The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne — Read

We have hardly spoken about that innocent infant who happened to spring, like a beautiful, eternal flower, from the foul indulgence of her mother’s guilty passion. How strange it seemed to Hester, as she watched her daughter grow more beautiful and more intelligent every day! Her Pearl! That’s what Hester named her, not in reference to the child’s appearance—which was neither calm nor pale, like a true pearl—but because she had come at a great price. Hester bought the child by parting with the only treasure she had: her virtue! How strange, indeed! Society had marked this woman’s sin with a scarlet letter, which was so powerful that no human sympathy could reach her unless it was the sympathy of a fellow sinner. As the direct result of the sin that man had punished, God had given her a lovely child. Pearl’s place was on Hester’s dishonored bosom. She connected her mother to the rest of mankind, and she would eventually become a blessed soul in Heaven! Yet these thoughts gave Hester more fear than hope. She knew she had committed an evil act, so she had no faith that its result would be good. Day after day, she watched fearfully as the child grew, always dreading the emergence of some dark and wild trait derived from the guilt in which she was conceived.

Certainly, Pearl had no physical defect. The child was so perfectly formed, energetic, and coordinated that she could have been born in the Garden of Eden. And if she had been left there after Adam and Eve had been driven out, she could have been the playmate of the angels. The child had a natural grace, which doesn’t always come with faultless beauty. Her clothes, no matter how simple, always seemed perfect. But little Pearl wasn’t dressed shabbily. Her mother—with a dark purpose that will become clearer as the story goes on—had bought the most luxurious material she could find and allowed her imagination to run wild when she designed the dresses Pearl wore in public. She looked so magnificent when dressed up—her natural beauty made more stunning—that a circle of radiance glowed around her on the cottage floor. A lesser beauty would have faded under such gorgeous garments. But a plain gown, torn and dirty from play, looked just as perfect on Pearl. Her features were ever-changing, as though enchanted. In this one child there were many children, ranging from the wild prettiness of a peasant baby to the miniature magnificence of an infant princess. Yet there was always a hint of passion, a certain color, which she never lost. If, in any of her changes, she had lost this color and grown paler, she would have ceased to be herself. She would no longer have been Pearl!