Hawthorne's Pearl: woman-child of the future.

Publication: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)

Publication Date: 01-SEP-05

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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter has earned its place in the literary canon precisely because it has retained the ability to arouse interest and intellectual discussion even 154 years after its first publication. The beauty of Hawthorne's defining work is that it lends itself to contemporary analysis year after year, decade after decade. As each change in society asserts itself, critics look at Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter with a fresh perspective and find the story ripe with new meaning that is relevant to contemporary society. In fact, a fresh look at Pearl, and how Hester contributes to the development of her daughter's character, can provide new insights into the role of women in today's society, a role that began to change as early as 1850 when Hawthorne first published The Scarlet Letter.

Many 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, and Hawthorne's way of presenting the "scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life" (90). As Emily Miller Budick points out:

In Hawthorne's novel, the strict authoritarianism of Puritan patriarchy finds its object in the child Pearl, who, as the living "likeness" of the letter ... becomes the target of the Puritans' efforts to control both human sexuality, and its literary, historical expression. The Scarlet Letter, in other words, dramatizes a relationship between issues of birth (Whose child is Pearl?) and questions of interpretation (What does the letter mean?). Indeed, one of the ways the text validates the centrality and legitimacy of the community's doubt about the child is by representing it as its own investigation into its major symbol. (201)

The idea that Pearl is nothing more than the "major symbol" of the novel is also seen in Robert Emmet Whelan, Jr.'s "Hester Prynne's Little Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love," where he claims, "it is Pearl, the gem on her mother's unquiet bosom, who throughout the tale betrays to the reader ... the passionate love for the minister which Hester, of fearful necessity, takes such great care to hide" (490). And the "badge of shame" upon Hester's breast, along with "Pearl, its living counterpart--allegorical emblems as they are of Hester's heart--are intended by Hawthorne to travel through the same range of meanings: 'Adultery,' 'Able,' 'Affection,' and 'Angel'" (490). Pearl's function as a living symbol of Hester's adultery, ability, affection, and role as feminine angel, connected to the story only through Hester's heart and emotional acuity, fails to acknowledge Hawthorne's complexity of character development in Pearl. In this analysis, she becomes nothing more than the scarlet letter personified. In another analysis: "Pearl, described by Hawthorne as the 'effluence of her mother's lawless passion,' is the 'living emblem' of Hester's guilt not so much because she resembles the scarlet letter, but rather because she embodies what the letter can only represent--the very passions which motivate Hester's transgression, and the sufferings that accompany her punishment" (Nudelman 193). Here, Pearl becomes nothing more than the face of Hester's guilt. The problem that recurs in analyses such as these is that critics are too quick to dismiss Pearl's integral role in the text, and furthermore, many are in disagreement over what, exactly, the scarlet letter represents. Trying to define Pearl as merely a symbolic element becomes an endless circle of ambiguity that leaves Pearl unexplored as a significant character in the text.

However, when critics endow Pearl with various other functions, symbolic or not, and acknowledge her central place within the text, her true role is expanded. Chester E. Eisinger, in his 1951 article "Pearl and the Puritan Heritage," argues that Pearl is a

symbol of natural liberty, perverse and willful, consulting her own impulses and following them wherever conflicts arose. She is antisocial. She will not be governed by any human will or law. She is as unruly as nature and is therefore unfit for civil society. Only when these natural qualities are washed away in Dimmesdale's salvation does Pearl become a responsible human being, ready for admission into the community of men and, when Chillingworth's money came to her, even into the Puritan community. (329)

Eisinger's comments obviously reflect the time period within which he was writing. Pearl is deemed "antisocial" because she has the temerity to step beyond the preconceived boundaries of what Eisinger sees as her main function: being a female and a child. She cannot be "governed by any human will or law" both of which, especially in 1950, are male-centered; his reference to the fact that Pearl is ready to be accepted into the "community of men" also reflects the social mores of the 1950s. What is not fully understood, however, is how Dimmesdale's salvation is translated into salvation for Pearl, especially since Pearl has rejected Dimmesdale's Puritan community and disappears at the end of the novel. Ironically, it is Pearl's willingness to acknowledge Dimmesdale during his scene of salvation that represents "natural liberty," and the control she maintains in their relationship is a foreshadowing of the coming change in the female role.

The connection between Pearl's character and her nature is another aspect that has garnered critical attention. Darrel Abel has claimed:

Pearl is in her most fundamental character a Child of Nature. She is of course a "natural child" in the euphemistic sense of the phrase. But a Child of Nature is properly speaking one who discovers conscious and valuable affinities with the natural world and enjoys an active and formative relationship with that world.... Little Pearl manifests this relationship between man and nature; her life and the life of nature are contiguous and sympathetic modes of being. Therefore, Hawthorne observed: "The mother forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child." This "wildness," however, is not the wildness of savagery but the wildness of innocence. (56-57)

This innocence is significant in that it casts Pearl in a new light. Her relationship with nature coincides with the relationship she is creating with the Puritan community, and just as the community cannot control nature, wild and free, it will not be able to control Pearl, either, although it has succeeded in controlling Hester. In fact, as Laurie A. Sterling points out in "Paternal Gold: Translating Inheritance in The Scarlet Letter":

[T]he patriarchy assumes the authority to rename and revalue Hester. They read her physical shape and assign a spiritual value to her. Hester's sin was representative of a sinful nature; thus their A, the representation of sin, could likewise embody Hester and thereby reduce her possible valuations. They inscribe on Hester, write her value (and her values) upon her, and in doing so they convert her according to official valuation. After her "conversion" they release her from the prison house in an attempt to show their omnipotence. Without her release into the community, into circulation,...

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