This chapter develops Pearl both as a character and as a symbol. Pearl is a mischievous and almost unworldly child, whose uncontrollable nature reflects the sinful passion that led to her birth. Pearl’s character is closely tied to her birth, which justifies and makes the “other worldliness” about her very important. She is a product and a symbol of the act of adultery, an act of love, an act of passion, a sin, and a crime. Hawthorne, the narrator, states, “[Pearl] was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels . . ." However, she “lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born.”
The Puritan community believed extramarital sex to be inherently evil and influenced by the devil, and, because Pearl is a product of her mother’s extramarital sex, Hawthorne raises the issue of Pearl’s nature. Can something good come from something evil? Is Pearl inherently evil because she was born from what the Puritans conceived to be an immoral, sinful union? Perhaps, thinks Hester, who is fearful at least of such a predetermined outcome. Our modern sensibilities, however, shudder at the implication that an immoral act between two adults necessarily means that a child born from that sexual affair will be inherently evil.
Hawthorne’s condemnation of Puritanism continues in this chapter. His strongest rebuttal of the society’s self-serving, false piety occurs when he ironically contrasts the Puritan community's treatment of Hester and God's treatment of her. He notes of Hester’s fellow citizens, “Man had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself.” Ironically juxtaposed against the Puritan’s sentence that Hester wear the scarlet letter A is “God, [who] as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, . . . o be finally a blessed soul in heaven!” The comparison between the community’s (Puritan’s) and God’s responses to Hester’s extramarital affair is dramatic.
