Humming-bird

The Humming-bird appears only once in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, yet the single simile carries a weight of meaning that resonates through the entire characterization of Pearl. When the shipmaster of the Bristol vessel, having been struck by Pearl's appearance during the Election Day festivities, tries to snatch a kiss from her, he finds it as impossible as catching a humming-bird in the air. The comparison is not decorative but diagnostic: it captures the very essence of Pearl's nature as something too quick, too wild, too otherworldly to be held.

The Simile in Context

The moment occurs in the crowded market-place on the day of the new Governor's installation. Pearl, dressed in her fantastically embroidered crimson velvet tunic, has been flitting through the crowd like a bird of bright plumage, darting to and fro among the somber Puritans. The shipmaster, a rough-looking desperado from the Spanish Main, is so taken with her that he throws her the gold chain from his hat, which she immediately twines around her neck and waist with such skill that it becomes part of her. When he attempts to lay hands on her for a kiss, the narrator states simply that it is as impossible as catching a humming-bird in the air. The simile does not describe the humming-bird itself—its size, color, or habitat—but uses its most salient behavioral trait: its speed and elusiveness, its refusal to be grasped.

Pearl as the Humming-Bird

This single comparison aligns with a pattern of imagery that runs throughout the novel. Pearl is repeatedly described in avian terms: she flits with a bird-like movement, she is like a sea-bird borne upward on the waves of sound, she is a wild tropical bird of rich plumage ready to take flight. The humming-bird simile condenses all these earlier images into one perfect, irreducible figure. Like the humming-bird, Pearl is brilliant, rapid, and untouchable. She cannot be caught, cannot be held against her will, cannot be subjected to the ordinary rules of human contact. The shipmaster's failure to kiss her is not a failure of desire or effort but a recognition of the fundamental impossibility of the task.

The Humming-Bird and the Novel's Symbolic System

In the symbolic economy of The Scarlet Letter, the humming-bird belongs to the realm of the natural and the wild, the forest world that stands opposed to the rigid, law-bound society of the Puritan settlement. The forest is described as "wild, heathen Nature ... never subjugated by human law," and it is there that Pearl finds her truest kinship, gathering wildflowers and being greeted by partridges, squirrels, and even a wolf. The humming-bird, as a creature of that untamed world, becomes a natural emblem of the freedom and elusiveness that Pearl embodies. It is also, significantly, a creature of the New World, unknown in England, and thus doubly appropriate for a child who is herself a product of the American wilderness, born out of a passion that defied the old world's laws.

The Humming-Bird and the Limits of Human Power

The simile also serves a thematic function within the novel's larger meditation on power and control. The shipmaster, a man accustomed to commanding his vessel and his crew, finds himself powerless before a child. The Puritan magistrates, who attempt to regulate every aspect of life, are equally baffled by Pearl. Even Hester, her mother, often feels that she cannot truly possess or understand her daughter. The humming-bird, which can be seen but not caught, admired but not held, becomes a figure for the limits of human authority. It suggests that there are forces in the world—wildness, freedom, the ungovernable spirit—that cannot be subdued by any law, any punishment, or any attempt at control.

Significance

The humming-bird's single appearance in The Scarlet Letter is a masterstroke of compression. In one brief simile, Hawthorne encapsulates the entire character of Pearl: her beauty, her speed, her unattainability, her kinship with the wild, and her resistance to all forms of human grasping. The image lingers in the reader's mind long after the scene is over, a tiny, brilliant point of light that illuminates the novel's deepest themes of freedom, transgression, and the irreducible mystery of the human soul.