In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the character of Pearl is a complicated symbol represented in the signifier of a human kid. Her affinity with the vermilion missive is stressed throughout the novel with the usage of symbolic colourss, reflecting her relationships with the people around her and the power of human verve and resiliency in the face of bias and unfairness.
Pearl is the populating personification of the vermilion missive: “ It was the vermilion missive in another signifier ; the vermilion missive endowed with life. ” ( Page 98 ) She is the symbol and effect of her female parent ‘s out wickedness of criminal conversation and an index of a evildoing. The vesture Hester Prynne chose to dress Pearl in farther augments the connexion between Pearl and the vermilion missive. She wears a “ red velvet adventitia of a curious cut, copiously embroidered with phantasies and flourishes of gold yarn. ” ( Page 98 ) that mimics the colour and embellishment of the black vermilion missive. Hester has created the connexion intentionally, “ showering many hours of morbid inventiveness to make an analogy between the object of her fondness and the emblem of her guilt and anguish. ” ( Page 98 ) The association between the symbolic colourss and Pearl is undeniable and it stresses the unreplaceable function of the vermilion missive in her life, which finally influences her physical and emotional relationships with the people around her. Pearl, non merely reflects her female parent wickedness, but besides represents the critical spirit of passion that drives both Hester and Dimmesdale to perpetrate the criminal conversation. “ In giving her being, a great jurisprudence had been broken, and as a consequence was a being whose elements were possibly beautiful and superb, but all in upset. ” ( Page 87 ) The storyteller remarks that although Pearl is everything the Puritan system denies- beauty, freedom and imaginativeness -she really much represents abstractions of elements in Hester ‘s ain character. Hester ‘s resiliency is projected on to Pearl, as they both, although Pearl is non wholly cognizant, digest the torture and societal isolation that is caused by the bias and unfairness in society. Therefore Pearl embodies the true defiance of Hester, demoing how superficial her quiet demeanour in public really is and how she mutely protests against the stiff conventions of the system that has caused her so much agony
Hester Prynne loves Pearl, but besides hates her at the same clip. It is this sense of ambivalency that witnesses Pearl ‘s growing and significance throughout The Scarlet Letter. In the beginning, Pearl is described about like a diabolic and cold kid, doing even Hester to oppugn her beginning and sort. “ O Father in Heaven- if Thou art still my Father -what is this being which I have brought into the universe! ” ( Page 92 ) Pearl is Hester ‘s penalty like the vermilion missive, and beyond doubt Acts of the Apostless as a changeless reminder of her wickedness and guilt, doing it about impossible for Hester to bury the shame she has to digest. But as the narrative advancements, Hester besides reveals the other side of the narrative, where her love for Pearl makes it hard to believe that she has done incorrectly. “ Pearl, as being of great price- purchased with all she had -her female parent ‘s lone hoarded wealth! ” ( Page 85 ) suggests how Pearl, like the vermilion missive, is both a approval and a penalty, yet Hester has volitionally paid a monetary value to be a good female parent and devotes her whole life to raising the kid, which is all that she has left. Her love for Pearl allows her to persist, albeit the unpropitious state of affairs, exemplifying the strength of human verve and resiliency that Pearl instigates in her. “ She is my felicity! -she is my anguish none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me excessively! See ye non, she is the vermilion missive, merely capable of being loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of requital for my wickedness? Ye shall non take her, I will decease foremost! ” ( page 109 ) Even Hester herself acknowledges the association between Pearl and the vermilion missive, yet the kid is both her felicity and her anguish, bestiring conflicting emotions within. Pearl has unnoticeably become an priceless portion of Hester ‘s life and therefore doing it impossible for them to be separated, no affair what the community elders suggest.
Not merely is Pearl the kid of Hester Prynne, she besides represents a signifier of scruples within the narrative. Pearl who is the consequence of an irrevokable offense, becomes the symbol of her female parent ‘s guilt and rebellion, while at the same clip besides acts as the intuitive voice and the drive force behind Hester ‘s verve despite the inauspicious conditions. Bing closely related to the vermilion missive, through the symbolic use of colour, Pearl has been witting about the being of the conspicuous missive on her female parent ‘s bosom since babyhood. “ But that the first object of which Pearl seemed to go cognizant of was- shall we state it? -the vermilion missive on Hester ‘s bosom! ” ( Page 93 ) Her consciousness and connexion with the missive proffers another point of position and shed visible radiations on the enigmas in the beginning of the novel. Pearl ‘s infantile artlessness provides a difference position in a straightforward and bias-free mode, compensating the apparently cryptic deepnesss of the truth. “ Pearl, that wild and flyaway hob, stole quietly towards him, and taking his manus in the appreciation of both of her ain, laid her cheek against it ; ” ( Page 112 ) The line suggests an about unconditioned fondness that Pearl possesses for Dimmesdale, while she dislikes Chillingworth, as if hinting and boding what is to come in the narrative. Pearl non merely is Hester ‘s girl, but besides a protective and intuitive usher that has saved her from the “ black adult male ” and the bias and unfairness of Puritan society. She has the ability “ to maintain her female parent ‘s psyche alive, and to continue her from blacker deepnesss of wickedness into which Satan might else hold sought to immerse her! ” ( Page 111 )
Through the usage of symbolic colourss, the character of Pearl Prynne and her association with the vermilion missive is emphasized, therefore impacting her relationships with those around her and reflecting the victory of human resiliency in the face of bias and unfairness in society. The beliing emotions that Hester has for her girl and the similarities between the two, mold Pearl into the symbolic character of human resiliency and verve that she is in The Scarlet Letter.
