SOURCE: “Coherence and Ambivalence in Melville's Pierre,” in American Literature, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3, November, 1976, pp. 302-11.

[In the following essay, Strickland asserts that, while Melville's handling of imagery in Pierre provides a kind of coherence for the work, the novel remains ultimately “inconsistent and incomplete.”]

Readers familiar with the mastery of Moby Dick have often been perplexed by the mystery of Herman Melville's succeeding novel, Pierre. The mystery lies in the contrast between the artfully controlled style and structure of the earlier book, published in 1851, and the sophomoric fustian of Pierre, which appeared just one year later. Critics have attempted to explain this apparent regression in craftsmanship by noting in Pierre Melville's satiric purposes in the outbursts of juvenile overwriting, which reflect the hero's immaturity, and by detailing Melville's intentional parody of the style and substance of conventional romanticism.¹ But there is further evidence of authorial control in the novel: the recurrence of certain motifs of imagery lends a degree of unity and coherence which shows that the hand of the master, though shaky, is still operating to shape Pierre.

This recurrent imagery is often manifested dichotomously, a technique which is completely appropriate to the theme of the novel, since its hero's vision is polarized. Pierre's journey through the course of the novel is from one extreme position to another, from optimism to pessimism, faith to cynicism, dependence to autonomy, joy to despair. Melville embodies these shifts of stance in the imagery of opposites: summer and winter, light and dark, country and city,² meadow and mountain, morning and evening.³ But there is one further opposition and one apposition which enhance the complexity of Melville's design in Pierre. He consistently counterpoises the green fertility of vegetation with the arid intractability of stone.⁴ And, apposite to the novel's central theme, the imagery of marble permeates Pierre, linking many of the oppositions and illustrating Melville's message which so agonizingly eludes Pierre: that the dualities such as light and dark, good and evil, Lucy and Isabel, as well as the perpetual strife between the human heart and head, are not irreconcilable at all but are inseparable parts of the whole continuum of life.

Pierre's two paramours, Lucy and Isabel, illustrate Melville's tactic of presenting two apparent opposites which are fused to make one whole through the marble imagery. No two characters could seem more opposite. The ethereal, sexless Lucy, who is said to belong “to the regions of an infinite day,”⁵ is associated with everything light, bright, and angelical. Her name suggests “lucid,” and Pierre's initial relation with her is as clear and unclouded as Melville's depiction of Lucy herself, bathed “in golden loveliness and light” (p. 83). In contrast, the sensual Isabel, who possesses “extraordinary physical magnetism” (p. 180), is described as literally and figuratively dark; her scenes with Pierre take place at night or twilight. Isabel is the very opposite of Lucy's transparent lucidity, for her origins and the thoughts and emotions she arouses in Pierre are veiled in mystery, just as Isabel is veiled by her ebony hair.

Melville describes a vision Pierre has of the two girls which both reveals their antithetical symbolism and foreshadows their synthesis: “For an instant, the fond, all-understood blue eyes of Lucy displaced the as tender, but mournful and inscrutable dark glance of Isabel. He seemed placed between them, to choose one or the other; then both seemed his; but into Lucy's eyes there stole half of the mournfulness of Isabel's, without diminishing hers” (p. 157). The “all-understood” world which Lucy represents is the fertile lowland world of Saddle Meadows, of joy and serene summer mornings, of repose and rural sunshine. It is the realm of rationality about which the immature Pierre naively rhapsodizes at the beginning of the novel: “It is a flawless, speckless, fleckless beautiful world throughout; joy now, and joy forever!” (p. 85).

In the “inscrutable” world to which Isabel introduces Pierre, dark, unknown forces of the unconscious and the undecipherable mysteries of metaphysics reign. It is Isabel's letter which first impels Pierre to look for the dark truth beneath the “flawless” surface of his life at Saddle Meadows and to discover his father's, his mother's, and his own weaknesses. Thus, as opposed to Lucy, Isabel is associated with the arid, stony, urban environment, with the bitter winter, the dark night, and with Pierre's intellectual anguish.

Yet, as different as Isabel and Lucy appear to be, they are linked through Melville's use of stone and marble imagery. Lucy represents the whiteness of the marble. She is variously described as a “snowy, marble statue” (p. 233), “marble-white” (p. 370), a “marble girl” (p. 400), “transparently immaculate, without shadow of flaw or vein” (p. 357). But Pierre needs a lesson in petrology. Just as he must learn that the world is not “flawless, speckless, fleckless,” he must recognize the painful truth of Melville's cry: “Why in the noblest marble pillar that stands beneath the all-comprising vault, ever should we descry the sinister vein?” (p. 135).

Just as the purest marble contains traces of other minerals, giving marble its distinctive coloration of contrasts, so Isabel represents the black vein in the white marble. Pierre's friend, Charlie Millthorpe, notes just such a dark vein in Pierre: “There was ever a black vein in this Glendinning; and now that vein is swelled …” (p. 400). His prophecy is fulfilled when he comments on Pierre's suicide at the book's conclusion, “The dark vein's burst …” (p. 405). Isabel's identification with the dark vein is made clear, for it is her black hair which envelops Pierre as she pronounces the final words over him: “‘All's o’er, and ye know him not!’ … and her whole form sloped sideways, and she fell upon Pierre's heart, and her long hair ran over him, and arbored him in ebon vines” (p. 405).

The symmetry of Isabel's mirror-image relationship with Lucy is also revealed in this passage, for Lucy, in the naive ignorance of Saddle Meadows, had longed to be able to say to others, “They know him not;—I only know my Pierre” (p. 61). And, contrary to Isabel's “ebon vines” which now enclose Pierre, Lucy is associated with green vines, called by Pierre “green heart-strings” (p. 359), wreathing her easel. The fact that these “green heart-strings” are stripped from Lucy's easel when she comes to the city and that Isabel's black vines encircle his heart demonstrates Pierre's failure to keep the forces that Lucy and Isabel represent in equilibrium and his inability to perceive their inextricability.

This dualism is portrayed in the depiction of the mountain which is simultaneously the appealing Delectable Mountain and, from another perspective, the terrifying Mount of the Titans. Lucy and Isabel, the Delectable Mountain and Mount of the Titans, as well as all the other polarities of the novel, are like the “two mutually absorbing shapes” Pierre cites from Dante's Inferno, neither “double now, / Nor only one!” (p. 111). Thus, too, can the forces which contend for loyalty in the human soul neither resolve into complete separateness nor fuse homogeneously into one. Both the catnip and the amaranth compete for dominion on the mountain. Lucy, who represents the light of the heart, domestic tranquillity, and knowledge that is readily comprehensible to man, is the green catnip, “man's earthly household peace” (p. 386). Isabel, the girl of dark mystery who spurs Pierre to his recondite speculations, is the sterile amaranth, emblem of man's “ever-encroaching appetite for God” (p. 386).

The fact that Isabel is now associated with the whiteness of the amaranth, the color previously ascribed to Lucy, shows that Melville finally conceives of the two as one entity. Indeed, white is here invested with all the ambiguity and complexity of “the whiteness of the whale” in Moby Dick. For white, besides its prior association with the spotless Lucy, also describes flawed characters, such as Pierre's father, the equivocating Reverend Falsgrave, and Plotinus Plinlimmon, the advocate of expediency.⁶

Thus, it appears overly simplistic to assume that white is the color of purity and black its opposite, just as Pierre errs in facilely terming Lucy and Isabel his “Good Angel and Bad Angel” (p. 403). The separate attitudes associated with both Isabel and Lucy provide an incomplete outlook; only together do they make a whole. The title of Book IX reveals this indissoluble synthesis of the forces represented by the two girls: “More Light, and the Gloom of That Light. More Gloom, and the Light of That Gloom” (p. 195). Lucy Tartan's name also hints of this truth, for, like marble, a tartan always consists of more than one color.

It is Pierre's ignorance of the mixed elements in himself and all humanity which causes his career of grief. His conception of his father, who is consistently characterized in terms of stone and marble imagery, is an example. And, since Pierre's name means “stone” in French, the implications associated with his father's character should apply to Pierre also.

Pierre, in the ignorance of immaturity, first conceives of his dead father as a perfect saint. In Pierre's heart is enshrined “the perfect marble form of his departed father; without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene …” (p. 93). When Pierre discovers his father's alleged iniquity, however, he completely reverses this idealized image of his father and of the world of Saddle Meadows. Pierre is incapable of moderation in his appraisals, and the violence of his reaction against his father is at the other pole from his former adulation.

The two extreme versions of Pierre's father are represented by the two differing portraits, which should have earlier given Pierre an inkling of the two sides of his father's personality. But Pierre is unable to affirm simultaneously these inseparable light and dark elements of human nature.⁷ Pierre had failed to see the dark veins of sin and human weakness beneath the “snow-white” surface of his father's memory. After rejecting the saintly image of his father, he then sees him as completely blackened with sin.

At the end of the novel Pierre has allowed the darkness to supplant entirely the whiteness in his outlook on life, to the point that his eyes literally no longer can tolerate the light. He refuses to live in the holistic world of black and white mankind; he cannot view his father and himself as both black-and-white but insists on judging conduct through the perspective of either / or extremes. Pierre cannot admit that the white, idealized version of his father, symbolized by the world of Lucy and light, is valid only when fused with, not replaced by, the darker knowledge of human sin represented by Isabel, and vice versa.

The parable of the mythical Enceladus makes clear this mixed heritage of all humanity. Enceladus, whose fate and aspirations are identical with Pierre's, was the offspring of both heaven and earth. His claim to divine parentage made him assault the heavens for admission “to regain his paternal birthright” (p. 389), but the taint of his terrestrial mother kept him in bondage on earth. His fate, as well as Pierre's, was adumbrated by Melville in the very beginning of the book in the description of the ruins of Palmyra: “the proud stone that should have stood among the clouds, Time left abased beneath the soil” (p. 28).

Pierre, too, feels himself prompted by inner divinity, when he undertakes his course of Christ-like self-sacrifice for Isabel. But he, too, fails to escape his earthly manacles and ends paralyzed in a stony prison. Pierre must acknowledge that, “though charged with the fire of all divineness, his containing thing was made of clay” (pp. 134-135) when he realizes that his heavenly aspirations, his struggle to be completely virtuous, are partially motivated by incestuous desire for Isabel. Striving to be god-like, Pierre finds himself all too humanly fallible.

Yet, to the end, he resists capitulating to the knowledge of the inextricable good and evil, divinity and mortality, in himself and all humanity. In a final effort to escape the ignominious bonds of his mortal body, Pierre commits suicide, even at the point of death refusing to admit that he is an underling to God's decrees.

Pierre's assumption of a god-like role, first by attempting to practice the dictates of Christ without compromise, and then by seeking to penetrate the mysteries of existence, puts him in direct opposition to the recommendations of Plinlimmon's pamphlet. This tract raises the central philosophical question expounded by this allegory of the human soul, caught between the warring claims of its heavenly father, God, and its terrestrial mother, the world. The pamphlet urges man to accept the limitations imposed by the fact of his mortality.

The imagery Melville employs throughout the novel which shows opposites not as eternally separate and mutually exclusive but as linked points on a single continuum may appear to indicate that Melville feels such relativism to be the solution for Pierre's dipolar oscillation between extremes. But the difficulty here lies in the fact that Plinlimmon ignores the “heaven-aspiring” component in man and capitulates wholly to the “terrestrial taint” (p. 389), to borrow terms from the Enceladus analogy again. Melville insists upon “the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated mood” (p. 389; italics mine).

In the description of Enceladus Melville offers Pierre only two extreme alternatives and ignores the possibility of the compromising, middle way espoused by Plinlimmon: “Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in the moat before that crystal fort, shows it was born within that slime, and there forever will abide” (p. 389). Pierre as the soul of man has only two choices: to be a stolid, ignoble creature (denoted by “it,” “whatso”) in the slime of earth or to be a human being (characterized by the words “whoso,” “he”) perpetually trying, and perpetually failing, to escape his humanity and gain full divinity. Henry Murray is correct in saying that the moral of this book “is that there is no moral. …”⁸

Thus, like Plinlimmon's pamphlet, Melville's book “seems more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself” (p. 243). And perhaps this sense of incompleteness is one source of many readers' and critics' dissatisfaction with the novel. While it is true that the eddying complexities of Pierre approximate the ambiguities of life with a vengeance, one expects internal clarity and order from a carefully crafted work of art.

Melville seems of two minds about Pierre; he has made it half comedy and half tragedy, half parody and half serious philosophy.⁹ Finally, Melville stubbornly refuses to deliver any answers to the reader, though the carefully constructed framework of imagery permeating the book implies a Hawthornian answer of acceptance of the mixed nature of humanity, where good is never absolute and evil never absent. The synthetic fusion, as in variegated marble, of the dichotomous images of the novel implies that good and evil, man's heavenly aspirations and mortal weaknesses, can viably co-exist in human nature.

The fused dichotomous imagery of fertility and aridity also demonstrates how the imagery of the novel implies what its denouement denies. The green vegetation of vines and flowers represented by Lucy and the summery, rural milieu of Saddle Meadows is opposed to the sterile stone represented by Pierre's devotion to Isabel in an urban, wintery environment. Isabel's face is often compared to Gorgon's (pp. 73, 91), though Pierre denies the correspondence when she asks him directly, “‘Tell me, do I blast where I look? is my face Gorgon's?’” (p. 222). Pierre replies: “‘Nay, sweet Isabel; but it hath a more sovereign power; that turned to stone; thine might turn white marble into mother's milk’” (p. 222). This prediction is ironically negated in the end of the book, however, when Pierre wrests the poison from Isabel's bosom with which he kills himself. He then concludes that Isabel's “mother's milk” is instead “death-milk” (p. 403). And Isabel's face does indeed turn Pierre to stone, for his dedication to her, and thence to the mysteries of existence, turns him against the glad joys of life and isolates him from common humanity until, as Melville had predicted after Pierre read Isabel's letter, “his petrifying heart dropped hollowly within him, as a pebble down Carisbrooke well” (p. 198).

Thus, Pierre's devotion to the forces Isabel represents, his antitheodicean speculations, necessitate his total denial of the forces of vitality symbolized by Lucy. He must give up l’allegro for il penseroso, the country for the city, Lucy's transparency for Isabel's mystery. And this preoccupation with the dark rather than the light is a life-negating process. For Pierre, extreme alternatives are mutually exclusive rather than symbiotic.

But Melville unites, as Pierre is unable to, the imagery of the two opposites, green growth and sterile stone, when he describes the rocks on the Mount of the Titans: “… for the rocks, so barren in themselves, distilled a subtile moisture, which fed with greenness all things that grew about their igneous marge” (p. 385). Melville had noted in the beginning of the book that “green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile Nature herself. … For the most mighty of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life” (p. 29). Such imagery suggests that it is possible to live with the wisdom that is woe, to unite the antagonistic facets of human nature.

For, even in Pierre's stone prison of his egotism and pride, “the stone cheeks of the walls were trickling” (p. 402). Could this moisture, too, yield life in inhospitable stone? Melville describes the Enceladus rock itself as “turbaned with upborne moss” (p. 387). The implication of the union of stone and vegetation imagery is that man can live as a hybrid of opposites, of “organic blended heavenliness and earthliness.” Chastening self-knowledge could yield new growth rather than result in self-destruction. But Melville undercuts this possibility when he says Pierre was unable to gain comfort and caution from the Enceladus myth, unable to “leap the final barrier of gloom … flog this stubborn rock as Moses his, and force even aridity itself to quench his painful thirst” (p. 388).

Perhaps the thirst-quenching moisture would have been “chill as the last dews of death” (p. 385), as was the water on the Mount of the Titans. But perhaps the painful awareness Pierre gained of his human limitations would permit him to live and grow with true self-knowledge, recognizing that he is neither completely good nor completely evil but capable of both. The stony Mount of the Titans exhibited such a renewal of life out of death when it “put forth a thousand flowers [both amaranth and catnip], whose fragile smiles disguised his [Enceladus'] ponderous load” (p. 389). But in the world of Pierre's mind, as in Eliot's waste land, stone yields no fructifying water but only despair.

Though the imagery of marble combines light and dark elements and Melville fuses the opposites of fertility and aridity, Pierre cannot similarly unite the antithetical forces which compete for his allegiance. Unable to cope with his divergent desires, he is sundered by their opposite attractions. Herman Melville's novel Pierre exhibits a similar bifurcation; the meshed imagery of opposites implies a hopeful acceptance of imperfect reality, while the hero's bombastic defiance urges continued futile rebellion against the ignoble fact of checkered human nature. Thus, Pierre looks both forward and backward in the Melville canon: backward to Captain Ahab's “ungodly, god-like” usurpation of divine prerogative in Moby Dick and forward to Captain Vere's awareness in Billy Budd¹⁰ of the impossibility of perfect human justice and his faith in ultimate acquittal by divine judgment. In Pierre Melville can neither laud nor condemn wholeheartedly Ahab's indomitable questing spirit or Vere's resolute and resonant humanity. And there is no Starbuck, no Ishmael to perceive the hero's valiance while lamenting his error.

“Pierre's world is gone,” as F. O. Matthiessen notes, “but, contrary to Shakespeare's method, nothing rises to take its place and assert continuity.”¹¹ The kindly, complacent, pompous Charlie Millthorpe hardly qualifies as Horatio or Fortinbras. Melville's unwillingness to take a positive stand for some character or solution, rather than merely against the opposite extremes of Pierre and Plinlimmon, may account for the reader's frequent failure to recognize the novel's satiric intentions. True satire is basically optimistic. Its end is to expose folly as a first step toward improvement. But Melville dooms Pierre to failure. He never allows his hero even the possibility of merging the extreme alternatives which split him, although Melville accomplishes this feat himself in the marble and stone/verdure imagery.

Thus, the novel provides no hope for the future and no proposed philosophic solution. Pierre's suffering, without the possibility of amelioration, is pathetic rather than satiric. Pierre's failure cannot even be presumed to be Melville's unequivocal recommendation of how not to live, for often Melville seems to share Pierre's sense of his own superior vocation and scorn for the other characters.

The imagistic patterns of Pierre provide a framework of coherence which shows the extent of Melville's effort in the book, but his ambivalence toward the hero undercuts this accomplishment. Melville's book, like Pierre's, is inconsistent and incomplete. It portrays the catastrophe of perpetual vacillation between resistance and resignation while never resolving its own vacillations.

Notes

1. For example, William Braswell, in “The Satirical Temper of Melville's Pierre,” American Literature, VII (Jan., 1936), 424-438 and “The Early Love Scenes of Melville's Pierre,” American Literature, XXII. (Nov., 1950), 283-289, discusses the novel as satire. Raymond J. Nelson, “The Art of Herman Melville: The Author of Pierre,” Yale Review, LIX (Winter, 1970), 197-214, cites specific objects of parody in Pierre.

2. See James Polk, “Melville and the Idea of the City,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XLI (Summer, 1972), 277-292, on the country-city thematic opposition.

3. Michael Davitt Bell, in “The Glendinning Heritage: Melville's Literary Borrowings in Pierre,” Studies in Romanticism, XII (Fall, 1973), 746, notes, “Pierre is built, thematically and structurally, upon a series of interrelated dichotomies. …” Richard Chase, “An Approach to Melville,” in Psychoanalysis and American Fiction, ed. Irving Malin (New York, 1965), pp. 111-120, also mentions the novel's thematic oppositions. R. K. Gupta, “Imagery in Melville's Pierre,” Kyushu American Literature, No. 10 (Dec., 1967), 41-49, presents a salient discussion of imagery.

4. H. Bruce Franklin's chapter on Pierre, in The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Stanford, Calif., 1963), contains the most thorough discussion of stone imagery. Saburo Yamaya, in “The Stone Image in Melville's Pierre,” Studies in English Literature (Japan), XXXIV (1957), 31-57, argues that Pierre's identification with a stone implies his gradual transcendence of earthly concerns and attainment of Nirvana.

5. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, with a Foreword by Lawrance Thompson (New York, 1949; rpt., 1964), p. 24. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

6. James Kissane, in “Imagery, Myth, and Melville's Pierre,” American Literature, XXVI (Jan., 1955), 569, believes that the image of whiteness, associated with both the spotless Lucy and Pierre's sinning father, symbolizes the ambiguity and relativism of good and evil.

7. Merlin Bowen, The Long Encounter: Self and Experience in the Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago, 1960), p. 161.

8. Henry A. Murray, introduction to Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (New York, 1949), p. xvi. (Italics in original.)

9. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York, 1950), p. 231, though denying Melville's intentional parody in Pierre, notes, “there is something in the violence, the overheatedness, the hysterical forcing of now one note, now another, in the novel, that inescapably suggests a doubleness in the mind of the man who wrote it, a bitter distaste of and disbelief in his own book in the very process of writing it. …” One senses Melville's ambivalence in the fact that Pierre is depicted alternately as ludicrous and heroic, the object of Melville's ridicule and grudging admiration.

10. Billy Budd was begun in the 1880's. It was unfinished at Melville's death in 1891 and not published until 1924.

11. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 469.