In the novel the scarlet letter by nathaniel hawthorne, hester’s daughter, pearl is used very interestingly as a symbol, and is the one to point out puritan flaws, and flaws in her parents, Arthur dimmesdale and Hester Prynne as their illegitimate child. Pearl is often referred to as very un christ-like things such as an imp and a little devil due to her ability to question people on their motives in the very oppressive puritan society. Her questions shock everyone around her, and she is described as a little girl with curly hair and pointed ears. The very significance and the symbolism in her character is a balance of nature versus society, sin versus human nature and how guilt balances itself out. Pearl’s very existence reveals the paradoxes about puritan society.
The mob mentality in the scarlet lett shows how ridiculous that the towns people are about things. Pearl is incredibly smart and perceptive in her own way, where she figured arthur dimmesdale is her father, due to how he treats her when they are in private, and basically asks her …show more content…
And may she feel, too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"
The mob mentality in the scarlet lett shows how ridiculous that the towns people are about things. Pearl is incredibly smart and perceptive in her own way, where she figured arthur dimmesdale is her father, due to how he treats her when they are in private, and basically asks her …show more content…
And may she feel, too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother's soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care--to be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator's sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne's sake, then, and no less for the poor child's sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!"