As a symbol, Pearl functions first as a reminder of Hester’s passion. Hester realizes this in the first scaffold scene when she resists the temptation to hold Pearl in front of the scarlet A, “wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another.” As Pearl grows into a lovely, sprite-like child, Hester feels that her daughter’s strange behavior is somehow associated with Pearl’s conception and birth.
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.” In Chapter 6, Hawthorne employs an often-used technique for that passion.
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.” Is this her own face, never with malice, but contorted by the evil of her passion? If so, Pearl is the embodiment of that passion.
