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Pearl: 1850–1955

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Barbara Garlitz
Barbara Garlitz*
Affiliation:
Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
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Extract

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 4-Part-1 , September 1957 , pp. 689 - 699
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 Henry Giles, Illustrations of Genius (Boston, 1854), p. 76; George B. Loring, “Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter,” Mass. Quart. Rev., III (Sept. 1850), 494.

2 W. H. Barnes, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Methodist Quart. Rev., Xlviii (Jan. 1866), 59; G. W. Griffin, Studies in Literature (Baltimore, 1870), p. 54; Charles F. Johnson, Three Americans and Three Englishmen (New York, 1886; cop. 1885), p. 146; Henry S. Pancoast, An Introduction to American Literature (New York, 1900; cop. 1898), p. 197.

3 Theodore T. Munger, “Notes on The Scarlet Letter, ” Atlantic Monthly, xciii (April 1904), 527; John C. Metcalf, American Literature (Atlanta, 1914), p. 188; William B. Cairns, A History of American Literature (New York, 1912), p. 313.

4 Randall Stewart, Introd., The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New-Haven, 1932), p. xxix; Oscar Cargill, “Nemesis and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” PMLA, III (Sept. 1937), 848–849.

5 W. Stacey Johnson, “Sin and Salvation in Hawthorne,” Hibbert Jour., L (Oct. 1951), 44; Roy R. Male, “From the Innermost Germ, the Organic Principle in Hawthorne's Fiction,” ELH, xx (Sept. 1953), 224–225, 227; Joseph Levi, “Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: (A Psychoanalytic Interpretation),” American Imago, x (1953), 303; Hugh N. Maclean, “Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter: ‘The Dark Problem of This Life’,” AL, xxvii (March 1955), 14.

6 Charles Eisinger, “Pearl and the Puritan Heritage,” College Eng., xii (March 1951), 329; Darrel Abel, “Hawthorne's Pearl: Symbol and Character,” ELH, xviii (March 1951), 56–57; Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne, A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 145.

7 Elizabeth W. Peck, Scarlet Letter, Dramatised (Boston, 1876), p. 30, et passim.

8 Julian Hawthorne, “Problems of The Scarlet Letter,” Atlantic Monthly, lvii (April 1886), 476.

9 Walter Blair, “Color, Light, and Shadow in Hawthorne's Fiction,” NEQ, xv (March 1942), 83, 89.

10 Austin Warren, Introd., The Scarlet Letter (New York: Rinehart, 1947), p. ix; Hyatt Waggoner, “Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Cemetery, The Prison, and The Rose,” Univ. of Kansas City Rev., xiv (Spring 1948), 185.

11 Margaret Forster, Hand-Book of American Literature (London, 1854), p. 207; George B. Smith, Poets and Novelists (London, 1875), p. 196,

12 Carl Van Doren, The American Nonet (New York, 1921), p. 93; William Lyon Phelps, Some Makers of American Literature (Boston, 1922), p. 120.

13 See The Scarlet Letter, pp. 138, 119, Vol. V of The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George P. Lathrop, 13 vols. (Boston, 1883). All citations from Hawthorne in my text are to this edition.

14 Hawthorne, the Artist: Fine-Art Devices in Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1944), pp. 148–149. See also John Louis Haney, The Story of Our Literature (Boston, 1923), p. 108.

15 William B. Stein, Hawthorne's Faust: A Study of the Devil Archetype (Gainesville, 1953), pp. 104, 42.

16 American Notebooks, p. 117.

17 Said of Pearl by Thomas G. Selby, The Theology of Modern Fiction (London, 1896), p. 83.

18 “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” English Rev., xxviii (May 1919), 416; loc. cit. (n. 6 above).

19 Thomas Bradfield, “The Romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Westminster Rev., cxlii (Aug. 1894), 208; Selby, loc. cit. (n. 17 above); Munger, loc. cit. (n. 3 above); Lawrence S. Hall, Hawthorne, Critic of Society (New Haven, 1944), p. 168.

20 Anne Marie McNamara, “The Character of Flame: The Function of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, ” AL, xxvii (Jan. 1956), 552,537.

21 N. Hawthorne: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris, 1905), pp. 162–163.

22 Cargill, loc. cit. (n. 4 above). But Cargill thinks Pearl a synthesis of Rousseau and Calvin because she acquires Original Sin—what makes her “a normal human being”—by Dimmesdale's kiss.

23 “Maule's Curse: Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory,” Amer. Rev., ix (Sept. 1937), 357; op. cit. (n. 5 above), p. 329.

24 See, e.g., Raymond W. Short, Introd., Four Great American Novels (New Fork, 1946), p. xxvii. Later Abel calls Pearl an “amoralist.” See “Modes of Ethical Sensibility in Hawthorne,” MLN, LXVIII (Feb. 1953), 83–84.

25 American Notebooks, p. 170. See Malcolm Cowley, “Hawthorne in the Looking Glass,” Sewanee Rev., lvi (Autumn 1948), 545–564.

26 Charles F. Johnson and Julian Hawthorne (see above, nn. 2 and 8). They do not seem to mean that she is amoral in its modem sense; Johnson is suggesting that Pearl is a Caliban, and Haw'thome that like Lucifer she represents the diabolic principle in the universe.

page 689 26a See, e.g., Gabriel Compayré, L'Evolution intellectuelle et morale de I'enfant (Paris, 1893) and James M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (New York, 1895). For a general discussion of the origin of the concept of the amorality of children see F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin (Cambridge, Eng., 1902), pp. 93–112 or his “The Child and Sin” in Religion and the Child, ed. Thomas Stephens (New York, 1905), pp. 154–184.

27 Anne Wales Abbot, rev. of The Scarlet Letter, North Amer. Rev., lxxi (July 1850), 142; Spiller, Thorp, et al., Literary History of the United States (New York, 1953; 1st ed., 1946), p. 424.

28 Anthony Trollope, “The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” North Amer. Rev., cxxix (Sept. 1879), 211; Herbert Gorman, Hawthorne, A Study in Solitude (New York, 1927), p. 88.

29 Richard H. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and The Dark (Norman, 1952), p. 114.

30 Even in her mission Pearl might be called the scarlet letter, which signifies not only Hester's sin but the retribution of society.

31 George Edward Woodberry, Nathaniel Hawthorne: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1918), p. 147; Gordon Roper, Introd., The Scarlet Letter and Selected Prose Works (New York, 1949), pp. xxxvi-xxxvii; Randall Stewart, American Notebooks, p. xxxi.

32 Said of Pansie in The Dolliver Romance, xi, 46.

33 Hawthorne read Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. (See Marion Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, 1828–1850, New York, 1949, p. 61.) Smith's views -were derived from Hume.

34 On these points see Johann C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Rev. C. Moore (London, 1797), I, 137, and George Combe, The Constitution of Man (Boston, 1829), pp. 148–149. Hawthorne read both (see Kesselring, pp. 55, 48).

35 A Treatise on the Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy (Edinburgh, 1846), p. 81.

36 On the source of The Birthmark see Randall Stewart, American Notebooks, p. xxv.

37 Anon., “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” North British Rev., xlix (Sept. 1868), 197. Others recognized Pearl as a case of bad heredity. See Julian Hawthorne; Rev. Charles C. Starbuck, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Andover Rev., VIII (1887), 40.

38 James E. Miller, Jr., “Hawthorne and Melville: The Unpardonable Sin,” PMLA, lxx (March 1955), 91.

39 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Literary World, VII (Aug. 1850), 126.

40 American Notebooks, p. 195.

41 Alec in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Ch. xii; Ibsen's Brand, Act IV.