Most of my favorite songs have to do with sunshine (eg, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tV11acSRk) so Hawthorne's motif of the light rays is most appealing to me.
The first time you get a taste of it is immediately upon Pearl and Hester's entrance into the square. THe light stings the baby's eyes, causing it to wink.
These rays stand for the concept of shedding light upon her guilt, literally. That light represents the particular societal moral standards of her onlookers; for if it wasn't for the standards being so opposed to the cause of her guilt, then the light wouldn't be quite so shocking to the baby's eyes.
"Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain mollusks as a defense mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant such as a parasite inside its shell, or an attack from outside, injuring the mantle tissue. The mollusk creates a pearl sac to seal off the irritation." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl#Origin_of_a_natural_pearl
While Hester was creating Pearl, she was technically sealing off the irritation of not having a husband around. However, perhaps her husband was the parasite all along because she did not love him. So then the husband would have been the cause of the baby after all. THough that really does make sense--it wouldn't have gone down as such a scandal if he never married her and brought her to Boston near Dimmesdale in the first place. CHapter ten is even labeled "The Leech and His Patient." A leech is sort of a parasite.
A cool quote from page 56:
"But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that is has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistible, the darker the tinge that saddens it."
No wonder so many people stick around my hometown.....
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