Exploring and Critiquing Notions of Gender, Language, and Power through Works of Melville and Hawthorne

This research paper focuses on critiquing and highlighting notions of gender, language, literature, and power, as presented in the works of American writers Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The works titled Moby Dick and Scarlet Letter are being taken into consideration along with scholarly articles. The primary focus of the paper is to showcase how power, when used in an uncontrolled manner, becomes hegemony and exhibits tyrannical form. Melville highlights the same through dictatorial character of Ahab in Moby Dick. The dichotomy between masculine and feminine, as presented by Melville, is explored in detail. There is also a reference to language and its manipulation by Hawthorne in his famous novel titled Scarlet Letter. The sexually repressed soul, Arthur Dimmesdale, is shown in a negative light by Hawthorne as the minister tries to justify his sinful act of adultery committed with Hester Prynne. The conception of God being less powerful than man, but at the same time, creator of predestined happenings, especially with reference to Moby Dick, is discussed in detail. The distorted and smudged image of gender is represented by both the authors in their works in question. Ahab is the epitome of totalitarianism and self-destruction because he becomes adamant about pursuing the white whale to satisfy his male ego and avenge the loss of limb. The construction of the notion of gender is challenged as well as accepted by both the writers at the one point in time. The symbol of ‘A’, which stands for adultery, is etched on the mind as well as body of the heroine Hester Prynne residing in the Puritan society of America. She tactfully defies, dissents, and even transcends the periphery of societal restrictions imposed on the fair sex. The paper aims to delineate how women have been subjugated by men in a patriarchy-dominated society since times immemorial and how the second sex has emerged victorious by dissenting against the subjugation. Power changes its forms through different pathways that it follows through the masculine and the feminine dichotomy.