Five-finger

The Five-finger, a common name for the starfish, makes a single, fleeting appearance in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, yet it carries a weight of symbolic meaning that illuminates the character of Pearl and the novel's broader themes. During a moment of respite by the seashore, while her mother Hester Prynne confronts the physician Roger Chillingworth, Pearl engages in a series of playful, almost feral activities that underscore her alienation from the human community and her kinship with the wild. Among these, she "seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers," an act that reveals her fearless, predatory curiosity and her instinct to claim the natural world as her own domain. This small, seemingly incidental detail is part of a larger pattern in which Pearl is consistently associated with the untamed, the elemental, and the pre-social, standing in stark contrast to the grim, ordered world of the Puritan settlement.

Pearl's Wild Play and the Natural World

The Five-finger is one of several creatures and natural objects that Pearl interacts with during her solitary play by the sea. Her activities—making boats of birch-bark, capturing a jellyfish, chasing beach-birds with pebbles, and gathering seaweed to fashion a mermaid's costume—all demonstrate a spontaneous, unmediated engagement with the environment. Unlike the children of the settlement, who play at "scourging Quakers" or "taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians," Pearl's play is not an imitation of human social rituals but a direct, almost animistic communion with the non-human world. The Five-finger, as a creature she "makes prize of," is not a pet or a symbol but a living object of her capricious will, a part of the "spell of life" that goes forth from her "ever-creative spirit." This episode reinforces the novel's persistent association of Pearl with the forest, the sea, and the wild, positioning her as a being who belongs more to nature than to culture.

Symbolic Resonance and Thematic Significance

The Five-finger's brief appearance also contributes to the novel's exploration of the relationship between the human and the natural, the social and the asocial. Hester Prynne, after years of isolation, has herself become a figure who "wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness," and her daughter embodies this estrangement from human institutions. Pearl's capture of the Five-finger is a small but telling instance of her refusal to be bound by the laws and customs that govern the town. The creature, like Pearl herself, is a denizen of the margin—the shoreline between land and sea—a liminal space that mirrors Pearl's own position as an outcast who is neither fully human nor fully spirit, neither entirely of the Puritan world nor entirely beyond it. In this way, the Five-finger, though a minor detail, participates in the novel's larger symbolic economy, where the natural world serves as both a refuge from and a counterpoint to the oppressive moral order of the community.

Connection to Hester's Transformation

The scene in which Pearl captures the Five-finger occurs at a pivotal moment in the narrative, just after Hester has resolved to reveal Roger Chillingworth's true identity to Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester's own state of mind is one of bitter resolve and self-examination; she has just declared, "I hate the man!" referring to Chillingworth, and is grappling with the consequences of her past choices. Pearl's carefree, predatory play by the water's edge provides a stark contrast to her mother's moral turmoil. Yet it also foreshadows the freedom that Hester herself will briefly experience in the forest, when she removes the scarlet letter and lets down her hair. The Five-finger, as a creature of the wild, untamed and indifferent to human judgment, embodies a kind of natural liberty that both mother and daughter seek, but which only Pearl, in her innocence and wildness, can fully inhabit. Ultimately, the Five-finger is a small but potent emblem of the novel's central tension between the artificial constraints of society and the untamable forces of nature and passion.