Pearl's Role In Puritan Society

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In Puritan society, a sinner is not taken to church, they are pushed away and condemned. The Puritan people rejected any minority in the majority, and that is precisely the case when it came to Hester Prynne. Because Hester was a sinner, and her pregnancy was from sin, her child was not seen as a puritan child. Pearl was defaultly given the name of “witch baby” despite the overwhelming lack of evidence for this claim. Pearl was a stain on Puritan society, the product of a terrible misdoing. She was seen as secondary to Puritan society, which is exactly the role she played in Hawthorne’s novel- secondary.
Pearl’s character becomes a metaphor early in the novel “It [Pearl] was the scarlet letter in another form, the scarlet letter endowed with …show more content…
Yet in being born, she defied societies standards. In being a person, a pure, sinfree, mortal person, she defies all expectation. She does not grow up to be a witch as the town assumed, or an outcast like her mother. She was the reflection of what Hester could have had, had this sin never occurred. A marriage to a rich man, and a “normal” Puritan life. Yet in having Pearl, in accepting that sin, Hester redefines society. Pearl becomes the success story from an unsuccessful situation. Pearl becomes a human not only because she cries over her father’s death and is warmed by his acceptance, nor because she took on some of both her parents’ traits and became a typical, normal citizen. She becomes a human because she defied the predetermined roles assigned to her by a society that was always right. Because in being the product of sin she was STILL Puritan, if not more so than the rest. Pearl was pure in every sense of the word, even when society condemned her on false terms. She was pure without the label, while the rest of society had a false sense of self-purity while judging Hester for her sins, and using her as a scapegoat to downplay their own. Pearl shows the fundamental problem of the Puritan society, the obsession with image as opposed to character. Pearl’s character proved that just because you came from sin doesn't mean you are
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