Pearl is defined to be elf, fey, and evil, which ascribes a unique shadow of light and shadow to her perpetual unknown and danger. She is crazy, rebellious, and uncontrollable, whom God is never more likely to look after a visit. She is definately not the reader's common understanding. Since The Scarlet Letter is permeated with a solid puritan color, many critics interpret pearl as something of sin from a symbolic point of view. Or because of Nathaniel Hawthorn's unhappy childhood and tense inner family relationships, some people interweaves innocent pearl with other protagonists' mental world using the sex drive device or Oedipus complex in a psycho-analytical way. However this sophisticated and difficult elf-child has not been uncovered any little, she is still some unfamiliar spirits concealing deeply under the defending clock.
According to the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, "God is dead", subsequently, this will lead to nihilism. In case the world is nihilistic, then everything is permitted, and people attain the energy to exercise a strong free will. With a strong free will, people can change into superhuman who have all the likelihood to achieve everything. As being a superhuman, he is not restricted to real human morality, and he can't be defeated destiny. In Hawthorn's Scarlet Letter, is pearl a superman with a strong free will, or as others, she actually is also bound by destiny? With the theory of Nietzsche and nihilism, this newspaper will go into the examination of pearl and make an effort to flick from the particles on pearl and give her a definite identity.
1. Pearl without Spiritual Conception
1. 1 Puritan Background
With the high idealism of religious flexibility, 102 puritan pilgrims stepped onto the Mayflower in 1620 to flee the old world. After 65 days' hard have difficulties against the most severe experience of ocean voyage, the fishing boat landed on the new continent with a never so shiny a future for them. They placed the strong perception of Manifest Future, and practice their preaching regarding themselves on the behalf of the imminent God. These are devoted to build the new colonial world a real puritan never-land.
' A person without God must be considered a person without religious conception
In the Bible, God is the inventor of the world. He is our almighty lord, and we can't ever surpass the power of the control placed by God. Within the script, God instructs his sons of right, incorrect, sacrifice, justice, love, sin, penitence, etc, which gives the very basis of the american culture and mould their life.
In Scarlet Letter, in the governor's hall, Governor Bellingham, Mr. Wilson, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth observed little pearl for the very first time.
'Ay, indeed!' cried good old Mr. Wilson. Skill thou a Christian child-ha? Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies whom we considered to have gone behind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry old Britain?'
'I am mother's child, ' responded to the scarlet perspective, 'and my name is Pearl!' 1
This is Pearl's first appearance in the book, and she accompanies her mother to the governor's hall. Mr. Wilson is so astonished with Pearl that he can't help questioning the identity and origins of this "little bird of red plumage". The nice people guess that little pearl has a "demon origin". Pearl is very beautiful to look at of a child, besides, her mom offers her full play of her creativeness and interest to make pear a garb "in a crimson velvet tunic of an peculiar chop, abundantly embroidered in fantasies and flourishes of platinum thread. " (Scarlet Notice, chapter. . . ). When people question pearl's demon origin and elf-like looking, these good people just impose their own religious judgement on this innocent child. Conversely, Pearl totally has not any notion of these critical narrow-minded sight and these imprisoned minds. She unveiled herself that she is mother's child biologically and she has a name of Pearl. Here pearl bears no spiritual burden in her center, so religious morality does not have any power on her behalf inner religious world. Now comes a daring finish: this landscape is a concealed confrontation between Puritanism and a new conception, more specifically nihilism or atheism.
2. Free will vs Fate
Does Pearl have a strong free will? Can pearl exercise her free will? Is Pearl constrained by fate?
Before analyzing these doubts, an obvious cognition of free will and destiny is very important. Free will referenced here is a restricted willpower, and it's a constrained one instead of an infinite one. Free will bears a strong responsibility, and it needs people to believe in themselves. You will discover no gods or any other agent who determine our figure, and we are in charge of cultivating our very own characters.
Fatalism is the thesis that what happens must happen. Fatalism believes that free will is impossible, activities are free, but still goes to an inevitable end. Determinism contains that each event or state of affairs, including every real human decision and action, is the inescapable and necessary consequence of prior affairs. Fate may make reference to destiny, an inescapable course of occasions. Fate here is more Determinism than Fatalism.
2. 1. A little powerless girl
Dimmesdale pours out such bitter attempting words to Hester:
"I am powerless to look. Wretched and sinful as I am, I have got no other thought than to drag on my earthly presence in the sphere where Providence hath put me"2
When he shed all his eager feelings on the term "powerless", we common readers get so heavy a weakness in his personality. He blames this powerlessness on Providence, and he excuses fate for many his hesitation and un-action. You can find litter sincereness in his hypocrite build.
But when target involves Pearl, "powerless" is sure to be considered a justifiable word for her. Hester goes to Governor's hall to plead for a agreement of rearing her own child. Even Pearl is defined to be "fiend-like", "dauntless", "wild and flighty little elf", she has no to control her own life, nor will she has the power to fight this injustice. This sense of desperation and powerless is unconquerable, and it maintains haunting humans through life, as it shoulders the unbearable burden of fate.
2. 2. Un-escapable Fate
Pearl as a child is powerless, then imagine if she grows up and can makes her own decisions, can she get away from fate overall? By the end of the storyline, it writes
"in no very long time following the physician's death, the wearer of the scarlet letter vanished, and Pearl along with her. "3
Pearl leaves and abandons her history with her mom in order to acquire a new life. By doing this, they both finally can leave behind their sinful life, and cast away the spell of destiny upon themselves. In such a brave action, their free will pushes them ahead, and their independence against fate is so near around their capture.
However, the fine detail of Chillingworth's previous will can not be forgotten in the conversation here.
"At old Roger Chillingworth's decease he bequeathed an extremely significant amount of property, both here and in England to little Pearl, the little girl of Hester Prynne
So Pearl-the elf child-the demon offspring, as some individuals up compared to that epoch persisted in considering her-became the richest heiress of her day in the New World. "4
What's the value of Chillingworth's bequeathment to Pearl? It gives Pearl the material foundation to build a new life outside the "New World". Without this groundwork, a fresh life will be a castle in the air. But this groundwork is not achieved by any free will by Pear, and it is old Chillingworth's will to give. Thus this bequeathment becomes a destiny kept on Pearl.
Friedrich Nietzsche proposes strong willpower (free will), hence there comes Hitler; Arthur Schopenhauer talks loud for the restrictions of free will, only resulting in the pessimism. If they're too extreme, there should be a balance between destiny and free will. However, in the above research of Pearl, we scarcely see any free will in her monumental turn-point, she is also enslaved by the powerful fate, which helps us to find her as a product of destiny.
3. Representation and Essence
The reason why pearl is misunderstood to be evil, fey, and elf, is largely lies on her behalf unnatural intuition.
Pearl asks her mom the particular scarlet notice means, why she wears the A, and why minister Dimmesdale keeps his hand over his center. These inter-connecting questions elevated by a-three-year old young lady are bizarre, and the questions themselves are beyond her capacity to compose if she is just a standard little child. Pearl says Hester that Chillingworth has a manipulation on Dimmesdale, and she actually is intuitively sensitive. For the landscape of Dimmesdale's virgil, Pearl laughs three times without express reasons, and she actually is haunted and dangerous. There are so many cases that may be quoted to demonstrate Pear's abnormality, but all the reality lies in her words. She says truth from incorrect.
The eagerness and subtlety, I will even say craftiness, with which the situation of 'the real and the evident world' is dealt with at present throughout European countries, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a 'Will to Truth' in the backdrop, and nothing at all else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In unusual and isolated instances, it may really have occurred that such a Will to Truth-a certain luxurious and exciting pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope-has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a small number of 'certainty' to a whole cartload of beautiful opportunities; there could even be puritanical fans of conscience, who like to place their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. 5
Nietzsche, in expanding "Prejudices of Philosophers", instructs that people are suffocated themselves in their own prejudices along the way of searching for the real world. Pearl is the only person in the novel who says the essence from the representation, because she actually is really the only innocent being who is not prejudiced in any standard in the complete story.
Since Adam and Eve eat the forbidden apple, sin comes forth. In puritan's theology, these inborn needs represent sin, and folks should repent, sacrifice and keep stoic. In Scarlet Letter, before the prison door, when Hester will cross the market place, women in the group gossip here and there and squash their hatred and disgust words toward her scandalous and sinful affairs. For these gossiping women, doesn't their superego manage their id, and twist their ego to prejudice? The greater superego repress identification, the more id will fight. The more powerful these women criticize Hester's sin, the more powerful their own passion for sin burst out of their hatred words. They cheat themselves by decorating a contrary appearance.
For pearl, she's a view from nowhere which is comparable to the immanent vitality. The Existentialists think that the world is a nothing and in little or nothing can people build something. And pearl build truth from her nihilistic world. In real life, people fear so much a nihilistic world, because a nihilistic world is similar to the most primitive world when Adam and Eve were cast into a helpless and total unusual place. In escaping this talk about, people figure out how to retain some common thing (religion, common interest, common prejudice, etc. ) which bind people collectively and share a feeling of belonging. Within the mean time, in addition they are restricted by these common things. There is a arena in Scarlet Letter when pearl performs with herself by the river bank or investment company, she is so noiseless and content with loneliness and the condition of nothing. That is quite the same as the Buddhism's coaching in The Gem Sutra that the world is unfilled without fact and experiencing everything can be achieved from egolessness and nothingness. In detailing this, we can borrow the conception of framework. A person lives in a platform like a jail which shapes a unique lifestyle. He/She think in this construction and eat in this construction. Also they are transformed by this platform. However Pearl is born to be always a total empty and she doesn't change until the spell is release. She has not a framework and she actually is free from prejudice of all kinds. She is what the Buddha phone calls true Bodhisattvas.
By breaking Pearl's incomprehensible patterns and words, a genuine Pearl should come before us and expose herself as an un-prejudiced human being who's also restricted by fate.
