Moby Dick: A Nasty Night for Hats and Men

Melville’s interest in hats derives from his boyhood trauma when his father went bankrupt and Herman was forced to drop out of school. Haunted by his father’s disgrace and death, and by his own Bartleby-like experience as a clerk in a haberdashery for almost two years, Melville had personal reasons for associating the loss of manhood with the loss of a hat. In Moby Dick, Melville expressed his feelings of abandonment and resentment through the symbolism of hats.