HOW IS PEARL DRESSED, AND WHAT IS HER DRESS COMPARED TO

Pearl is dressed in "a crimson velvet tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread." Her dress brings her mother's badge of shame to a new level, almost as if Pearl is wearing a similar symbol of her mother's shame.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and, indeed, of the child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain, that all her conceptions assumed its form—had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.