pearl as rose bush

-“‘Pearl? – Ruby, rather! – or Coral – or Red Rose, at the very least, judging form thy hue!’” (75). –Governor Belllingham

-Reverend Wilson asks if Pearl can tell him who made her (wanting her to give the proper Christian answer), but Pearl refuses to say that God made her…“the child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door” (76).

This refers back to the rose bush by the prison door that offers Nature’s kindness and beauty to the lone criminal. This in itself is a statement too, that Nature is non-discriminatory in its sympathy to criminals and society’s outcast, who maybe appreciate it most in the absence of human sympathy.

“In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild-flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom; dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But, whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little, laughing image of a fiend peeping out – or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it – from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes” (67, emphasis mine).

The first time I read this scene, I found Pearl so eerie, and interpreted her action as one of attack. However, in relation to her personification of the rose bush and Nature’s kind sympathy, Pearl could be using the flowers here not as weapons, but as a way to cover Hester’s “A”. In this reading, the flowers covering “the mother’s breast” become a symbol of Nature’s touch of compassion, and Pearl could be attempting to cover the symbol of her mother’s isolation and pain (67).