Pearl in Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter

The character of Pearl in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter is to serve as an embodiment of conscience and innocence at the same time. She is the conscience of Dimmesdale as she stands as a living accusation of his sin and of his failure to stand beside Hester and confess. She is also the symbol of her mother's essential goodness. There is a duality to Pearl's nature, and she is portrayed as both an angelic presence and a darker vision of guilt. In combining these two elements in a small chid, Hawthorne points up the hypocrisy of the community and the destructive consequences of its unforgiving nature.

The Scarlet Letter is probably his best-known work and is a novel about the consequences in Puritan society of a seduction. The seduction has taken place perhaps a year before the opening of the novel, but the fact of the seduction is incontrovertible because of the baby Hester Prynne has borne. This fact is Pearl, and her existence is thus a statement of what has occurred, a reminder of the community response, and a challenge to the community which holds that nothing good comes from an act of moral failure. The child's mother is the only person being punished for this sin, though this is a sin that could not have been committed alone. Hester will not reveal the name of her partner in sin, and she bears her public burdens with stoicism and courage. Her sin is a sin of passion, but this passion is never evoked directly in the novel except in the personali

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zed as she makes fun of the letter by creating one of her own, showing no reverence for the meaning of the letter. In a sense, her attitude foreshadows the change in the meaning of the letter that will come to her mother much later, after Dimmesdale's death. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth comment on Pearl's nature as they watch her dancing among the gravestones, and she throws a burr at them and comments to her mother about the "old Black Man" who has got hold of the minister. Pearl sees through the facade to the true nature of people and has no fear of saying so. Dimmesdale acts as a hypocrite, a man of God who serves as the spiritual counselor for the community but who cannot admit his own guilt as he would have others do in is church. He carries his secret inside until it manifests itself in the scarlet letter on his chest--a letter that may not be visible as he believes, but since he believes it the image has the same power in his mind. The sign of his hypocrisy is the way he holds his hand over his chest, as Pearl comments to her mother in the woods. Pearl herself is another symbol of the hypocrisy of Dimmesdale and is described as a tormenting spirit, though she torments with her laughter and her joy. Laughter and joy

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