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 personality of the child. The child is always a reminder, and even as an infant Pearl seems to have supernatural knowledge--she reaches for Dimmesdale as he speaks while her mother is on the scaffold, and this is the one time she stops crying, as if she knows her father when she sees him.
For that matter, it is less the seduction itself than the response to it that is important in the novel. Dimmesdale suffers greatly because of this seduction, a sin he committed w...