It is said that a daughter steals her mother’s beauty, but does that mean she also takes her mother’s burdens, sins and reputation. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, carries her mother’s faults through her adolescents. Pearl lives a lonely life as an outcast being the result of her mother’s great sin. Named Pearl “not as a calm, white, unimpassioned luster” (Hawthorne 91) but “as being a great price-purchased with all she had- her mother’s only treasure” (91). It is quite oblivious Pearl is her mother’s treasure, but as for the rest of the Puritan community Pearl is ridiculed and frowned upon just as her mother, especially since Pearl is treated as an “imp of evil, emblem and product of sin” ( 95). Just from her name and the meaning behind it Pearl’s existence is not only a character in The Scarlet Letter but also a …show more content…
Pearl is described as “a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion.”(91) She is the good that came from her mother’s sin. It seems that even when described as a witch, and alien, all of Pearl’s actions are graceful and refreshing. However Pearl’s greatest act of redemption comes right before her father’s death. As her father reveals his sin and then dies, Pearl kisses him. This simple act symbolized the redemption of Reverend Dimmesdale’s sin and the burden he suffered keeping that sin a secret from the community. To even greater extent Pearl is able to redeem her mother by becoming a woman. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s ex-husband, was so moved by Dimmesdale’s confession that he decided to give Pearl his inheritance. With the inheritance, Pearl was able to marry well and bare children in a different community. With a new start Pearl could be human and redeem her parents of their sins avoiding the life foreshadowed for her in the Puritan