Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Stephen Rachman (essay date 1997)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Stephen Rachman (essay date 1997)

Stephen Rachman (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: “Melville's Pierre and Nervous Exhaustion; or, ‘The Vacant Whirlingness of the Bewilderingness,’” in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 1997, pp. 226-49.

[In the following essay, Rachman explores Pierre in the context of male hysteria, asserting that Pierre's nervous exhaustion both shapes and makes problematic the idea that the novel was written as a romance.]

The author … has succeeded in producing nothing but a powerfully unpleasant caricature of morbid thought and passion … [T]he details of such a mental malady as that which afflicts Pierre are almost as disgusting as those of physical disease itself.

—Review of Pierre, Graham's Magazine 18521

So, if thou wouldst go to the gods, leave thy dog of a body behind thee.

—Pierre2

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