The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a novel chock full of symbolism, thematic statements, and long tedious sentences that seem to go on forever. With four main characters, readers a receives a mere four characters, with Pearl Prynne playing the most minor of them all. Throughout the novel, Pearl’s identity as a person is of the interpretation of everybody else in the novel; Pearl’s identity becomes her context in the lives of Hester and Dimmesdale, along with her context to nature and the townspeople. Hawthorne uses Pearl as an example of the theme that all people are shaped by personal experience, and he makes it blatantly obvious within the lines of the novel.
As a child, Hawthorne describes Pearl as “a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxurious of a guilty passion,” (Hawthorne 61) through this classification Pearl and the majority of classifications of Pearl as a baby, Pearl, seemingly, is this magic baby that experienced empathy and fear and understanding of the human language which babies can 't do. According to Barbara Garlite in her scholarly article, she spends the time to say that “In the past hundred years she has been variously described as ‘most artificial and unchildlike’,” (Garlite 689) and this is true. She seems less like a baby and more like an alien. Hawthorne does this on purpose. To give Hawthorne the benefit of the doubt, Hawthorne personifies the child as an angel because the point of view is biased by the protagonist, Hester Prynne.