Settler Discourses of Reform in The Scarlet Letter

In “The Governor’s Hall” and “The Elf-Child and the Minister,” local magistrates examine Hester and Pearl in order to determine if Hester is a fit guardian. In other words, Hester’s capacity to undertake Pearl’s... [ view full abstract ]

In “The Governor’s Hall” and “The Elf-Child and the Minister,” local magistrates examine Hester and Pearl in order to determine if Hester is a fit guardian. In other words, Hester’s capacity to undertake Pearl’s moral and religious wellbeing is a state matter. Pearl’s characterization as a precocious and unruly child conflates her eccentricities with a racially coded and malevolent darkness that takes shape in the forest just beyond the Boston settlement. Put another way, Pearl is the character that is most closely associated with unrestrained “wildness” as a signifier for indigeneity. This paper argues that placing Pearl’s characterization as an indigenized settler child in the context of nineteenth-century debates over the fate of Native youth imagines narrative possibilities for her eventual reform.

Hester and Pearl’s examination bears similarities to systems of indentured servitude and municipal regulation of deviant youth—typically poor children of color—that proliferated throughout southern New England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Moreover, Pearl is “peculiar” in ways that echo nineteenth-century arguments that Native children required institutional reform as a means of developing settler sentience, or normative mental and intellectual abilities. Histories of servitude and apprenticeship occur in the decades before removal and the development of the federal boarding school system. This paper suggests that a settler colonial critique of the ways in which reform and ability discourses targeted Native youth offers ways to understand how nineteenth-century literature imagines perceived national threats to settler futurities.