Julia Boudreaux
Ms. McLane-Higginson
Composition and literature 121-015
19-Apr-09
Pearl, a revolution against Puritans
Little is said directly in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter about Pearl’s significance. Pearl is the human reflection of the scarlet letter on Hester’s chest. Also she represents the joy that Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale should have felt as they started their relationship, which presented them with a child. Hawthorne created Pearl to demonstrate how the Puritan ways where wrong. Pearl refuses to be confined into the Puritan way of life and thought.
Early on in the book it is noted that if anybody other than a Puritan had been at the prison release of Hester Prynne they would have seen:
in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity’ which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of the sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world, (42 Hawthorne).
However, “[m]any critics who focus their analysis on Pearl define her as the sin-child, the unholy result of Hester Prynne's and Arthur Dimmesdale's fall from grace,”(Cindy Lou Daniels 221). What the Puritans saw was a woman that deserved to be burned at the stake. Not only was Hester evil, her child, Pearl, was viewed as demon spawn.
The Scarlet Letter gives one the feeling that Pearl is not even a real person. “[S]he becomes nothing more than the scarlet letter personified,” (Cindy Lou Daniels 222). Hawthorne himself even writes it so that Hester views the child and the letter as interchangeable: “She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her fingers, to assure herself that the infant [Pearl] and the shame were real,” (44).
Pearl refuses early on in The Scarlet Letter to comply with the guilt that is supposed to be felt by her and her mother Hester. As Hester is being yelled at and pleaded at, to tell the name of the father of the child, Pearl screams as loud as she can “[t]he infant during latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailing and screams; she strove to hush it, mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathize with its trouble,” (Hawthorne 50). The fact that Hester feels for her child shows that she knows what she did is not a mortal sin, it was biology and lust. The character Pearl is displayed as someone who cannot be bent in to compliance by the Puritans: “Pearl, on the other hand, is left unmarked by the patriarchy, for the Puritan community assumes Hester will carry on its traditions. Hester, though, cannot bring herself to quell her daughter's wild spirit, despite the restrictions placed upon her both emotionally and physically,” (Cindy Lou Daniels 223).
Pearl was created to display the problems between human life and religion. According to Puritan views, Pearl should not be happy since she is born out of sin. This notion does not seem to bother Pearl, when one considers, that Hester never finds any darkness in Pearl’s soul: “[d]ay after day she looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature; ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity’ that would correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being,” (Hawthorne 61). The Puritans believe that Pearl should not have a happy individual self worth, however, Pearl’s sense of moral, right, and wrong is more of a philosophical nature than a religious nature according to Richard Hull:
law-breaking (i.e., the Puritan view) and the Enlightenment philosophy which emphasizes autonomy and values an order peculiar to an individual. In Pearl, the notion that individuality is disorder is already giving way to the Enlightenment view, that individuality gives access to the highest truth. (149).
Hawthorne, In his book The Scarlet Letter uses Pearl to mock the Puritan way of belief and life at least when it comes to adultery: “[t]hough much is said about sin, little of this discourse is directly presented, and what Hawthorne does give us bears little resemblance to Puritan theology,” (Nina Baym 210). The religious belief is displayed wrong which could mean that Hawthorne basically thought of it as pointless and easy to misunderstand. Nina Baym writes it best when she discusses the idea of heaven and sin: “[o]n the one hand, there is no vivid sense of Hell, and on the other, there is a doctrine which appears to suggest that man is bound to heaven unless and until he commits a sinful act,” (Nina Baym 210). The way Hawthorne presents this idea in The Scarlet Letter shows the either he or Hester misunderstood the Puritan ways: “[s]he knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith therefore, that its results would be good,” (61). Hester is condemning Pearl as evil even though nothing in her Puritan religion says that she has to. The reason it is say Hester’s Puritan way is because Hawthorne created his own type of Puritan believe system:
Hawthorne’s Puritan community considers its own laws the ultimate moral framework of the universe to the point where such laws define, rather than reflect or contain, morality as well as good and evil. This community invokes God to sanction its own social system and to enforce the general will on individual members of the group. In sum, The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne has created an authoritarian state, (Nina Baym 213-14).
Pearl is a child based off of Hawthorn’s own children which would explain why Pearl is portrayed the way she is. Hester is a self portrait of Hawthorne. Mark M. Hennelly, Jr said the following: “but such parental pride turns to self-pity as Hawthorne chronicles his own limitations: ‘For my part, I felt very inactive with this lazy benumbing cold, which hangs on longer than usual,’” (532). This can be seen as a portrait of Hester: “[h]er mother with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be produces, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore, before the public eye,” (Hawthorne 62). Hawthorne like Hester was quite a gloomy person, while their children were their pride and joy in life.
Hester did everything in her power to make her child a beautiful, bright child, which Hawthorne shows when he wrote: “So magnificent was the small figure, when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was absolute circle of radiance around her on the darksome cottage floor,” (Hawthorne 62). This, in a sense, is defying what the child was supposed to stand for. Pearl is supposed to be the human version of her mother’s sin. However, the way that Pearl acts and is dressed is showing that Hester is not sorry, nor ashamed of her actions. Hester lets her rebellion against the religious dictatorship show through her child. Which is what Hawthorne‘s plan was all along. He raised his own children with a happy and proper sense of the world, “‘I venture to assert that there can be no physical health without play; and there can be no efficient and satisfactory work without play; that there can be no sound and wholesome thought without play,’” (Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. 533).
Another instance where one can see that the characters of Pearl and Hester are derived from Hawthorne and his children is when Hester and Pearl are in the town:
Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones and fling at them, with shrill incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a which’s anathemas in some unknown tongue, (Hawthorne 64).
This quote is particularly interesting because one can see the difference between mother and daughter very clearly, Hester feels lonely and wishes for human contact while Pearl has no interest to be friends which the hypocritical Puritans who are angry at her mother not for the adultery but because she will not quench their nosiness. The contrast that one sees between Hester and Pearl is something that Hawthorne experienced as his mother died; it shows how children can be so inherently different from their care givers when placed in the same situation.
As he keeps watch at his mother’s deathbed, which he called ‘the darkest hour I ever lived,’ he hears the ‘shouts, laughter, and cries of [his] two children’ playing outside in the yard. Within the ‘strange contrast,’ Hawthorne ‘seemed to see the whole of human existence at once’ as an ‘interval between extreme youth and dying age,’ (Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. 534).
Pearl’s whole outlook on the sin is so different from that of everybody around her. She plays with the scarlet letter on her mother’s chest because it carries no sinful meaning to Pearl. The whole idea of religion is rejected by Pearl, “Hester's interpretation of her child, and Pearl's claim that she has no Heavenly Father!” (Richard Hull 144). While her mother thinks she is heaven sent, Pearl believes no such thing, “‘He did not send me!’ cried she, positively. ‘I have no Heavenly Father!’” (Hawthorne 67).
The reason some believe that Pearl is so distant from the Puritan religion is because she is a child of nature. Pearl was left to herself by her mother, which means she was playing in the world of the natural, “he [Hawthorne] thought that intimacy with nature exercised ‘the essential passion if the heart’ and prepared the child for human and spiritual affections, so that moral truths might be received.” (Abel 192). One has often heard or thought that Pearl is evil for taunting her mother for the burden she chooses to carry, however, this is not true based on Hawthorne’s believes according to Darrel Abel: “Hawthorne supposed that a pure Child of Nature would lack the most essential human quality, that of moral awareness.” (Abel 193).
The last importance that Pearl carried is she was what tied Hester and Arthur together throughout the story. She caused both—mother and father— to feel the guilt that the Puritans wanted them to feel. With Hester is obvious as to how she points and plays with the scarlet letter, but with Arthur it is not so obvious,
[t]he spirit child communicates her disapproval in another way, one exquisitely appropriate to Dimmesdale’s sensibility—through a silent, indirect, subjective language. In the entire scene at the brookside she does not speak to him with her human voice at all. She addresses him indirectly through her persistent rejection of his advances and through actions ostensibly directed toward her mother. (McNamara 69).
It is safe to say that Pearl is actually trying to be mean towards Arthur since he is the reason for her mother’s suffering. Dimmesdale realizes this through simple questions, like: “[a]nd will he always keep his hand over his heart?” (Hawthorne 136). With this question she is teasing her mother and father that regardless what they do, Dimmesdale will always feel guilty as explained by McNamara: “[s]he clearly implies that guilt will plague Dimmesdale even if he succeeds in the plans for escape which he and Hester are now formulating” (69).
In the end however, Dimmesdale turns Pearl into a functioning person who is capable in living with society, by finally confessing to the world that Pearl is his daughter:
He meets his problem by subjecting Pearl to a kind of psychic shock when Dimmesdale, in his expiation scene, recognizes her as his daughter and awakens through suffering all her human sympathies, thus sweeping her into the community of men. Before this she was unable to obey civil and divine law. Now she may, if she will, (Eisinger 326).
After all is said and done and both men that were in Hester’s and Pearl’s life are dead. Hawthorne gives a look at what life Pearl chose, “[t]his inheritance [land, money] gives Pearl both paternal legitimacy and wealth. She and Hester then leave Boston for Europe. Hawthorne suggests that Pearl eventually marries into an aristocratic family and has children of her own,” (Hunt 30).
Pearl is many things to many people, to some a demon child, to others a symbol that is not real. Pearl saw no reason to feel guilt, instead she decided to show the conflict between human life and religion. Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, for one to display his own life, and two, to mock the puritan society. With Pearl, Hawthorne created a child of nature, one that shows the people what is really important, for example love, happiness, freedom. This ending suggests that Pearl was no demon spawn but simply a child who refused to be dressed for something that was not natural to her. However in the end Hawthorne did write that she married of and had children of her own. What would be interesting to know is if Pearl raised her children in a religious belief? It should be safe to assume however, that they are free spirited individuals like her.
Abel, Darrel. “Pearl: “The Scarlet Letter Endowed with Life.” The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne's Fiction. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1988. 190-207.
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Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. "A Play-Day for the Whole World?" The New England Quarterly 61.4 (1988): 530-54. .
Hull, Richard. "Sent Meaning vs. Attached Meaning: Two Interpretations of Interpretation in The Scarlet Letter." The American Transcendental Quarterly 14.2 (2000): 143. Academic OneFile. Gale. Truxal Library, Anne Arundel Community College. 12 Apr. 2009 .
Hunt, Constance C.T. "The Persistence of Theocracy: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. (Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter)." Perspectives on Political Science 38.1 (2009): 25-33. Academic OneFile. Gale. Truxal Library, Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, MD. 12 Apr. 2009 .
McNamara, Anne Marie. “The Character of Flame: The Function of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.” On Hawthorne: The Best from American literature. By Edwin Harrison Cady, Louis J. Budd. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.65-81 .
