Although the reader actually meets only Hester and her infant daughter, Pearl, in this chapter, Hawthorne begins his characterization of all four of the novel’s major characters. He describes Hester physically, and he tells about her background, illustrating her pride and shame. Then we see Pearl and hear her cry out when her mother fiercely clutches her at the end of the chapter. Although Pearl is one of the physical symbols of Hester's sin (the other is the scarlet A), she is much more than that. She is the product of an act of love — socially forbidden love as it may have been — but love still. This is why Pearl, as we later learn, is not amenable to social rules. She was conceived in an act that was intolerable in the Puritan code and society.
In addition to Hester and Pearl’s appearance, we get our first glimpse of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, the novel’s other two main characters. Although the irony of Dimmesdale's relationship to Hester is not yet apparent, his grief over his parishioner Hester is commented on by one of the women assembled near the prison who notes that Dimmesdale “takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation.” And, although Roger Chillingworth is not yet named, we are given a rather full characterization of the man through Hester's recollections of him. He is the “misshapen scholar” who is Hester's legal husband.
