Analyze Pearl's personality based on how she lives and responds to conflicts in her life. Is she a strong person in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

The character Pearl of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter acts as a symbol and is not rendered human until the final
chapter of the novel as she kisses the lips of her father and "a spell was broken." It
is only then that Pearl attains the ability to "grow up amid human joy and sorrow" and
not "forever do battle with the world."

Prior to the
concluding chapter, Pearl is the incarnation of the sins of passion that Hester Prynne
and Arthur Dimmesdale commit. As such, she is a baffling mixture of strong moods:
imaginative, inquisitive, intuitive, and obstinate at times. She demonstrates a fiery
nature that battles with the other children and at other times is given to
uncontrollable laughter. Because of the capriciousness of her nature, Pearl is referred
to as an "elf-child," and "imp," or an "airy sprite" while some of the Puritans contend
that she is a "demon offspring" perhaps because Pearl in Chapter
IV:

writhed in
convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type in its little frame, of the moral agony
which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the
day.

As evinced in Chapter
IV. Pearl's responses to conflicts reflect the responses of her mother rather than any
strength or weakness in Pearl herself. Because Hester Prynne demonstrates much strength
as a person, Pearl, then mirrors this strength. For instance, in Chapter XIX, Pearl will
not recognize or come to her mother until she replaces the scarlet letter that she has
cast off into the brook. This strength of recognition that Hester must continue to bear
her sin mirrors the words of Hester to Roger Chillingworth when he suggests that she may
be worthy of having her scarlet letter removed by the
magistrates,

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Were I not worthy to be quit of it, it would
fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a
different purport.

That
Pearl is primarily a symbol of the kind of passion which accompanies Hester's sin is
well developed in Chapter VI; therefore, any strength that Pearl demonstrates--or any
other emotion, for that matter--is a reflection of the nature of her mother, Hester
Pyrnne, of whose passionate soul she is symbolic:

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Pearl's aspect was imbued with a spell of
infinite variety; in this one child there were many
children....

Hester could only account for the child's
character—and even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself had
been, during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual
world, and her bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother's impassioned state
had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its
moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of
crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light, of the
intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was
perpetuated in Pearl.