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“But the point which drew all eyes…was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom.” (Hawthorne, 2000, 12) The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, goes to great lengths to show that the color white is everything, including the greatest Evil embodied in Moby Dick. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, emphasizes how Hester is the outcast from society and forced to live on the fringes, on the boundary between the town and the woods – the border of good and evil. Both authors use symbols to develop the effects of evil on society.

Melville paints the white of Moby Dick as a symbol of the world’s evils to Ahab. (Roberts, 1966, 43) Moby Dick and Ahab personify each other through vengeance. Moby Dick’s snow-white forehead symbolizes God in that He couldn’t be reached, but he is there. Ahab is not an evil man but only a man trying to dispose of God, the Evil of the Deity. Ahab represents most of mankind, who in trying to conquer God, is destroyed by Him instead. The paint of whiteness also appears on Ahab. When Ishmael first sees Ahab, he notices the huge white scar running down the side of his face. (Roberts, 1966, 35) Ahab’s one leg is also a white peg, made of pure whalebone. The sin of Moby Dick is now embedded into Ahab. Ahab is the negative side of humans because he wants to take revenge on Moby Dick for tearing up his leg. Ishmael also notices a face wreathed in wretched long strands of gray hair. (Roberts, 1966, 35) The color gray symbolizes a mixture of both good and evil. It shows a good person that is guilty of a sin. Gray also reflects the color of hiding something. In Ahab’s case, he is hiding his obsession to the world about his devoted pursuit of the White Whale.

Hawthorne shows that sin isolates a person from her community and from God. When he uses the color gray to describe Hester‘s clothes, he is insisting Hester and her lover are hiding their secret of their love affair. Ahab’s...

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