearl who, under unchanged conditions, had attained maturity.
For her character would then be formed, and the evil which came to her by inheritance would so have tinged and moulded her natural traits that we should inevitably draw in the poison and the perfume at a single breath, — ascribe to evil the charm which derives from good, and pollute good with the lurid hues of evil.
The history of the race abundantly demonstrates that a chief cause of moral perversity and false principle has been our assumption of absolute proprietorship in either the good or the evil of our actions.
Pearl, still in the instinctive stage of development, shows us the way out of this labyrinth. As the pure sunlight vivifies noxious as well as beneficent forms of existence, so the evil proclivities of the child's nature are energized, though not constituted, by the divine source of her being.
It would be interesting parenthetically to draw a parallel between Pearl and Beatrice, in Rappaccini's Daughter. Both are studies in the same direction, though from different standpoints. Beatrice is nourished upon poisonous plants, until she becomes herself poisonous. Pearl, in the mysterious prenatal world, imbibes the poison of her parents' guilt. But, in either instance, behind this imported evil stands the personal soul: and the question is, Shall the soul become the victim of its involuntary circumstances?
Hawthorne, in both cases, inclines to the brighter alternative. But the problem of Beatrice is more complicated than that of Pearl. She was not born in guilt; but she was brought up to translate the symbolism amidst guilty associations, so that they had come to be the very breath of her life.
But, in truth, Pearl's demon was summoned into existence, not by her own acts, but by the act of others; and, unless with her own conscious consent, it cannot pollute her. Meanwhile, with that profound instinct of self-justification which antedates both reason and conscience in the human soul, the child is impelled on all occasions to assert and vindicate her cause, — the cause of the scarlet letter.
She will not consent to have it hidden or disavowed. She mocks and persecutes her mother, so long as the latter would disguise from her the true significance of the badge. When Hester casts it away, she stamps and cries with passion and will not be pacified till it is replaced. She distrusts the minister, save when, as in his plea for Hester in the governor's hall and his midnight vigil on the scaffold, he approaches an acknowledgment of his true position.
In a word, she will have truth in all things: without truth nothing is good; nor, with truth, can anything be evil. In the deepest sense, this is not only true, but it is the truth of the book. The perfectibility of man being infinite, the best man and the worst man alike must fall infinitely short of perfection: but every one can account honestly for such talents as he has; and it is always the motive, never the achievement, the sincerity, not the sound, that Divine Justice regards.
A Thug, who should devoutly believe in the holiness of his mission, would fare better than an evangelist, who should lead a thousand souls to salvation, not for God's glory, but for his own. So when little Pearl would frankly unfold the banner of the scarlet letter, and openly fight beneath it, we feel that God will give her victory, not over her apparent enemies, but over herself. She is so much alive as to live independently of her actual appearances in the story.
The imagination which there bodies her forth has done its work so well as to have imparted somewhat of its own power to the reader; and we can picture Pearl in other scenes and at other epochs in her career, and can even argue of her fate, had the conditions been different for her.
Suppose, for example, that Hester and the minister had made good their escape from Boston, or that the latter's confession had been delayed until Pearl had passed the age of puberty. In either of these or a dozen other possible alternatives, the progress of her growth would have had a new and important interest, conducting to fresh regions of speculation. But Hawthorne never allows the claims of a part to override the whole; the artist in him would permit nothing out of its due proportion; and Pearl, for all her untamable vitality, is kept strictly to her place and function in the story.
Where she speaks one word for her personal, she speaks two for her representative, character. There seems to be no partiality on the author's part; nor, on the other hand, is there any indifference.
The same quiet light of charity irradiates each figure in the tale; and he neither makes a pet of Pearl, nor a scapegoat of Roger Chillingworth. Dramatically, the last-named personage plays perhaps the most important part of the four; he communicates to the plot whatever movement it exhibits.
But what renders him chiefly remarkable is the fact that, although he stands as the injured husband, and therefore with the first claim to our sympathy and kindness, he in reality obtains neither, but appears more devoid of attraction than any other character in the tale. This would seem an unconventional and rather venturesome proceeding; for the average mind, in modern English fiction, finds itself under moral obligations to use every precaution, lest the reader fall into some mistake as to the legitimate objects of favor and of reprobation.
Continental novelists, to be sure, have a sort of perverse pleasure in defying Anglo-Saxon taste in this particular, and do not shrink from making the lawful partner of the erring wife either odious or ridiculous.
But it will be profitable to inquire in what respect the American romancer follows or diverges from these two methods of treatment. It is evident, of course, that the fact that a man has suffered injury has nothing to say, one way or the other, as to his personal character; and the only reason why a novelist should represent him as amiable rather than the reverse is in an instance like the present that the reader might otherwise, in disliking him, be led to regard too leniently the crime of which he is the victim.
Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale, however, are not so presented as to invite such misplaced tenderness on the reader's part; while Chillingworth, on the other hand, though certainly not a lovable, is very far from being an absurd or contemptible, figure.
The force, reserve, and dignity of his demeanor win our respect at the outset, and the touches of quiet pathos in his first interview with Hester prepare us to feel a more cordial sentiment.
But the purpose of the author is more profound and radical than could be fulfilled by this obvious and superficial way of dealing with the situation. His attitude is not that of a sentimental advocate, but of an impartial investigator; he is studying the nature and effect of sinful passions, and is only incidentally concerned with the particular persons who are the exponents thereof. He therefore declines, as we are not long in finding out, to allow the course of events to be influenced by the supposed moral rights or wrongs of either party.
He simply penetrates to the heart of each, and discloses the secrets hidden there, — secrets whose general and permanent vastly outweighs their personal and particular significance. The relation of Chillingworth to the lovers has been pronounced, by an able critic, the most original feature of the book.
But it did not so appear to the author's mind. It was a necessary outcome of his plan, and seems more original than the rest only because the pervading originality of the whole happens to be more strikingly visible in Chillingworth than elsewhere.
But given Hester and the minister, and the punishment inflicted upon the former, and Chillingworth becomes inevitable. For the controlling purpose of the story, underlying all other purposes, is to exhibit the various ways in which guilt is punished in this world, — whether by society, by the guilty persons themselves, or by interested individuals who take the law into their own hands.
The method of society has been exemplified by the affixing of the scarlet letter on Hester's bosom. This is her punishment, the heaviest that man can afflict upon her. But, like all legal punishment, it aims much more at the protection of society than at the reformation of the culprit. Hester is to stand as a warning to others tempted as she was: if she recovers her own salvation in the process, so much the better for her; but, for better or worse, society has ceased to have any concern with her.
In a word, society, as at present administered, presents the unhandsome spectacle of a majority of successful hypocrites, on one side, contending against a minority of discovered criminals, on the other; and we are reduced to this paradox, — that the salvation of humanity depends primarily on the victory of the criminals over the hypocrites.
Of course, this is only another way of saying that hypocrisy is the most destructive to the soul of all sins; and meanwhile we may comfort ourselves with the old proverb that hypocrisy itself is the homage which vice pays to virtue, or, if the inward being of society were in harmony with its outward seeming, heaven would appear on earth.
Hester, then, the social outcast, finds no invitation to repentance in the law that crushes her. The only alternative it offers her is abject self-extinction, or defiance. She chooses the latter: but at this point her course is swayed by a providential circumstance with which society had nothing to do. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man had thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent forever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven.
Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!
Standing, as she did, alone with Pearl amidst a hostile world, her life turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling to thought. As a symbol, Pearl always keeps Hester aware of her sin.
Just as Dimmesdale cannot escape to Europe because Chillingworth has cut off his exit, Pearl always keeps Hester aware that there is no escape from her passionate nature. The Puritans would call that nature "sinful.
Hawthorne's handling of mirror images has both the goal of representing the passionate, artistic side of man and also the idea that life's truths can be pictured in mirror images. Hester looks into "the black mirror of Pearl's eye" and she sees "a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them.
If so, Pearl is the embodiment of that passion. The poetic, intuitive, outlawed nature of the artist is an object of evil to the Puritans. As a symbol, Pearl represents that nature. As she looks in the brook in Chapter 19, she sees "another child, — another and the same, with likewise its ray of golden light.
Filled with the glory of sunshine, sympathetic, but only "somewhat of its [Pearl's] own shadowy and intangible quality," it is the passion of the artist, the outlaw. This is a passion that does not know the bounds of the Puritan village. In the forest, this passion can come alive and does again when Hester takes off her cap and lets down her hair. Pearl is the living embodiment of this viewpoint, and the mirror image makes that symbol come to life.
Hester herself tries to account for the nature of her child and gets no farther than the symbolic unity of Pearl and her own passion. A close examination of Chapter 6, "Pearl," shows the unification of the child with the idea of sin.
Hester is recalling the moment when she had given herself to Dimmesdale in love. The only way she can account for Pearl's nature is in seeing how the child is the symbol of that moment.
She recalls ". The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance. Even Pearl's clothes contribute to her symbolic purpose in the novel by making an association between her, the scarlet letter, and Hester's passion.
Much to the consternation of her Puritan society, Hester dresses Pearl in outfits of gold or red or both. Even when she goes to Governor Bellingham's to plead for her daughter's custody, Hester dresses Pearl in a crimson velvet tunic.
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