Comparing Evil In The Scarlet Letter And Moby-Dick

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The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a novel that tells the story of Hester Prynne, who commits adultery on her husband, Roger Chillingworth, with the reverend of the town, Arthur Dimmesdale. This causes Chillingworth to allow evil to grow within him. Likewise, in another American gothic novel, Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, the captain of the whaling ship, The Pequod, becomes evil after the whale named Moby Dick bites his leg off. Roger Chillingworth and Captain Ahab are both evil characters with many similarities in the way they allow evil to manifest within them. What starts this evil within these two characters is the fact that both of them have a feeling of absence in their manliness after suffering these unfortunate