Wolf

The Wolf is a minor but symbolically charged presence in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, appearing in two distinct contexts: as a denizen of the primeval forest that responds to the child Pearl with an instinctive recognition of kinship, and as a spectral figure in the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale's guilt-ridden vigils. In both instances, the wolf embodies the untamed, lawless nature that stands outside the Puritan settlement's moral and social order.

The Wolf in the Forest

During the pivotal forest meeting between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, while the two adults sit together on a mossy tree-trunk, their daughter Pearl wanders alone through the woods. The great black forest, stern as it shows itself to those who bring guilt and troubles into its bosom, becomes the playmate of the lonely child. Among the wild creatures that make way for her—a partridge with a brood of ten, a pigeon on a low branch, a squirrel that chatters and flings a nut at her head, a fox that looks inquisitively at her—a wolf is said to have come up and smelled Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The narrator immediately qualifies this account, noting that "here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable." Yet the truth, the narrator adds, seems to be that the mother-forest and all the wild things it nourishes recognized a kindred wilderness in the human child. The wolf thus serves as the most dramatic instance of nature's sympathy with Pearl, confirming that she belongs not to the ordered world of the Puritan town but to the wild, untamed realm of the forest.

The Wolf in Dimmesdale's Vigils

In a very different register, the wolf appears among the spectral visions that haunt Arthur Dimmesdale during his secret vigils. In his locked closet, the minister keeps a bloody scourge and plies it on his own shoulders; he fasts until his knees tremble; he keeps night after night of vigil, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes viewing his own face in a looking-glass by the most powerful light he can throw upon it. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reels and visions seem to flit before him. Among the shapes that appear—a herd of diabolic figures that grin and mock, a group of shining angels that fly upward heavily, the dead friends of his youth, his white-bearded father with a saint-like frown, his mother turning her face away—there is no explicit mention of a wolf. However, the wolf's presence in the novel's symbolic landscape is reinforced by the minister's own description of his condition: he speaks of himself as a man whose "knees are tottering beneath him," too weak to run a race, and Hester later describes him as "crushed under this seven years' weight of misery." The wolf, as a creature of the wild that Pearl can touch but the minister cannot approach, marks the boundary between the freedom of the forest and the imprisonment of the guilty soul.

The Wolf as Symbol of Untamed Nature

The wolf's brief appearance in the forest scene crystallizes a central thematic opposition in the novel. The Puritan settlement, with its rigid laws and its "iron framework" of moral reasoning, stands in stark contrast to the "wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth." The wolf, like Pearl herself, belongs to this latter realm. When the wolf offers its head to be patted, it performs a gesture of trust that no adult human in the story can offer to Pearl without fear or suspicion. The wolf's recognition of Pearl as kin underscores the child's essential alienation from the human community and her deep affinity with the natural world. At the same time, the narrator's hesitation—"it is said"—leaves the encounter hovering between fact and legend, much like the scarlet letter itself, which the townspeople invest with supernatural properties. The wolf, whether real or imagined, becomes one more sign that Pearl moves in a sphere where the ordinary rules of human society do not apply.