The Scarlet Letter Rhetorical Analysis

Nathaniel Hawthorne sets Orthodox Christianity at odds against Romanticism in his magnum opus, The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne studies the physical, mental, and spiritual repercussions of Romanticism and Orthodox Christianity. Hawthorne realizes at once that the two cannot co-exist in the same way. Hawthorne struggles personally with the concepts of sin, legalism, justice, and true repentance, and draws his own conclusion, ultimately championing a Christian worldview. A key aspect of this is the guilty reader technique.

Using the guilty reader technique, Hawthorne brings the sympathy of the reader by casting the character of Hester Prynne in a positive, nonjudgmental light. He persuades the reader to embrace a certain viewpoint and fully commit to it, followed by

Rather, in only the second chapter, the reader is presented with a group of “not unsubstantial” women, whose gossiping tendencies and gaudy appearances are exaggerated quite obviously for satirical effect. Hawthorne portrays them as an brazen, presumptuous group who spend their time “wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution.” In this scene, a young wife, an archetypal image of grace and beauty, proposes that Hester’s adulterous act does not merit a Scarlet Letter, much less a death penalty. In contrast, it is “the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges” who rudely interjects that Hester fully deserves the Letter and is being shown mercy by not being sentenced to death. This Puritan extremism and physical repulsiveness of the undesirable, older woman, representing harsh injustices and irrational actions, lie juxtaposed to the young wife’s physical beauty and grace, representing mercy and compassion. This is Hawthorne’s use of evaluative language by Hawthorne in order to entice the reader to side with