Scarlett Letter
...ion" (85). This said "rank luxuriance" illustrates Pearl's ability to foil the basic beliefs of a Puritan standard of living. Pearl is seen as an untouchable because she is the product of guilty passion, regardless of the universal warmth usually expressed towards young children and infants. Here, she referred to once again as a part of nature, which accepts her. Puritan society rejects Pearl because she lives life contrary to the accepted Puritan lifestyle, henceforth nature embraces her. Nature receives Pearl wholeheartedly and shows sympathy to the outcast. For example, nature's fondness of Pearl can be seen through the sunshine present in the forest, when Pearl attempts to catch the rays and, "The light lingered about the lonely child as if glad of such a playmate" (146). Nature is Pearl's equal. It welcomes her gleefully as no other child would and shows its warm and accepting demeanor through the welcoming weather. Additionally, Pearl frolicks where the "great black forest became the playmate of the lonely infant" (163). The forest is Pearl's only genuine friend. Society openly rejects Pearl just as it rejects the forest. In their banishment, they find companionship in one another. Finally, as Pearl plays in the forest while her mother waits across for the Reverend, "The truth seems to be that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child" (184). Just as the forest is dismissed by the Puritans and is seen as a source of evil, so are sinners. Nature and Pearl therefore, find solace in their mutual acceptance and friendship. Pearl and nature are both discarded in the same manner making it feasible for the environment to welcome the "little imp." Pearl's lack of companions works in a response of equilibrium bringing about Nature's affable acceptance. Pearl's distinguished characteristics, being of demon-like qualities and her link with nature, are exemplified through the use of foliage. For example, while Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale is meeting Pearl's mother, Hester, in the forest, Pearl, "threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light missile" (123). This act portrays Pearl's wild and undisciplined ways coinciding with the forest. She openly illustrates her disposition towards the Puritan society, in this case directly towards a respected leader of Puritans, by bombarding the Reverend with a product of her rejected comrade, which in a way is a part of herself. Additionally, while Hester and Mr. Dimmesdale are walking they hear, …clear, wild laughter of a young child's voice, proceeding from the adjacent burial-ground. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad, flat, armorial tombstone . . . she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother's command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock, which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered. (119) This further demonstrates the wild ways of the forest and Hester's young. Akin to nature, Pearl tends to be "out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact." Pearl does not behave "decorously" and ignores the accepted ways because society shuns that which they are ignorant and unsure of. Furthermore, focusing solely on her mother and nature, "Pearl took some eel-grass, and imitated, as best as she could, on her own bosom, the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter, the letter A, but freshly green, instead of sca...