In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of the characters suffer from the tolls of sin, but none as horribly as Hester's daughter Pearl. She alone suffers from sin that is not her own, but rather that of her mother. From the day she is conceived, Pearl is portrayed as an offspring of vice. She is brought introduced to the discerning, pitiless domain of the Puritan religion from inside a jail, a place where no light can touch the depths of her mother's sin. The austere Puritan ways punish Hester through banishment from the community and the church, simultaneously punishing Pearl in the process. This isolation leads to an unspoken detachment and animosity between her and the other Puritan children. Thus we see how Pearl is conceived through sin, and how she suffers when her mother and the community situate this deed upon her like the scarlet letter on her mother's bosom. Hester Prynn impresses her feelings of guilt onto Pearl, whom she sees as a reminder of her sin, especially since as an infant Pearl is acutely aware of the scarlet letter A on her mother's chest. When still in her crib, Pearl reached up and grasped the letter, causing "Hester Prynne [to] clutch the fatal tokenŠso infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand" (Hawthorne 66). Hester feels implicitly guilty whenever she sees Pearl, a feeling she reflects onto her innocent child. She is therefore constantly questioning Pearl's existence and purpose with questions: asking God, "what is this being which I have brought into the world!" or inquiring to Pearl, "Child, what art thou?" In this manner, Hester forces the child to become detached from society. Pearl becomes no more than a manifestation based entirely upon Hester's and Dimmesdale's original sin. She is described as "the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life!"(70). Due to Hester's guilty view of her daughter, she is unable see the graci...
