Pearl is an incredible character. “Many modern readers find Hester’s elf-child intolerable arch, with her pranks and preternatural knowledge. She is indeed a remarkable infant, distinguished as much for her fidelity to the actual psychology of a three-year-old child as for the allegorism with which Hawthorne manipulates her strange behavior.” (Hoffman 344). She is the problem and resolution of the novel. Pearl is characterized as a living version of the scarlet letter. This is true because she is the reason her mother wears the letter that brings her shame. Pearl is extremely beautiful, but she lacks certain Christian qualities that are essential for living in a Puritan society.
Pearl is the representation of Hester’s ambiguity. Pearl’s devilish ways represent Hester’s wild, sinful side. “If she was spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations that madder her mother tremble, because they had so much sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.” (Hawthorne 63) “She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage-floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child,--to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began,--to snatch her to her bosom, with a close pressure and earnest kisses,--not so much from overflowing love, as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before.
Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester would sometimes burst into passionate tears.” (65)
Conversely, her precociousness represents Hester’s potential to grow and overcome her sin. “Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening influences of maternity.” (66)
Roger Dimmesdale is a Puritan reverend who committed adultery. This makes him a hypocrite. He can’t preach to his congregation when he, himself, does not even abide by the Puritan laws. This inability to take responsibility destroys him. Pearl’s questioning makes him look childish. In order for pearl to become human, Dimmesdale must confess the secret. “The salvation of Pearl depends upon Dimmesdale. Until he acknowledges himself her father she can have no human patrimony, and must remain a Nature-spirit, untouched by the redemptive order that was broken in her conception.” (Hoffman 348)
