Abigail Williams Rhetorical Analysis

Nick Gartley

Mr. Benjamin Will

Honors English 11

“Abigail Williams, seventeen... a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling.” (9) Dissembling. To conceal one's true motives, feelings, or beliefs. Ms. Williams keeps up her act of hindering the town’s social and political life with the use of false rumors and excessive lying. Ms. Abigail does not make a good impression on the reader as they find her immediately start lying. She, according to her religion and her towns customs, has broken the law. Abigail told the judge at court, after her uncle accused her of dancing in the woods as they danced naked, that none of the sort happened, but then changed her answer stating that “it were sport” (11) and it did not matter what they were doing. Then she had to take it a step further by adding that Tituba was associated with witchcraft. Abigail was the reason of the death of nineteen people, not to mention all of the people she had sent to prison. Abigail was in fact much of

If a whole town decided to be socially acceptable of being able to marry a goat, then people would want to go with the flow, or try to be like everyone else. But should society really be pushing people to be a conformist? Should people comply with unfair social rules made by other people? Of course not. People in general should not be allowed to conform to society. The reason people choose to obey others beliefs and customs is because of their lack of knowledge of that subject. And people are too lazy to go and gather their own information and form an opinion on their own, they are stuck to resorting to integrating with the “normal” people in society. The so called witches in Salem Massachusetts, were wrongly accused of practicing witchcraft or any other witch related crimes. Has our dear Abigail Williams fallen under this dark curse just as countless humans in this world