As the exposition of Hawthorne's classic novel, the grey
starkness of Puritan life and its sanctimonious cruelty and punishment of any who fail
to comply with its stringent ideology is portrayed in the description of the prison, the
oldest of all structures in the community:
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments
and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others
barheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily
timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes....The rust on the ponderous iron-work
of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all
that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful
era.
Incongruously, in front
of this door is a rose bush, covered with delicate and fragant
beauty:
But
on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush,
covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer
their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned
criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity
and be kind to him.
This rose
bush stands as a symbol of the power of nature to thrive in all situations. It also
represents the passion of the occupant behind the door, a passion incarnate in the body
of little Pearl.
In Chapter I Nathaniel Hawthorne sets
the tone for the "tale of human frailty and sorrow" which follows. The rust and decay
and ugliness of the prison and its door foreshadow the gloom of the narrative to
follow. The landmarks of Puritanism, the prison and the cemetery, suggest the themes of
punishment and death, themes that meet in the climax of the novel. The rose, in its
beauty, is Hawthorne's invitation to find "some sweet moral blossom" in the tragic tale
that follows.
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