The Scarlet letter is the perfect example of the American Romantic Era, celebrating the beauty and the power of the natural world. Hester and Reverend Dimmesdale’s daughter who was born because of their affair is the Romantic Ideal of a capacity for wonder and consequently a reverence for the freshness and innocence of childhood vision.
Pearl was looked at as somewhat of an outcast, mainly because everyone was a Puritan and anyone that knows understands that Puritans are people that are very Orthodoxic with very censored moral beliefs especially about pleasure and sex, therefore the fact that Pearl was not only born out of wedlock, but her mother’s known husband was not her biological father, all those factors did not sit very well with the locals. Pearl was a symbol of her mother’s shameful act, the narrator at some point refers to Pearl as “The scarlet letter endowed with life” because just like the letter A pinned on Hester’s chest “Pearl was the public consequence of Hester’s very private sin”. Dimmesdale
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Dimmesdale is evidently a secret sinner because the face that he puts on in public is the total opposite to that of his private life. Dimmesdale symbolizes hypocrisy and somewhat of a self-centered intellectualist who knows that his affair with Hester went against his beliefs, yet he does not have the courage to speak up and claim Pearl as his daughter, which is the principal conflict in the novel. “For Dimmesdale, however, his effectiveness betrays his desire to confess.” [Van Kirk]. Surprisingly his sermons got better with every passing moment that he suffered in silence. That says allot about how his faith affected him greatly and his conscience played a major