What does the rose symbolize in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

It is through his use of symbolism in The
Scarlet Letter that Hawthorne has made one of his most significant
contributions to American literature that has been perpetuated throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth century.  In Hawthorne's symbolic narrative, the red rose
is representative of passion; as such the rose bush outside the prison door--"the black
flower of civilized society"-- serves

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to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may
be found along the rack, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human fraility and
sorrow.

This "sweet moral
blossom" is the passionate fortitude with which Hester refuses to wither under the scorn
of the Puritans who gather in their grey steeple-crowned hats and "sad-colored garments"
to watch and scorn her in Chapter I.  In another allusion to the roses by the prison
door, in Chapter VIII, when asked by Reverend Wilson who made her, Pearl--knowing her
catechism--impishly says that

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she had not been made at all, but had been
plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison
door.

Thus, Pearl is the rose
and, like the rose, is symbolic, too, of the kind of passion which has accompanied
Hester's sin.  The red rose of The Scarlet
Letter symbolizes passion and "some sweet moral blossom" in both Hester and
in Pearl, who is a symbol herself of Hester's sin of adultery.