Moby DIck

It is easy to see why Melville, himself a prey to the deepest forebodings about the optimism of his day, recognized at once his kinship of spirit with Hawthorne. "There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion (he wrote), was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne." A year after Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, Melville dedicated his own most powerful embodiment of this tragic phase, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne, his …

…it": and the sea, he reminds us shortly, covers "two thirds of the fair world." Moby Dick presents this awfulness relentlessly, even wickedly, as Melville hinted to Hawthorne. It is a cruel reminder of the original terror. If the world it presents is the starkest kind of answer to the Emersonian dream, it is not a world for despair or rejection--- as long as there is even one who escapes to tell its full story.