Confessions of a Pilgrim Shopaholic Rhetorical Essay 
Mihails Berezuns
In the article, “Confessions of a Pilgrim Shopaholic” Puritan values such as the belief in witchcraft, dressing in plain, conservative clothes, and the practice of saving and not spending money, are satirized. To drive his attack on consumer society, and achieve the full effect of a satirical piece, the author uses hyperbole, irony, farfetched examples, and sarcasm.
The use of hyperbole dominates the article and is the prime strategy in the satirization.
For example, Rebecca a puritan lady is described traveling to Boston for a “thimbleful of salt”.
Then five years later, she has “travelled to Boston for a second thimbleful” and afterwards claims she is “out of control”. The importance of this thimbleful of salt is extremely over exaggerated; the author makes it seem like the woman is committing a crime when she is just getting salt that is very helpful in everyday life. Another example of hyperbole is the punishment that the woman will receive if her husband finds out about her wantings: “I imagine myself attending a fancydress ball with the pail on my arm, filled with pinecones and soil. I fear the I shall speak these dreams aloud, and beg my husband to bludgeon me”. Normally, one wouldn’t get consequences for dreaming that they were attending a “fancydress ball” but since Puritan values are over exaggerated and brought to the extreme, such repercussion does exist. Inversion, which is a reversal of order, or form and irony is also at work when the woman is scorning her child for having doll made out of rock: “‘I have made a doll from a small rock. I will call my doll
Rockelle.’ Of course, I struck her and grabbed the rock from her hand, saying, ‘Be ye the Queen of the Nile, with such gilded pleasures?’ I will confess only to this diary that I have kept the rock for myself, and married it to an acorn...Has my evil no limits?”. First, the author uses inversion by comparing the child to the “Queen of the Nile” for desiring
In the article, “Confessions of a Pilgrim Shopaholic” Puritan values such as the belief in witchcraft, dressing in plain, conservative clothes, and the practice of saving and not spending money, are satirized. To drive his attack on consumer society, and achieve the full effect of a satirical piece, the author uses hyperbole, irony, farfetched examples, and sarcasm.
The use of hyperbole dominates the article and is the prime strategy in the satirization.
For example, Rebecca a puritan lady is described traveling to Boston for a “thimbleful of salt”.
Then five years later, she has “travelled to Boston for a second thimbleful” and afterwards claims she is “out of control”. The importance of this thimbleful of salt is extremely over exaggerated; the author makes it seem like the woman is committing a crime when she is just getting salt that is very helpful in everyday life. Another example of hyperbole is the punishment that the woman will receive if her husband finds out about her wantings: “I imagine myself attending a fancydress ball with the pail on my arm, filled with pinecones and soil. I fear the I shall speak these dreams aloud, and beg my husband to bludgeon me”. Normally, one wouldn’t get consequences for dreaming that they were attending a “fancydress ball” but since Puritan values are over exaggerated and brought to the extreme, such repercussion does exist. Inversion, which is a reversal of order, or form and irony is also at work when the woman is scorning her child for having doll made out of rock: “‘I have made a doll from a small rock. I will call my doll
Rockelle.’ Of course, I struck her and grabbed the rock from her hand, saying, ‘Be ye the Queen of the Nile, with such gilded pleasures?’ I will confess only to this diary that I have kept the rock for myself, and married it to an acorn...Has my evil no limits?”. First, the author uses inversion by comparing the child to the “Queen of the Nile” for desiring