Essay about Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter

With the usage of rhetoric, one can write or say one statement while implying a completely separate opinion rather easily. This theory is prevalent among the great authors of our time, but none so much as Nathaniel Hawthorne. For example, throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s varying usage of enticing imagery and marvelous diction reflect how the Puritans feel about Hester, as a result implying how his opinions of the group. Within the novel, Hawthorne shows the Puritans as pertaining from one violent extreme to another, thus creating the aura of hypocrisy. Regardless, for the majority of the time, these men and women are perceived as stringently and almost violently religious and upright, making their punishment of Hester almost too severe and Hawthorne’s description likewise foreboding. Hawthorne considers the Puritans as intensely stern and uncompromising, as seen through his illuminating diction and eloquent imagery relating to them. At one point, when Hester stands humiliated upon the scaffold, he claims that the group would have remained “stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur of its severity” (39). By using wording such as “stern” and “without murmur of its severity,” Hawthorn conveys with the connotation and denotation that people can be defined as unfeeling and grim. In addition to this, he implies that Puritan society feels so little sympathy that they would have felt that Hester…