Pearl In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter
“And in Its Depths it Has its Pearls Too”
In the Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s style could accurately be likened to that of an artist; he commands color, contrast, and shading to enhance his work. On page 54, Hawthorne paints a rare portrait of Pearl, at once with the precision of a cartographer, mapping out her inner complexities, and with the wonder of Van Gogh, capturing her particular beauty in vivid color. Adorning his work with euphonious, connotative diction, and mounting syntax, Hawthorne fashions a wild, wraithlike mood, in order to distinguish Pearl from the realm of the ordinary and elevate her to greater symbolic significance.
As a painter uses a brush, Hawthorne utilizes diction to color his characterization of Pearl. …show more content…
Adorning the passage with sentences of increasing length, he creates a sense of mounting action. If one were to read the passage out loud, the sheer number and length of clauses would cause one to continually pause, breathless. In constructing this passage so, Hawthorne emphasizes Pearl’s wild energy and tirelessness. Hawthorne’s juxtaposition of descriptions of Pearl’s imagination with comparisons of Church elders to “pine trees- aged, black and solemn” emphasizes the great contrast between Pearl’s vivacity and the stoicism of the Puritan elders. Hawthorne uses the alliteration of certain words (“darting up and dancing” and “vast variety”) to lend a euphonious sound to the passage. In contrast to this euphony, the passage ends with the repetition of a series of hard c sounds (“constant”, “cause in the contest”). These words create harsh sounds that correspond with the sentence’s harsh subject, an adverse world. In addition, the staccato consonant sounds contrast with the fluid prior clauses. This contrast reinforces Pearl’s variability, because just as Pearl is changeable, the sentence is changeable, dynamic in sound and construction.
Like a masterful work of art, Hawthorne’s writing is rich in complexity, vivid in color, and intricate in its balance of light and dark elements. As a painter paints with a brush, Hawthorne paints a portrait of Pearl with diction and syntax, assigning otherworldliness and symbolic
In the Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s style could accurately be likened to that of an artist; he commands color, contrast, and shading to enhance his work. On page 54, Hawthorne paints a rare portrait of Pearl, at once with the precision of a cartographer, mapping out her inner complexities, and with the wonder of Van Gogh, capturing her particular beauty in vivid color. Adorning his work with euphonious, connotative diction, and mounting syntax, Hawthorne fashions a wild, wraithlike mood, in order to distinguish Pearl from the realm of the ordinary and elevate her to greater symbolic significance.
As a painter uses a brush, Hawthorne utilizes diction to color his characterization of Pearl. …show more content…
Adorning the passage with sentences of increasing length, he creates a sense of mounting action. If one were to read the passage out loud, the sheer number and length of clauses would cause one to continually pause, breathless. In constructing this passage so, Hawthorne emphasizes Pearl’s wild energy and tirelessness. Hawthorne’s juxtaposition of descriptions of Pearl’s imagination with comparisons of Church elders to “pine trees- aged, black and solemn” emphasizes the great contrast between Pearl’s vivacity and the stoicism of the Puritan elders. Hawthorne uses the alliteration of certain words (“darting up and dancing” and “vast variety”) to lend a euphonious sound to the passage. In contrast to this euphony, the passage ends with the repetition of a series of hard c sounds (“constant”, “cause in the contest”). These words create harsh sounds that correspond with the sentence’s harsh subject, an adverse world. In addition, the staccato consonant sounds contrast with the fluid prior clauses. This contrast reinforces Pearl’s variability, because just as Pearl is changeable, the sentence is changeable, dynamic in sound and construction.
Like a masterful work of art, Hawthorne’s writing is rich in complexity, vivid in color, and intricate in its balance of light and dark elements. As a painter paints with a brush, Hawthorne paints a portrait of Pearl with diction and syntax, assigning otherworldliness and symbolic