The opening
ofof "" is beautiful prose:
that little
creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and
immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to the
sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and
the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the features of this child!
More than a child,is a symbol of the love and passion betweenand
the father of the child. In addition, she is the outpourings of the repressed heart of her
mother. All outpouring of the passions of the woman imprisoned by grey and a mark upon her
bosom are manifested in Pearl:
Man had marked this woman's
sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy
could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which
man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom,
to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed
soul in heaven.
In , Hester herself explains that Pearl
is the scarlet letter only "capable of being loved and so endowed with the million-fold the
power of retribution: "She is my happiness!....She is my torture!" In a criticism of
the harsh punishment of the Puritans. also, Hawthorne writes that God has given Hester a lovely
child to connect the isolated Hester with the human race and to provide her with the prospect of
reparation through her caring love for her child.
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