Pearl also functions as a constant reminder of Hester's adulterous act. She is, in fact, the personification of that act. Even as a baby, she instinctively reaches for the scarlet letter.
Hawthorne says it is the first object of which she seemed aware, and she focuses on the letter in many scenes. She creates her own letter out of moss, sees the letter in the breastplate at Governor Bellingham's mansion, and points at it in the forest scene with Hester and Dimmesdale. As a symbol, Pearl always keeps Hester aware of her sin. Just as Dimmesdale cannot escape to Europe because Chillingworth has cut off his exit, Pearl always keeps Hester aware that there is no escape from her passionate nature.
The Puritans would call that nature "sinful. Hawthorne's handling of mirror images has both the goal of representing the passionate, artistic side of man and also the idea that life's truths can be pictured in mirror images. Hester looks into "the black mirror of Pearl's eye" and she sees "a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them.
If so, Pearl is the embodiment of that passion. The poetic, intuitive, outlawed nature of the artist is an object of evil to the Puritans. As a symbol, Pearl represents that nature. As she looks in the brook in Chapter 19, she sees "another child, — another and the same, with likewise its ray of golden light. Filled with the glory of sunshine, sympathetic, but only "somewhat of its [Pearl's] own shadowy and intangible quality," it is the passion of the artist, the outlaw.
This is a passion that does not know the bounds of the Puritan village. In the forest, this passion can come alive and does again when Hester takes off her cap and lets down her hair. Pearl is the living embodiment of this viewpoint, and the mirror image makes that symbol come to life. Hester herself tries to account for the nature of her child and gets no farther than the symbolic unity of Pearl and her own passion.
A close examination of Chapter 6, "Pearl," shows the unification of the child with the idea of sin. Hester is recalling the moment when she had given herself to Dimmesdale in love.
The only way she can account for Pearl's nature is in seeing how the child is the symbol of that moment. By choosing to embrace her actions, Hester flourishes and presents the scarlet letter with a new meaning.
Hester has no way of hiding her sins like Dimmesdale since she is pregnant. Initially, the people of the Boston were cold and scorned Hester for her sins.
Everyone can be forgiven for their mistakes, despite the views of those surrounding them. When Hester Prynne gets caught committing adultery and premarital sex, her punishment is extremely severe. She is thrown in prison, forced to wear a large letter A on her chest for the rest of her life, forced to raise her daughter Pearl and is publically humiliated upon a scaffold. Despite this lifelong punishment, many of the townspeople feel that Hester got off too easy; as the written punishment for adultery is death.
Hester did not love Chillingworth anymore and she could not love him ever. Her thought process on Chillingworth is why she committed adultery. Losing custody of Pearl was due to the punishment inflicted on her because of her disloyalty to. The Scarlet Letter and Easy A are the stories of women who defy their societies. Hester, of The Scarlet Letter commits adultery but refuses to reveal Dimmesdale or Chillingworth in order to both men from public humiliation. Hester is forced to bear the burden of her punishment alone, while her partner is held up as saintly.
Olive, of Easy A, pretends to sleep with various boys in order to protect them from bullying and to boost their social statuses and inadvertently gives herself a bad reputation in doing so.
In the time period of the Puritans, adultery was one of the most shameful crimes, considering how strictly they followed the bible. Once word travels around town the way rumours tend to do, Hester quickly becomes the center of attention in the community.
There are various impacts; not only on her, but the entire community, with the birth of her barbaric child whom defies the standard Puritan etiquette, and the man who is also guilty and silently suffering. Overall, the response. Dimmesdale was created by Nathaniel Hawthorne representing a weak character in many ways. One of the many weak decisions made by Hawthorne that stood out was the guilt he had built up, eating away at him causing an internal struggle if he should do right and confess or if he should let the one he loves suffer because of his actions.
The Scarlet Letter is about the Puritan society and the outcome of the immoral decisions of the protagonist, Hester Prynne. Nathaniel Hawthorne has an overall unfavorable view against Hester and her choices, so his storyline involves many consequences for her.
Hester Prynne wears the scarlet letter as an accessory as well as an acceptance of her consequence for not sharing any details about her sin. Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne is critical of any character committing a sin, so Hester Prynne exemplifies his criticism as she portrays an immoral protagonist.
When we keep secrets we also keep guilt and guilt will destroy us from the inside. She decides to meet Dimmesdale at a forest path after she finds out he went to visit a Native American settlement and would walk down that route. She would warn him of Chillingworth and telling him his identity. Hester brings Pearl and while she waits for the minister by the brook, Pearl asks her mother to tell her the story of the Black Man and his connection to the letter. Hester asks her where she has learned that story, and she tells her it was the old woman Mistress Hibbins who told her that the Black Man has left his mark on the letter.
Hester even said she had met the Black Man once and placed his mark on the letter. At that moment, Dimmesdale is seen coming down the path. Wanting some time alone, Hester tells Pearl to go play in the woods, and assures her that Dimmesdale is not the Black Man.
After the girl scurries away, the minister approaches Hester covering his chest with his hand and appearing weak. The couple hold hands and sit together near the brook, and that their presence in the forest keeps them safe from Chillingworth and from society. They talk, with Dimmesdale asking Hester if she has found peace, which she doesn't answer but asks him the same thing, and the minister responds by confessing about his misery.
Hester reveals to Dimmesdale that Chillingworth is her husband, which shocks the minister and condemns her, blaming her for his suffering.
Not wanting to hear Dimmesdale speaking ill of her, she pulls him to her chest and has his face placed against the letter. She apologizes to him and he eventually forgives her, stating that Chillingworth is a worse sinner than both of them. He is worried of the physician and him exposing his secret, so Hester convinces him he should flee Boston and start a new life in Europe. When he says he is unable to go alone, she tells him he won't need to and she and Pearl would join him to live together as a family.
The couple are delighted at the fact of escaping the country together, and is even called an "angel" by the minister. She unpins the letter and tosses it away at the bank of a stream.
While still smiling, she takes off her cap and lets her long, dark hair loose to flow. She regains some of her passion again as she is brightened by the sunlight. They talk about Pearl, and Hester is excited at the fact of Pearl meeting her father for the first time. She calls her daughter, who was playing by the brook. The girl is suspicious and refuses to come to her when she spots her mother isn't wearing the letter.
Hester asks her to go pick up the letter and bring it to her, but Pearl refuses. When she puts it back on herself and places her hair back in her cap, the girls accepts her by kissing her and then the letter. She encourages Pearl to embrace Dimmesdale as well, even though she doesn't tell her she is his child.
When her daughter asks if the minister is coming back to town with them, Hester responds that he won't just yet and Dimmesdale kisses her with Pearl washing off the kiss at the brook. Shortly after her meeting, Hester makes arrangements for their escape. She meets the captain and crew at their ship in the harbour that is to depart for Bristol, England.
She secures a place for two adults and a child among the passengers, and they would leave in 4 days right after Dimmesdale delivers his sermon on Election Day. On the day of the new governor's inauguration, Hester and Pearl await the upcoming procession and stand with a group of Natives as well as some sailors from the ship Hester and Dimmesdale would board right after the sermon.
When asked by her daughter if the minister would talk to them when they are in and if they would join him like at the brook, Hester replies he won't meet them in public yet. She starts imagining leaving behind her isolation, but her expectations are shattered when the shipmaster comes by and informs her Chillingworth has joined the party on the same ship Hester, Dimmesdale and Pearl would be leaving. She looks through the crowd and sees Chillingworth smiling at her menacingly.
She was about to think what to do now in her unexpected situation when she hears military music. The town officials walk through the marketplace, with Dimmesdale being part of the procession behind the magistrates. He is looking more energetic, but as Hester stares at him, she starts being distressed and doesn't know how it happened.
She thought about their meeting in the forest, and since she hardly recognized him, she feared their time together by the brook was just a delusion. When asked by Pearl if the minister is the same man who kissed her at the brook, Hester tells her to keep quiet and not talk about the day they were by the brook in public. She scolds her daughter when she said she didn't recognize the minister and would run up to him and kiss him. Mistress Hibbins appears and talks with Hester, asking her if she knows Dimmesdale as the same minister she met at the forest path.
While Hester doesn't know and won't speak lightly of him, the old woman says she knows both Dimmesdale and Hester are servants to the Black Man. After the sermon, Hester and Pearl were standing in front of the scaffold when Dimmesdale approaches them and asks them to join him on the scaffold. When they climbed on top, he tells her he is dying and wants her to take responsibility for his shame.
Hester holds his head to her chest while Pearl kisses him. She asks him when they would be together again in the afterlife, he says only God can decide on that. He then bids her farewell and dies in her arms.
Years later, Hester suddenly returns to the abandoned cottage where she used to live and wears the letter again.
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