Scarlet Letter #3

Chapter 6 (pages 85-96)

            I didn’t really like this chapter. I find the relationship between Pearl and Hester to be beautiful, but the chapter bored me. Plus it didn’t help being how I was listening to Mozart while reading. However, this chapter goes into great detail about Hester’s sunshine. Pearl, named “as being of great price-purchased with all she had-her mother’s only treasure!” (Hawthorne, 85)

            Just like chapter 5, Hawthorne is showing a more sentimental side of Hester in this chapter. She’s strong in the very beginning of the novel and now we learn that she’s only strong because the heavens blessed her with this child. “Above all, the warfare of Hester’s spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl” (Hawthorne, 87) Even at such a young age, I feel as though Pearl knows she is different from the other kids.

• Symbol: Pearl’s eyes and smile

Every time Hester wonders if Pearl is a demon child, Pearl smiles and looks at her with eyes that reach the depth of your soul. Then, Hester knows her child is just a blessing that the world doesn’t understand.

Chapter 7 (pages 96-104)

            Do my eyes deceive me? Could Pearl really be taken away from her mother? This is not happening!

            Pearl has to be the cutest little thing. I picture Pearl with anime-like eyes, big, brown, and bright. When reading about Pearl stopping the kids from flinging mud at her and Hester, all I could do was laugh; imagining this little girl scaring off children three times her size. Pearl isn’t a sin; she gets rid of the sins. “She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence-the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment-whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation.” (Hawthorne, page 99)

            The last event that caught my eye in this chapter was on page 102, “…that it made Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into Pearl’s shape.” (Hawthorne) Why did Hester begin to see her child as an imp (demon)? Were the words of the townspeople getting to her?

Chapter 8 (pages 104-114)

            When Governor Bellingham, Wilson, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale walk into the room, they didn’t notice Hester. They talked bad about young Pearl until they noticed the mother. Gov. Bellingham tells Hester that Pearl doesn’t belong and that she isn’t a Christian child. However, talking bad about an infant isn’t Christian-like either!

            As the adults have a discussion about Pearl, there goes Chillingworth getting on my last nerve!! His whispers got under Prynne’s skin and she sticks up for her daughter. “God gave me the child! He gave her in requital of all things else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness!-she is my torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me as too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!” (Prynne, page 109)

            Hester doesn’t give up when the men insist on separating her and her child. She perseveres by asking Dimmesdale to help her out. To my astonishment, he does just that. Maybe she has one person that hasn’t completely given up on her. I think Chillingworth is suspicious of Dimmesdale. “You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” He gives off the impression that the clergyman was the apprentice in the adultery. At the top of page 113, Chillingworth wants the men to continue the search for the father of Pearl. Why does he care so much? Maybe because men don’t like to be portrayed as a fool; even in today’s day in age men don’t want to find out their girlfriend or wife cheated on them. I think he cares because she killed his “pride”. In the end, precious Pearl is allowed to stay with her mother.J