The Role of Pearl’s Character in The Scarlet Letter

There is no doubt that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ​The Scarlet Letter ​is a novel on morals. The way society judges Hester Prynne and the actions of Arthur Dimmesdale, speaks to Hawthorne’s views of Puritanism and religion as well as the treatment of women. However, there is very little attention to the significance of Pearl, Hester’s illegitimate daughter with Dimmesdale. In many ways, Pearl is essential in understanding the link between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. In fact, not only is Pearl the visible tie that unites Hester and Arthur, her character speaks to the presentation of truth and the idea that sometimes children see the truth more clearly than adults can. Through the detailed imagery of Pearl and her sympathetic interest in her mother’s plight, Hawthorne presents Pearl as a moral compass and compassionate ideal in ​The Scarlet Letter.

Although she is a playful seven-year-old child, Pearl is precocious and intelligent, almost to the point of being too independent and wise beyond her age. Hawthorne emphasizes Pearl’s importance to the story through his consistent imagery applied to Pearl. For instance, Pearl is “endowed with natural dexterity and native grace” (Hawthorne 194). While on one occasion Pearl is a lovely flower, possessed, another instance she has a “wild-flower prettiness”. Hawthorne also likens Pearl to a bird several times in the book: “a wild tropical bird, of rich plumage” and “a floating sea-bird”. Hawthorne also endows Pearl with an otherworldly description such as an airy sprite with an “elfish intelligence” as if she were “a little elf gathering handfuls of wild flowers. Mistress Hibbins suggests that the child is of the lineage of the Prince of the Air!”. These descriptions make Pearl saint-like, beyond this temporal world that could judge her and confine her, as people did to her mother. In that sense, when Pearl demonstrates her perversity toward social and religious authority, readers share her hostile anger toward the Puritan brats and her sympathetic interest in the Scarlet Letter on Hester’s bosom.

Another important aspect of Pearl’s character is her instinct for truth and her compassionate perception of Hester’s predicament. Pearl seems to have an unconscious awareness of her blood relationship with Dimmesdale such as when she lays her cheek against Dimmesdale’s hand in the Governor’s mansion. Pearl also has the insight to see the truth of dissimulation in humans, perhaps as a result of living with her mother in the woods. Since she is surrounded by nature, she is able to preserve her innocence from society’s deleterious conventions and religious pretense. Hawthorne also connects Pearl with nature that “the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child”. He equates the this wildness “not as the wilderness of savagery but the wilderness of innocence” and that Pearl is an “infant worthy to have been brought forth in Eden”. For instance, Hawthorne describes how “a wolf in the forest, responsive to her primitive innocence, came up, and smelt of Pearl‘s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand”. Pearl, therefore, is an undeniable link between humans and nature, untarnished by society’s perverse regulations.

Hawthorne also uses Pearl’s character symbolically as a social commentary against religion and society’s arbitrary rules. In Governor Bellingham’s hall, Hawthorne depicts Pearl’s conscious kinship with nature as divine and otherworldly. When Reverend Mr. Wilson asks pearl who had made her, Pearl answers perversely “that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison door. Connecting to the opening chapter of ​The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s unnamed narrator calls the reader’s attention to “one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him”. Prison, in this scene, is “the black flower of civilized society”, the civilized human society of law and order. The wild rosebush, in contrast, is the mark of nature that is lodged on the outskirts of “the prison door”. In many ways, Hester and Pearl represent the rosebush behind the prison door. These symbols outline Hawthorne’s ideas that nature is being abandoned for the pursuit of blind religious fervour and perverse interpretation of civilization.

In ​The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne exhibits Pearl as a mirror of what he thinks of human nature and religion. Pearl, in her innocence, is portrayed as a child of nature that sees through the constraints of societal expectations. While she is often described as a wildling or a woodland sprite, Pearl speaks the truth. Through her character, readers understand what Hawthorne thinks of politics and society at the time. Thus, Pearl gives Hawthorne an outlet to be less reserved in voicing his judgment of society and moral degradation