Using Nathaniel Hawthome's 1850 nove! The Scarlet Letter and two 20th century novels that echo its main ideas, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952), this study focuses on the hypocrisy of religious figures. Faulkner and O'Connor both acknowledged their debt to Hawthorne and present variations on Reverend Dimmesdale, one of the central characters in his nove!. Following Austin's idea that any performance amounts to "doing things with words," the characters analyzed here use words to hide their deep dark secrets and present the world with smooth talks and an irreproachable behavior.