It burns upon its wearer's breast, it casts a lurid glow along her pathway, it isolates her among mankind, and is at the same time the mystic talisman to reveal to her the guilt hidden in other hearts.
It is the Black Man's mark, and the first plaything of the infant Pearl. As the story develops, the scarlet letter becomes the dominant figure, — everything is tinged with its sinister glare. So strongly is the scarlet letter rooted in every chapter and almost every sentence of the book that bears its name. And yet it would probably have incommoded the average novelist. The wand of Prospero, so far from aiding the uninititated, trips him up, and scorches his fingers.
Between genius and every other attribute of the mind is a difference not of degree, but of kind. Every story may be viewed under two aspects: as the logical evolution of a conclusion from a premise, and as something colored and modified by the personal qualities of the author. If the latter have genius, his share in the product is comparable to nature's in a work of human art, — giving it everything except abstract form.
But the majority of fiction-mongers are apt to impair rather than enhance the beauty of the abstract form of their conception, — if, indeed, it possess any to begin with.
At all events, there is no better method of determining the value of a writer's part in a given work than to consider the work in what may be termed its prenatal state. How much, for example, of The Scarlet Letter was ready made before Hawthorne touched it? The date is historically fixed at about the middle of the seventeenth century. The stage properties, so to speak, are well adapted to become the furniture and background of a romantic narrative.
A gloomy and energetic religious sect, pioneers in a virgin land, with the wolf and the Indian at their doors, but with memories of England in their hearts and English traditions and prejudices in their minds; weak in numbers, but strong in spirit; with no cultivation save that of the Bible and the sword; victims, moreover of a dark and bloody superstition, — such a people and scene give admirable relief and color to a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
Amidst such surroundings, then, the figure of a woman stands, with the scarlet letter on her bosom. But here we come to a pause, and must look to the author for the next step.
For where shall the story begin? Nor are hints wanting that this phase of the theme had been canvassed in Hawthorne's mind.
We have glimpses of the heroine in the antique gentility of her English home; we see the bald brow and reverend beard of her father, and her mother's expression of heedful and anxious love; we behold the girl's own face, glowing with youthful beauty. She meets the pale, elderly scholar, with his dim yet penetrating eyes, and the marriage, loveless on her part and folly on his, takes place; but they saw not the bale-fire of the scarlet letter blazing at the end of their path.
The ill-assorted pair make their first home in Amsterdam; but at length, tidings of the Puritan colony in Massachusetts reaching them, they prepare to emigrate thither. But Prynne, himself delaying to adjust certain affairs, sends his young, beautiful, wealthy wife in advance to assume her station in the pioneer settlement. In the wild, free air of that new world her spirits kindled, and many unsuspected tendencies of her impulsive and passionate nature were revealed to her.
For his forbearance he has received much praise from well-meaning critics, who seem to think that he was restrained by considerations of morality or propriety. This appears a little strained. As an artist and as a man of a certain temperament, Hawthorne treated that side of the subject which seemed to him the more powerful and interesting. But a writer who works with deep insight and truthful purpose can never be guilty of a lack of decency. Indecency is a creation, not of God or of nature, but of the indecent.
And whoever takes it for granted that indecency is necessarily involved in telling the story of an illicit passion has studied human nature and good literature to poor purpose.
The truth is that the situation selected by Hawthorne has more scope and depth than the one which he passed over.
It is with the subjective consequences of a sinner's act that our understanding of him begins. The murderer's blow tells us nothing of his character; but in his remorse or exultation over his deed his secret is revealed to us. So Hawthorne fixes the starting-point of his romance at Hester's prison-door, rather than at any earlier epoch of her career, because the narrative can thence, as it were, move both ways at once; all essentials of the past can be gathered up as wanted, and the reminiscences and self-knowledge of the characters can supplement the author's analysis.
The story rounds itself out at once, catching light and casting shadow; and Hester's previous life seems familiar to us the moment she takes her stand upon the scaffold, — for, in the case of an experience such as hers, a bare hint tells the whole sad story. So long as women are frail and men selfish, the prologue of The Scarlet Letter will not need to be written; it is known a thousand times already. But what is to follow is not known; no newspapers publish it, no whisper of it passes from mouth to mouth, nor is it cried on the housetops.
Yet is there great need that it should be taught, for such teaching serves a practical moral use. All have felt the allurement of temptation, but few realize the sequel of yielding to it.
This sequel is exhaustively analyzed in the romance, and hence the profound and permanent interest of the story. No sinner so eccentric but may find here the statement of his personal problem. Such an achievement avouches a lofty reach of art.
The form has not the carpenter's symmetry of a French drama, but the spontaneous, living symmetry of a tree or flower, unfolding from the force within.
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.
She realizes that he set off a chain of events beginning with an unnatural, loveless marriage. We hear for the first time her thoughts about her marriage to Chillingworth. He spent long hours among his books, emerging to "bask himself in [her]. By now the careful reader should be examining the differences in the two relationships that are presented in the novel. First, in the Hester-Chillingworth relationship is a marriage accepted and legal in every way but without love and passion.
In the Hester-Dimmesdale relationship is love and passion without marriage. The plot and themes of this novel are set in the Puritan society at the confluence of these two relationships. Another variation on the scarlet letter occurs in Hester's conversation with Pearl. The pathetic loneliness of Hester's position is obvious as she wonders if she should confide in her daughter. She is compared to the living version of the scarlet letter. Pearl runs back to the brook and washes the kiss off.
Dimmesdale tells Chillingworth that he no longer needs his help or his medicine. When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest, she impulsively takes off the letter and throws it away. When Pearl sees her mother without the letter, she reacts by screaming and crying until Hester puts the letter back on. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis May 14, What role does Pearl play in The Scarlet Letter? How does Pearl feel about the scarlet letter?
How does Hester describe Pearl?
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