Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl are the unwed mother and illegitimate child. Before the story begins, we learn Hester had been married in Europe to a dried – up, pretentious, academic sort who sent her ahead to America, intending to follow. He got hung up pursuing his fruitless studies, and after a couple of years, everyone, including Hester, presumed he lay dead at the bottom of the sea. Hester and her Puritan minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, had fallen in love and had relations. What Dimmesdale never does have as the story progresses is the courage, or necessity, to own up to his adultery or hid fatherhood.
While Hester is forced to stand for hours before the critical community, Governor Bellingham directs Dimmesdale to use his priestly persuasive powers on Hester to make her name the child’s father. Hawtorne’s prototype for his fictional governor and upholder of the law was a real Massachusetts governor of the same name. In 1641 Bellingham married a woman already betrothed to a friend of hid and performed the ceremony himself in a rush job, so as to avoid going through the required publication of marriage intentions. When asked to step down from the bench during an inquest about his breach of law, he refused (Bayer, 250).
Hester pays dearly for her Dimmesdale’s love. Unlike him, she cannot conceal the fact of her adulterous sex because she cannot hide her pregnancy. She cannot flee from the fact of the motherhood because the child is in her and issues from her. And she cannot escape parenthood, because no one else is going to take care of the child and child abandonment is frowned upon. Dimmesdale pays, too, but his is a very private penance. He is eaten by guilt and dies near the end of the novel.
What about Pearl? She is marked from the get-go, presumed by the Puritans to be the child of the devil. Even Hester absorbs the social view that nothing good can issue from a woman who was in a state of sin when the child was “imbibing her soul.” So naturally, Pearl turns into a child who “cannot be made amendable to the rules.” She is wild and seems to be part animal, part demon, all of which is to say she is definitely not fully human. She does eventually grow up to lead an apparently prosperous life – but only by escaping from her home and living in England.
Part way through “The Scarlet Letter”, Hester and Pearl have one of those fundamental conversations about where Pearl “came from” that might have been a lesson in family values, had Hester not felt the pressing need to protect Pearl’s father. Hester drills Pearl: “Tell me then, what thou art and who sent thee hither?” Pearl demurs, so Hester offers the correct answer: “Thy Heavenly Father sent thee.” Pearl is having none of it: “He did not send me. I have no Heavenly Father.” She begs her mother, “Tell me, tell me.”
Then Hester gets wind of a plan to take Pearl away and put her in the care of the state. Some of the good Christians of the town, it seems, had concluded that “if the child were really capable of moral and religious growth . . . then surely it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne’s” Hester takes Pearl to the Governor’s mansion to plead her case. There she has an audience with Governor Bellingham, Arthur Dimmesdale, and another minister named Wilson.
Bellingham commands Wilson to determine whether Pearl has had a Christian upbringing. Wilson quizzes her, “Cants thou tell me, my child, who made thee?” Pearl knows the correct answer as well as she knows the rest of the catechism, but she also knows it isn’t true. In a moment of playful perversity, she says her mother plucked her from a rose bush. The very lie that Hester had maintained to preserve the authority of church and state and to protect the good name of Dimmesdale becomes the source of Pearl’s resistance and the evidence of Hester’s unfitness as a mother.
Dimmesdale, true to character, remains silent during this little child welfare hearing – until, that is, Hester rises up in a fury and commands him to speak on her behalf. He has the gall to bring the authority of the church down on Hester once again, this time to her advantage. He speechifies about God’s purpose in sending this “child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame” as retribution and even a “torture” to the mother, to remind her of her sin. Hester gets to keep the kid because the church, the minister, and the dad all say punishment is good for her soul.
By the time she is seven, Pearl comes to know on some level that Dimmesdale is her father. Once, Hester, and Pearl come upon Dimmesdale in the middle of the night. He is standing on the scaffold where the three of them once stood together. He beckons them to join him, and they all hold hands in a moment of electric intensity. “Minister,” implores Pearl, “wilt thou stand here with mother and me, tomorrow noontide?” “Nay, not so.” Replies Dimmesdale, backpedaling furiously as the thought of public recognition hits him. “I shall indeed stand with thy mother and thee one other day, but not tomorrow.” Pearl tries to pull her hand away, but Dimmesdale hand on. She begs for acknowledgement and commitment, for a promise that Dimmesdale will take her and her mother’s hands in public. She tries to pin him down to a date. Pushed into a corner, he names “the great judgement day.” “The daylight of this world shall not see our meeting,” he says.
Near the end of the novel, Hester meets Dimmesdale in the woods and tries to persuade him that the three of them should return to Europe, where they could live out the love that “had a consecration of its own.” She tells him he has repented enough, and casts off her patch with the scarlet “A”. “Thou must know Pearl, our little Pearl,” she tells him. Dimmesdale worries that Pearl won’t warm up to him or trust him. But pearl, summoned now to join Hester and Dimmesdale, goes into a “fit of passion” and refuses to come until Hester dons the scarlet “A” again.
“He waits to welcome thee . . . He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother too. Wilt thou not love him? Come! He longs to greet thee!” Pearl had been burned before. If he really loves her, she wants proof. She wants Dimmesdale to act like a father and a husband. “Doth he love us?” she asks, staring into her mother’s eyes. “Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the town?” Once again, the adults tell her a deeper truth that contradicts all their previous words: “Not now, dear child.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is a wonderful piece of American Literature. The setting of the story related well to the history of Salem, Massachusetts and that time period in history.
Works Cited
Bayer, John G. “Narrative Techniques and the Oral Tradition in The Scarlet Letter.”
American Literature. Vol 52 no 2 May 1980: 250-263.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Scarlet Letter”. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. “Hawthorne: A Critical Study”. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1955.
