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Rhetorical Analysis Of The Scarlet Letter

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The Prison Door In this Chapter from The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne introduces the setting of the book in Boston. He uses a gloomy and depressed tone in the beginning of the chapter. He is able to convey this tone using imagery while describing the citizens, the prison, and the cemetery. However, as he continues to discuss the rose-bush, he uses parallelism to shift the tone to be brighter and joyful. To create a gloomy and depressed tone, Hawthorne uses imagery. In the first paragraph, he begins by talking about men with “sad-colored garments”. This sets a gloomy tone because the word “sad” is blatantly used to describe the characters. Later on in the paragraph, Hawthorne begins to describe the prison door. He says that the door consists of …show more content…

The rose-bush conveys a brighter and joyful tone, which is evident when words like “delicate gems” and “fragile beauty” are used as descriptors. The rose-bush is further talked about as a happy symbol for people walking into the prison: “...and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.” This quote shows parallelism while talking about someone’s heading to their doom, and having something even that small to give them joy. The parallelism used here is in place to help shift the tone from gloomy and depressed, to something brighter and happier. In “The Prison Door” from The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses imagery and parallelism to convey his tone while introducing the setting of the book. He uses a gloomy and depressed tone in the beginning of the chapter using imagery while describing different places through the town. Later on in the chapter, he moves on to discuss the rose-bush. This is looked at as a joyful symbol to the sad citizens. This is the parallelism he uses to shift the tone to be brighter and

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