Today’s definition of a doppelganger is two people who look similar or identical, but it could also mean one person with two facades, or even two people who contrast each other in similar situations. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, shows several examples of this masquerade taking different forms. Pearl contrasts Hester’s behavior while their punishment is executed; Pearl roams with a light heart and few cares, “her anarchic freedom contrasts with Hester’s continuous self-control” (Baym 68). In the same way, Hester remains more uplifted than Dimmesdale. While Hester has come to terms with her sin and has learned and grown from it, Dimmesdale keeps it locked away within his heart, which leads to his ultimate downfall. Although
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The townspeople taunt and tease Hester for the Scarlet Letter she wears, even throw things at her, but she will not defend herself; she believes this treatment is what she deserves. Hester walks along, maintaining a disinterested facade, but Pearl takes on a different reaction. As the children gawked at or surrounded the outsiders, “Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill incoherent exclamations,” (Hawthorne 71). Hester and Pearl provide an example of doppelgangers as two sides of one story; Hester accepts her deed and its repercussions, but Pearl is “an abstraction of elements of Hester’s character, a kind of ‘double’,” (Baym 57). Hester internally wishes for the freedom from society’s expectations of her: to be miserable in her punishment and to suffer in public judgement. Pearl is the personification of these yearnings, bluntly disregarding the Puritan’s standards. Baym analyzes Pearl’s character and concludes “the child is beauty and freedom and imagination and all the other natural qualities that the Puritan system denies,” (57). In this comparison, Pearl is happier than her mother, “her anarchic freedom [contrasting] Hester’s continuous self-control,” but Hester still remains in higher spirits than her partner in sin, Arthur
The townspeople taunt and tease Hester for the Scarlet Letter she wears, even throw things at her, but she will not defend herself; she believes this treatment is what she deserves. Hester walks along, maintaining a disinterested facade, but Pearl takes on a different reaction. As the children gawked at or surrounded the outsiders, “Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill incoherent exclamations,” (Hawthorne 71). Hester and Pearl provide an example of doppelgangers as two sides of one story; Hester accepts her deed and its repercussions, but Pearl is “an abstraction of elements of Hester’s character, a kind of ‘double’,” (Baym 57). Hester internally wishes for the freedom from society’s expectations of her: to be miserable in her punishment and to suffer in public judgement. Pearl is the personification of these yearnings, bluntly disregarding the Puritan’s standards. Baym analyzes Pearl’s character and concludes “the child is beauty and freedom and imagination and all the other natural qualities that the Puritan system denies,” (57). In this comparison, Pearl is happier than her mother, “her anarchic freedom [contrasting] Hester’s continuous self-control,” but Hester still remains in higher spirits than her partner in sin, Arthur