Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: Hester and Pearl are Alternate Personalities of a Single Person

Pearl, Hester’s daughter, is not an ordinary little girl. First, she is a symbolic incarnation of the scarlet letter (“A” for adultery). Second, especially in the forest, she is portrayed as supernatural. Third, “Pearl is not an independent character so much as an abstraction of elements of Hester’s character: a kind of ‘double,’ or ‘other self,’” says Nina Baym in an online excerpt from The Scarlet Letter: A Reading (1986). In other words, Pearl is Hester’s alternate personality.

“…the woman [Hester] hath been like a possessed one…” (1, p. 51). As discussed in past posts, “possession” is an old theory for multiple personality.

“[Pearl], drawing [her] sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the mother’s system. [Pearl] now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day” (1, pp. 50-51).

“Pearl” is actually the name for a number of alternate personalities

“Pearl’s aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children…the warfare of Hester’s spirit…was perpetuated in Pearl…Hester could not help questioning…whether Pearl was a human child…the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence” (1, pp. 62-63).

“Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal…In the mere exercise of the fancy…there might be little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties…The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend…” (1, p. 65). But on other occasions, “it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement” (1, p. 134).

Hester and Pearl are Inverse

If a person were a pie, multiple personality is not more than one pie; it is one pie divided into a number of pieces. Where that analogy fails, however, is that, in multiple personality, none of the pieces are the same, and there is only so much of any ingredient to go around. For example, if one identity is more angry, other identities will be less angry, or perhaps even unable to feel anger.

Throughout the novel, Pearl has all the confidence, pride, and exuberance that penitent Hester lacks. And at the end of the novel, when you think Hester will have put her somber, penitent persona behind her, she resumes that persona, almost as if she were still wearing the scarlet letter. Why?

The reason is that Pearl has bloomed into a successful, worldly, confident woman. If they were really two separate people, Hester could have bloomed, too. But as alternate identities of a single person, what is added to Pearl is subtracted from Hester (and vice versa).

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Edited by Leland S. Person. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.