Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Robert Milder (essay date 1974)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Robert Milder (essay date 1974)

Robert Milder (essay date 1974)

SOURCE: “Melville's ‘Intentions’ in Pierre,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. VI, No. 2, Summer, 1974, pp. 186-99.

[In the following essay, Milder suggests that in Pierre Melville set out to write a parody of the romance novel that would reveal the depravity of which mankind is capable.]

With the publication of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Pierre with its historical note by Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, an orthodox interpretation of the novel has begun to emerge, an interpretation not so much of the meaning of the book as of Melville's complex intentions in writing it. The essence of this interpretation, first presented by Professor Howard in his biography of Melville and modified only slightly in his section of the historical note, is that when Melville “began to write the book which was to become Pierre, he was planning to turn out a genuinely popular story,...

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