Innocence and Experience in The Scarlet Letter

Notice the display of the Romantic view of Nature, as well as Blake’s Innocence and Experience in this passage:

“‘Mother,’ said little Pearl, ‘the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!’
‘Nor ever will, my child, I hope,’ said Hester.
‘And why not, mother?’ asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of her race. ‘Will not it come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?’
‘Run way, child,’ answered her mother, ‘and catch the sunshine! It will soon be gone.’
Pearl set forth, at a great pace, and, as Hester smiled to perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, and brightened by its splendor, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the magic circle too.
‘It will go now!’ said Pearl, shaking her head.
‘See!’ answered Hester, smiling. ‘Now I can stretch out my hand and grasp some of it.’
As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or to judge from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl’s features, her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade” (126).

In this passage, Pearl clearly represents Innocence, and Hester, Experience. Also, the sunshine is portrayed as a symbol of childlike purity while Hester’s scarlet “A” symbolizes the consequences that come with experience. Pearl finds companionship in the sunlight, and here Nature replaces the human playmates that the ostracized girl lacks. Just as there is often a hint of the coming Experience in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Pearl shows her hint of adult wisdom in asking her mother, “‘Will not it [Experience] come of its own accord, when I am a woman grown?’” (126). Though Pearl and Hester, as a family unit, show the co-existing contraries of Innocence and Experience, the two states do not blend here. When Hester tries to touch the sunshine, it either vanished or was absorbed by Pearl. Hawthorne also points to the linear path into further Experience in the final mention of their path and the coming gloomy shade.