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The Scarlet Letter Rhetorical Analysis

Decent Essays

In Hawthorne's description of Hester on the pedestal he paints this shameful picture of Hester. He describes her in a guilty manner and emphasizes the pain Hester is feeling from this shame. Hawthorne expresses all of this guilt and pain in his first set of parallel phrases. For instance he repeats "a fixed gaze" twice in order to show the reader the intenseness of this part and then goes on to say the sun is "lighting up her shame" and making her "sin" clear to everyone watching her. He also refers to the "midday sun" as lighting up her shame and therefore making it more visible to the "whole people." He even goes as far as to describe her child as "sin-born" when she makes eye contact with the stranger, who is found out to be her husband. This adds to her feeling of guilt as Hawthorne makes it clear the baby in her arms is not her husband's child. Yet when he gets to the second set of parallel phrases he has this complete rhetorical shift and this whole guilty look of Hester disintegrates into one of almost sympathy. He goes from shaming and making Hester look guilty to describing how her privacy has kind of been torn away from her because of this whole situation. For example, he makes note of private affairs and compares them to the event taking place, he says things such as "features that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of the fireside."

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