Pearl as a symbol in Scarlet Letter
Pearl as a symbol in Scarlet LetterThere is quite a lot of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter and Pearl, Hester Prynne’s daughter, is one of the most important symbols. She is an ambiguous character and she is presented as several symbols. I tried to figure out how she was a gift from God to Hester, but the society thinks she is devil’s child because she is a product of sin and how she is a symbol of the scarlet letter.
Pearl is described as extremely beautiful, but lacking certain Christian qualities. “The child had a native grace which does not invariably coexist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became it best,”(p.76) Hawthorne describes Hesters qualities. Whenever Pearl is mentioned in the novel she always seems be surrounded by nature and animals.
To Hester Pearl is at the same time a blessing and a constant physical and mental reminder of the sin that she committed. And she could not escape it. As if the scarlet letter A did not remind her enough of her sin. That way Pearl was God’s way of punishing Hester. Although Hester had so much trouble with Pearl, she still felt that Pearl was her treasure. Pearl responds to this harshness of the society by defending her mother, sticking up for Hester against the Puritan children when they start to hurl mud at her. That shows the love that Pearl feels toward her mother (p.86).
Hester is constantly questioning Pearl’s existence and purpose by: asking God, “what is this being which I have brought into the world!” (p.81) or inquiring to Pearl, “Child, what art thou?” (p.82) At times Hester is, “feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain”(p.82). Hester even tries to deny that Pearl is her child, “Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!”(p.82) She was a kind of burden, yet love for Hester. Pearl was more then her mother’s only treasure.
God’s punishment for her sin was quite unique. He gave her a beautiful child, which she named Pearl. The name reflects that Hester had to pay a heavy price for her (p.75) and that she has a great value. Pearl is a symbol of innocence and the treasure of youth. She was brought into the world at the expense of her mother’s public life. Pearl is different from ordinary Puritan children so she is like a shining pearl in a sea.
Pearl is especially difficult to raise because she is anything but normal. Hawthorne gives a description of Pearl when he writes: “The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.” (p.76)
Pearl is introduced for the first time to the discerning, pitiless domain of the Puritan religion from inside a jail, a place where no light can touch the depths of her mother’s sin: “She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from too vivid light of day: because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison. (p.45)”
At the beginning of the story Pearl is seen as a symbol for example one passage says “In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around her at her townspeople and neighbors.” (p.45)
Everything about Pearl, for example her name and her spirit, makes the Puritan society to think that she is a sinful symbol because she was born as a result of lustful sin. The people of the society constantly describe Pearl as an “elf-child” (p.83) and “witch-baby” (p. 209) and believe she is possessed because of her capricious nature.
Pearl suffers from sin that is not her own, but her mother’s. The severe Puritan ways punish Hester at the same time punishing Pearl. Pearl is conceived through sin and she suffers when her mother and the community acts the same way towards her like towards the scarlet letter.
She is clearly upset about her isolation and hates the people in the town, whom she views as enemies. “The pine trees needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest of weeds were their children” (p.80).
The townsfolk are always dressed in drab grays and black but Pearl is decked out in the colors of the rainbow in very lavish dresses. These clothes are made by Hester because she feels the need to make up for the isolation that she has put Pearl in.
Hester’s own sin leads her to believe that Pearl is an instrument of the devil, when in reality she is just a curious child who cherishes her free nature and wants to be loved by her mother. Even Hester was afraid that Pearl was Devil’s child. Hester always looked into Pearl’s eyes to try to discover some evil inside her daughter. “Day after day, she looked fearfully into the child’s ever expanding nature; ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being” (p.75).
Pearl has often been compared to a living version of the scarlet letter. Pearl really was the scarlet letter, because if Pearl had never been born, Hester would have never been found guilty of adultery, and thus never would have had to wear that burden upon her chest. Her role as a symbol continues on through the story as Pearl is always seen as a symbol and an indication of Hester’s adultery and eventually as the story goes on, Hester’s ability. In the same way at first people thought that Pearl was an elf-child but in the end they started to think that she is really normal. She even made herself her own “A”(p.151). Pearl is described as “the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life!”(p.85).
In one passage Pearl refuses to cross the stream until her mother comes over and picks up the scarlet letter she had thrown away. Since Pearl is a living version of the scarlet letter, she throws away Pearl by tossing her scarlet letter away. Even though Hester and Dimmesdale think they can just run away, Pearl is standing on the other side refusing to come with them (p.178-181).
Pearl is perhaps the moral of the story. The moral she is meant to teach is that Hester and Dimmesdale cannot let their passions invade them without thinking of the consequences. Pearl herself is a consequence of their previous passion, and so she refuses to cross the stream until her mother takes the letter is her way of demanding that they should take responsibility for what they have done.
When still a little baby, Pearl reached up and grasped the letter “did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token instinctively endeavouring to tear it away; so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s baby hand” (p.81). That passage describes how Pearl was interested in the scarlet letter already from the beginning.
While people used to saw her as elfish, she now shows the first signs of normal human emotion because of the burden lifted from her soul. After Dimmesdale confesses his sin, she kisses his lips. “The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore apart, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it” (p.218).
By kissing Dimmesdale, as the passage above says, “a spell was broken”. The time had come for that struggle and her role as a “messenger of anguish” to end, at least for Pearl and Dimmesdale. After the sin was publicly revealed she was liberated by the truth and Pearl’s role as the living scarlet letter was finally over, and the moral which she was meant to teach had been learned by Dimmesdale and Hester, who finally took responsibility for their sin. Pearl was no longer a creation of a secret passion but the daughter of a minister and a young woman.
In conclusion Hawthorne infers that Pearl is rich, happily married and living overseas in Europe. So finally she might have got the life she deserved. So after truths are told everything turned better for her. It was the lies that made her so devilish but after the revelations she becomes something beautiful and even a legend.