Read the following passage from an analysis essay's body: Both Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Mo
by-D share important traits of Gothic literature. In Moby-D, Melville uses the color white to represent grotesqueness, saying that it "peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye" (211). Hawthorne similarly relies on color to convey meaning, drawing particular emphasis to the scarlet in the "A" that Hester Prynne must wear. What is the primary weakness of this passage? A. No evidence is given from either novel. B. The evidence is not clearly tied to the claim. C. Color is an inappropriate topic for analysis. D. The passage fails to make a debatable claim.
The key weakness of the given passage is that 'it fails to establish a debatable claim.' A claim is characterized as debatable when the readers could reasonably argue on different opinions regarding it but here the 'claim regarding the presence of gothic elements' in Hawthorne's 'Scarlett Letter' and Herman Melville's 'Moby-D' is already agreed upon and accepted as a fact. Thus, <u>there remains no point in persuading the readers' to believe in it by comparing the two</u>. Another weakness of this passage is that the evidence presented here fails to support the claim. Thus, <u>option D</u> is the correct answer.
