The incident with the meteor obviously highlights and exemplifies two different uses of symbols: Puritan and literary. Although Pearl is a complex character, her primary function within the novel is as a symbol. She is the physical consequence of sexual sin and the indicator of a transgression.
Ace your assignments with our guide to The Scarlet Letter! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Did Hester ever love Chillingworth? Even when she goes to Governor Bellingham's to plead for her daughter's custody, Hester dresses Pearl in a crimson velvet tunic. With Pearl's attire, Hester can give "the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play," embroidering her clothes "with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread.
Mistress Hibbins invites Hester to the forest and Hester says if the governor takes her child away she will gladly go. Their conversation reminds us that, as a symbol, Pearl is also the conscience of a number of people. First, she is the conscience of the community, pointing her finger at Hester. In any number of places, she reminds Hester that she must wear, and continue to wear, the scarlet letter. When they go to the forest and Hester removes the A , Pearl makes her put it back on. She tells her mother that "the sunshine does not love you.
It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom" Chapter Pearl is also the conscience of Dimmesdale. In Chapter 3, when Hester stands with her on the scaffold, Pearl reaches out to her father, Dimmesdale, but he does not acknowledge her. Once again on the scaffold in Chapter 13, Pearl asks the minister to stand with them in the light of day and the eyes of the community.
When he denies her once again, she washes away his kiss, apt punishment for a man who will not take responsibility. She repeats her request for recognition during the Election Day procession.
In her intuitive way, she realizes what he must do so to find salvation. In the end, it is Dimmesdale's actions that "save" Pearl, making her truly human and giving her human sympathies and feelings.
We are drawn to regard, not the outline, but the substance, which claims affinity with the inmost recesses of our own nature; so that The Scarlet Letter is a self-revelation to whomsoever takes it up. In a story of this calibre a complex of incidents would be superfluous. The use of incidents in fiction is twofold, — to develop the characters and to keep awake the reader's attention. But the personages of this tale are not technically developed; they are gradually made transparent as they stand, until we see them through and through.
And what we thus behold is less individual peculiarities than traits and devices of our general human nature, under the stress of the given conditions. The individuals are there, and could at need be particularlized sharply enough; but that part of them which we are concerned with lies so far beneath the surface as inevitably to exhibit more of general than of personal characteristics.
Henry Wood, have doubtless yawned over the revelation of Dimmesdale's soul, and grown heavy-eyed at the spectacle of Pearl's elfish waywardness.
Dimmesdale is, artistically, a corollary of Hester; and yet the average writer would not be apt to hit upon him as a probable seducer. The community in which he abides certainly shows a commendable lack of suspicion towards him: even old Mistress Hibbins, whose scent for moral carrion was as keen as that of a modern society journal, can scarcely credit her own conviction.
That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister! A gross, sensual man would render the whole drama gross and obvious. But Dimmesdale's social position, as well as his personal character, seems to raise him above the possibility of such a lapse. This is essential to the scope of the treatment, which, dealing with the spiritual aspects of the crime, requires characters of spiritual proclivities.
Highly intellectual he is, too, though, as the author finely discriminates, not too broadly so. As with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart! As Hester suffers public exposure and frank ignominy, so he is wrapped in secret torments; and either mode of punishment is shown to be powerless for good. Dimmesdale cares more for his social reputation than for anything else.
His self-respect, his peace, his love, his soul, — all may go: only let his reputation remain! And yet it is that selfsame false reputation that daily causes him the keenest anguish of all. Pearl, however, is the true creation of the book: every touch upon her portrait is a touch of genius, and her very conception is an inspiration. Yet the average mind would have found her an encumbrance. Every pretext would have been improved to send her out of the room, as it were, and to restrict her utterances, when she must appear, to monosyllables or sentimental commonplaces.
Not only is she free from repression of this kind, but she avouches herself the most vivid and active figure in the story. Instead of keeping pathetically in the background, as a guiltless unfortunate whose life was blighted before it began, this strange little being, with laughing defiance of precedent and propriety, takes the reins in her own childish hands, and dominates every one with whom she comes in contact. This is an idea which it was left to Hawthorne to originate: ancient nor modern fiction supplies a parallel to Pearl.
Yet Pearl was, all the while, the most unrelentingly real fact of her mother's ruined life. Standing as the incarnation, instead of the victim, of a sin, Pearl affords a unique opportunity for throwing light upon the inner nature of the sin itself. In availing himself of it, Hawthorne touches ground which, perhaps, he would not have ventured on, had he not first safeguarded himself against exaggeration and impiety by making his analysis accord so to speak with the definition of a child's personality.
Pearl, as we are frequently reminded, is the scarlet letter made alive, capable of being loved, and so endowed with a manifold power of retribution for sin. Like nature and animals, she is anterior to moral law; but, unlike them, she is human, too. She exhibits an unfailing vigor and vivacity of spirits joined to a precocious and almost preternatural intelligence, especially with reference to her mother's shameful badge.
This contrast, or, perhaps it is more correct to say, mingling, of the opposite poles of being, sin and innocence, in Pearl's nature is an extraordinary achievement; enabling us, as it does, to recognize the intrinsic ugliness of sin.
Pearl is like a beautiful but poisonous flower, rejoicing in its poison, and receiving it as the vital element of life. But the beauty makes the ugliness only the more impressive, because we feel it to be a magical or phantasmal beauty, enticing like the apples of Sodom, but full of bitterness within.
It is the beauty which sin wears to the eyes of the tempted, — a beauty, therefore, which has no real existence, but is attributed by the insanity of lust. Now, if Pearl were a woman, this strong external charm of hers would perplex the reader, in much the same way that the allurements of sin bewilder its votaries. The difficulty is to distinguish between what is really and permanently good and what only appears so while the spell lasts.
Pearl being a child, however, no such uncertainty can occur. She has not, as yet, what can in strictness be termed a character; she is without experience, and therefore devoid of either good or evil principles; she possesses a nature, and nothing more. The affection which she excites, consequently, is immediately perceived to be due neither to her beauty not to her intellectual acuteness; still less to the evil effluence which exhales from these, and is characteristic of them.
These things all stand on one side; and the innocent, irresponsible infant soul stands on the other. Each defines and emphasizes the other: so that so far from one being led to confuse them, so far from being in danger of loving evil because we love Pearl, we love her just in proportion to our abhorrence of the evil which empoisons her manifestations. The same discrimination could not be so sharply made if, indeed, it could be made at all in the case of a Pearl who, under unchanged conditions, had attained maturity.
For her character would then be formed, and the evil which came to her by inheritance would so have tinged and moulded her natural traits that we should inevitably draw in the poison and the perfume at a single breath, — ascribe to evil the charm which derives from good, and pollute good with the lurid hues of evil. The history of the race abundantly demonstrates that a chief cause of moral perversity and false principle has been our assumption of absolute proprietorship in either the good or the evil of our actions.
Pearl, still in the instinctive stage of development, shows us the way out of this labyrinth. As the pure sunlight vivifies noxious as well as beneficent forms of existence, so the evil proclivities of the child's nature are energized, though not constituted, by the divine source of her being. It would be interesting parenthetically to draw a parallel between Pearl and Beatrice, in Rappaccini's Daughter. Both are studies in the same direction, though from different standpoints. Beatrice is nourished upon poisonous plants, until she becomes herself poisonous.
Pearl, in the mysterious prenatal world, imbibes the poison of her parents' guilt. But, in either instance, behind this imported evil stands the personal soul: and the question is, Shall the soul become the victim of its involuntary circumstances? Hawthorne, in both cases, inclines to the brighter alternative. But the problem of Beatrice is more complicated than that of Pearl.
She was not born in guilt; but she was brought up to translate the symbolism amidst guilty associations, so that they had come to be the very breath of her life. But, in truth, Pearl's demon was summoned into existence, not by her own acts, but by the act of others; and, unless with her own conscious consent, it cannot pollute her. Meanwhile, with that profound instinct of self-justification which antedates both reason and conscience in the human soul, the child is impelled on all occasions to assert and vindicate her cause, — the cause of the scarlet letter.
She will not consent to have it hidden or disavowed. She mocks and persecutes her mother, so long as the latter would disguise from her the true significance of the badge.
When Hester casts it away, she stamps and cries with passion and will not be pacified till it is replaced. She distrusts the minister, save when, as in his plea for Hester in the governor's hall and his midnight vigil on the scaffold, he approaches an acknowledgment of his true position. In a word, she will have truth in all things: without truth nothing is good; nor, with truth, can anything be evil. In the deepest sense, this is not only true, but it is the truth of the book.
The perfectibility of man being infinite, the best man and the worst man alike must fall infinitely short of perfection: but every one can account honestly for such talents as he has; and it is always the motive, never the achievement, the sincerity, not the sound, that Divine Justice regards.
A Thug, who should devoutly believe in the holiness of his mission, would fare better than an evangelist, who should lead a thousand souls to salvation, not for God's glory, but for his own. So when little Pearl would frankly unfold the banner of the scarlet letter, and openly fight beneath it, we feel that God will give her victory, not over her apparent enemies, but over herself.
Did Hester ever love Chillingworth? What type of work does Chillingworth take on in New England? What does Dimmesdale believe he sees when the meteor lights up the night sky? How does Pearl react when she first sees her mother without the scarlet A?
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