SOURCE: “The Sentimental Education of Pierre Glendinning: An Exploration of the Causes and Implications of Violence in Melville's Pierre,” in American Transcendental Quarterly: A Journal of New England Writers, Vol. 1, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 167-77.

[In the following essay, Wilson notes that Melville attributes Pierre's psychological problems, especially his belief in his own capacity for heroic action, to his sentimental education.]

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville's seventh and most problematic novel, is still so little understood that critics have tended to focus on questions of authorial intent and/or composition: whether Melville intended to write a popular romance, a satire of a popular romance, or even a psychological novel;¹ and whether (and if so, why) Melville deviated from his original plot when he added the autobiographical material in the second half of the novel.² Little agreement has been reached on any of these questions, and meanwhile important thematic and textual matters in Pierre have remained unexplored.

One of the most important elements in Pierre, one which is central to both the Saddle Meadows and the New York sections of the novel, is the multi-layered theme of violence and its connection to the sentimental education of Pierre Glendinning, Melville's nineteen-year-old protagonist. From the very beginning of the novel, Melville repeatedly calls the reader's attention to the social influences that have shaped Pierre's life. Living at Saddle Meadows, his ancestral mansion, Pierre has been “nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life” (216). The young Glendinning has been raised as a country gentleman—steeped in tradition, social convention, and a bogus sentimentality that becomes ever more obvious as the novel progresses. In Book I we see Pierre, the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero, play at being the knight-errant and romantic lover of his betrothed, Lucy Tartan. His protestations of love are both effusive and artificial in these early mock Romeo and Juliet scenes. He will say, for example, “‘I must away now, Lucy; see! under these colors [a flower] I march,’” to which Lucy responds in kind, “‘Bravissimo! oh, my only recruit!’” (4). Their dialogue here and throughout the novel—with its use of archaic expressions like “thee,” “thou,” and “fie, now,” and the excessive use of exclamation points—reads as though it had been copied from the kind of cheap sentimental romance that was so popular in Melville's day. In fact, Pierre attempts to measure up to what he sees as his heroic and aristocratic heritage by living according to the conventions of the sentimental romance, and he does it with a zeal that rings as false as the conventions themselves. It is significant that Pierre is repeatedly castigated, at least in the Saddle Meadows section, by the narrator of the novel, who frequently calls attention to his young protagonist's bravado, his naivete, and his romantic excesses.

Pierre maintains an equally immoderate relationship with his mother. Mrs. Glendinning, described as “an affluent, and haughty widow” (4), has rejected all suitors since the death of her husband so that she might better lavish attention on her only son. Their wealth and their insulated country life in Saddle Meadows have allowed them a “strange license” (5), a bizarre inbred familiarity that is explicitly Oedipal. With his “lover-like adoration” (16), Pierre has replaced his father, has become “lover enough” (5) for his widowed mother. Pierre and Mrs. Glendinning call each other “brother” and “sister,” they engage in a kind of incestuous conversational foreplay, and they live out a pretend or mock marriage in scenes that parody the typical drawing-room marriages of the sentimental romance. The excesses of Pierre's “romantic filial love” (5) are evident throughout the early scenes of the novel.

If Pierre's love for his mother is “romantic,” his love for his dead father can only be described as quasi-religious. Perhaps out of a sense of guilt for having created their own mock marriage at Saddle Meadows, both Pierre and his mother have transformed the memory of Mr. Glendinning into an icon, an image of God, the heavenly father. Mrs. Glendinning refers to him as “your dear perfect father” (19), and Pierre regards him as the “personification of perfect human goodness and virtue” (68). The dead father has become a “shrine” (68), where the son can worship the father and all that the father represents. What the father represents, as the novel makes clear, is the moral foundation (or ideological superstructure) on which Pierre's life of privilege has been constructed. Pierre's obsession with the symbolic purity of his father is yet another example of his general tendency toward absolutism, a characteristic that will prove to be self-destructive.

By the time Pierre receives the fateful letter from Isabel Banford in Book III, Melville has established most of Pierre's essential traits: his absolutism, his romantic illusions, and his emotional immaturity and volatility. These characteristics predispose Pierre to act rashly, as we see by his reaction to Isabel's letter, in which Isabel declares that she is his illegitimate sister and requests his help. Here in this first of many such instances, we see Pierre turn away from all he has held sacred and accept, without a shred of hard evidence, that Isabel is indeed his sister. Suddenly, Pierre decides, the “before undistrusted moral beauty of the world is forever fled; for thee, thy sacred father is no more a saint; all brightness hath gone from thy hills, and all peace from thy plains; and now, now, for the first time, Pierre, Truth rolls a black billow through thy soul!” (65). And just as suddenly, before he even meets Isabel, Pierre commits himself to a course of action that will have tragic consequences: “‘Oh! Isabel, thou art my sister; and I will love thee, and protect thee, ay, and own thee through all’” (66).

Though Isabel's story as told in Books VI and VIII is extremely vague, and though her reasons for believing herself to be Pierre's sister are inconclusive at best, the point is that Pierre has already decided (on impulse, certainly not on any rational basis) to believe her. Thus the problem that Pierre faces is how to “protect” Isabel without publicly humiliating his mother and dishonoring the memory of his father. His solution, as dishonest as it is ultimately disastrous for everyone involved, is to announce to his mother and the world at large that he and Isabel are married. Thus Pierre goes from one pretended marriage with his mother to another pretended marriage with his (fictitious?) sister. Predictably, Mrs. Glendinning reacts with outrage and promptly disinherits her son, who leaves the mansion feeling “hurled from beneath his own ancestral roof” (185). At this crucial juncture, Pierre makes yet another rash decision—he decides to flee to New York with Isabel and Delly, a local servant woman who has recently born a child to an already married man and who is, like Isabel (and soon Pierre), a social outcast. Acting out of a “new hatefulness” (196), Pierre severs all ties with his family and his past; he symbolically burns all the family letters and miscellaneous memorials in his possession and declares: “‘Henceforth, cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past …’” (199). Here we see established a pattern that will become clearer in the second half of the novel as the action moves to New York—Pierre will decide on a particular cause to champion, will feel constrained and/or attacked by hostile forces, and will strike out impulsively and with increasing anger at all that supposedly restrains him.

Melville reminds the reader in repeated passages that Pierre suffers from an illusion that is central to his sentimental education—the illusion that he is capable of heroic action. Throughout the novel Pierre sees himself and is described as a “recruit,” a “warrior,” a “knight.” Conventions of the literature of courtly love and the sentimental romance intermingle in one important early description of Pierre:

In the country then Nature planted our Pierre; because Nature intended a rare and original development in Pierre. … She blew her wind-clarion from the blue hills, and Pierre neighed out lyrical thoughts, as at the trumpet-blast, a war-horse paws himself into a lyric of foam. … She lifted her spangled crest of a thickly-starred night, and … ten thousand mailed thoughts of heroicness started up in Pierre's soul, and glared round for some insulted good cause to defend. (13-14)

Pierre, of course, finds two of these insulted good causes in Isabel and Delly. He eagerly—and recklessly—takes it upon himself to protect and provide for both of them without understanding the consequences of his action or how the world will view it.

However, Pierre's motives in deciding to “defend” Isabel are not altogether altruistic and/or mock-heroic. Early in the novel it is apparent that Pierre's attraction to Isabel is partially, if not primarily, sexual. After he sees her for the first time at a neighbor's house, Isabel's “mystic face” (48) haunts Pierre and causes “wild reveries” (50) and a “pervading mood of semi-madness” (52). He cannot control his infatuation: “The emotions he experienced seemed to have taken hold of the deepest roots and subtlest fibers of his being. And so much the more that it was so subterranean in him, so much the more did he feel its weird inscrutableness” (48-49). Later, when Pierre agrees to meet Isabel in the little red farmhouse where she is staying, he goes to satisfy his “wild, bewildering, and incomprehensible curiosity” (47)—in other words, to possess her. To Pierre, trapped in an Oedipal relationship with his mother and an asexual courtship of Lucy, Isabel initially promises sexual release. He sees her (and in a sense creates her) as a dark, mysterious, olive-cheeked girl—in stark contrast to his cold, haughty mother, and his cold, virginal bride-to-be.

Though initially attracted, Pierre soon recoils from Isabel because his sentimental education has not prepared him for, and in fact does not allow for, open sexuality. As a victim of the idealized world of Saddle Meadows, Pierre has learned to substitute incestuous desire for genuine Eros or sexual love. Just as formerly he had diverted his youthful sexual desire into a mock-marriage with his mother, now he defuses his sexual response to Isabel by creating yet another fictitious, incestuous marriage. The result, of course, is that by forcing his relationship with Isabel to become hidden and illicit, Pierre ultimately destroys the relationship.

It has been a common critical assumption, at least since Henry A. Murray's seminal introduction to the Hendricks House edition of Pierre, that Isabel is, in Murray's words, “the personification of Pierre's unconscious” (lii). As a reflection of Pierre's unformulated and heretofore repressed desires, Isabel appears in images of sexuality and death. Indeed, the two sets of images are everywhere linked, as in this passage: “He felt a faint struggling within his clasp; her head drooped against him; his whole form was bathed in the flowing glossiness of her long and unimprisoned hair. Brushing the locks aside, he now gazed upon the death-like beauty of the face, and caught immortal sadness from it. She seemed as dead …” (112). In this and other passages we witness the classic struggle between Eros and Thanatos (that is, between sexual love and the death-wish) that Freud described nearly a half century after Melville. The struggle occurs both in Pierre's psyche and in the character of Isabel, and the result is that, as Pierre continues to withdraw from Isabel, Eros, diverted, gives way to Thanatos. Isabel becomes more and more associated with death. Her beauty is “death-like” and her manner “funereal”; she speaks repeatedly of a “world of horrible and inscrutable inhumanities” (122) and of the “infinite forlornness of [her] life” (123). Isabel longs for dissolution; she says at one point, “‘I pray for peace—for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation’” (119). Late in the novel Isabel actually attempts to commit suicide by jumping from a ship, while Pierre and Lucy restrain her.

It is significant that, as Pierre moves toward Thanatos, he begins to identify with literary, mythological, and historical characters who share a tragic fate. For example, in Book VII Pierre identifies with Memnon, “that dewey, royal boy, son of Aurora, and born king of Egypt, who, with enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another's account into a rightful quarrel, fought hand to hand with his overmatch, and met his boyish and most dolorous death beneath the walls of Troy” (135); in Book IX (and elsewhere) with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who extinguished his royal family in an attempt to avenge the murder of his father; in Book XVI with the gladiator Spartacus, who led an unsuccessful slave revolt against Rome from 73-71 B.C.; and in Book XXV with Enceladus the Titan, the “most potent of all the giants” (345), who according to Greek mythology was killed by the thunderbolts of Zeus during a futile war on the gods. These characters share the “reckless sky-assaulting mood” (347) that Pierre is driven to emulate—by challenging infinitely greater powers, they destroy themselves.

Thus Pierre has become increasingly prone to reckless and violent behavior by the time he and Isabel leave Saddle Meadows in Book XIII. Book XIV contains the theoretical center of the novel—Plotinus Plinlimmon's pamphlet. Pierre discovers the torn, discarded pamphlet, entitled “EI” (or “IF”), in the coach that takes him to New York. To be more specific, Pierre finds a fragment of the first of the 333 lectures supposedly contained in the pamphlet. This first lecture, “Chronometricals and Horologicals,” is billed as “not so much the Portal, as part of the temporary Scaffold to the Portal of this new Philosophy” (210). The point here is that the first lecture, like the pamphlet itself, is incomplete; as the narrator points out, it lacks a “conclusion,” a definitive resolution to the problems that it presents.

Critics have disagreed over the meaning of “Chronometricals and Horologicals” and why Melville chose to include the pamphlet here.³ However, it is apparent that, when considered in the context of the entire novel, the pamphlet further illuminates Pierre's essential problems—problems that are, once again, derived from his sentimental education. Plinlimmon, using the distinction between chronometric and horological time as his extended metaphor, distinguishes heavenly or “chronometric” wisdom from earthly or “horological” wisdom. He argues that, just as in China where one would not keep Greenwich time, “in things terrestial (horological) a man must not be governed by ideas celestial (chronometrical)” (214). His conclusion, though one of the most debated passages in all of Pierre, is really quite simple: “A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them” (214).

However, to recognize the importance of the pamphlet to Pierre, it is important to understand fully Plinlimmon's argument. To his distinction between chronometrical and horological, he adds that it “follows not” that God's truth is one thing and man's truth another. Instead, he argues that “by their very contradictions they are made to correspond” (212), and elsewhere that “this world's seeming incompatibility with God, absolutely results from its meridianal correspondence with him” (213). Finally, he promises that this correspondence, in which all contradictions are resolved, will be forthcoming in subsequent lectures, lectures that are missing from Pierre's copy of the pamphlet. The fact that these lectures are missing in Pierre's copy is significant because, unlike Plinlimmon, Pierre cannot resolve the contradictions of the world. Later in the novel he will come to refer to them as the “ambiguities.”

Furthermore, embedded in the pamphlet are several passages that warn against the kind of excess and absolutism towards which Pierre is inclined. For example, at one point Plinlimmon writes that though “minor self-renunciations” are inevitable, a man “must by no means make a complete and unconditional sacrifice of himself in behalf of any other being, or any cause, or any conceit” (214). Elsewhere he writes that a man who makes an “absolute effort” to live in this world according to chronometricals will likely be led into “strange, unique follies and sins” (213; Melville's emphasis) and eventually “work himself woe and death” (212). These statements describe, rather obviously I think, the life of Pierre Glendinning. In fact, Plinlimmon's pamphlet can be read as an indictment of Pierre and his imprudent behavior; Pierre certainly sees it as such, which is the primary reason why he does not consciously comprehend the pamphlet, as the narrator makes clear. Because it “condemns” him, Pierre does not want to understand the pamphlet, for any treatise or sermon that “illustrates to [man] the intrinsic incorrectness and non-excellence of both the theory and the practice of his life; then that man will—more or less unconsciously—try hard to hold himself back from the self-admitted comprehension of a matter which thus condemns him” (209).

Pierre's inflexibility becomes even more apparent when he arrives in New York with Isabel and Delly. Accustomed to his life of privilege in the country, Pierre cannot adjust to the nightmarish world of greed, poverty, and sin that he discovers on his first night in the city. As a result, Pierre reacts with increasing violence in a series of brief but bitter altercations with a coach-driver, his cousin Glen Stanley, and a crowd of rowdies at a watch-house (or shelter) for the poor. When their coach-driver is insolent, Pierre flies into a “sudden wrath” (233); he “burst” open the door, “sprang ahead of the horses, and violently reined back the leaders” (233). Only the timely appearance of a policeman prevents Pierre and the driver from coming to blows. When Glen Stanley snubs Pierre because of his various affronts to conventional morality, Pierre leaps toward his cousin “like Spartacus” and only manages to restrain the “savage impulse in him” because of the presence of guests in Stanley's apartment. Even so, Pierre says, “‘By Heaven, had I a knife, Glen, I could prick thee on the spot; let out all thy Glendinning blood, and then sew up the vile remainder’” (239)—a threat that looks forward to the end of the novel. Later, when he returns to the watchhouse where he has left Isabel and Delly, Pierre resorts to “an immense blow of his mailed fist” to free Isabel from one particularly aggressive “whiskerando” (241).

Pierre manages to control his violent impulses only temporarily and only by retreating with Isabel and Delly to the cloisters of the old Church of the Apostles, where they take a set of rooms in one lofty tower. The Apostles had long since outlived its “primitive purpose” (266) and had been divided, by the merchants and accountants who succeeded the priests, into offices and apartments for rent. At first the tenants had been primarily lawyers, but by the time Pierre arrives only a few lawyers remain on the ground floor, while the towers are “populous with all sorts of poets, painters, paupers and philosophers” (269). Symbolically, Pierre locates himself up above with the dreamers, sequestered in a “beggarly room” in the tower (270).

Though socially isolated in New York, Pierre is as imprisoned by his sentimental education as he was in Saddle Meadows, and he remains at heart a warrior desperate for another cause to champion. He finds his cause when he and Isabel reach the self-justifying conclusion that “‘Virtue and Vice are trash!’” (273), which Pierre decides to incorporate in a book and publish to the world. The reader discovers at this point, rather belatedly, that Pierre had been a juvenile author who had enjoyed some success with silly, sentimental poetry. Characteristically, when Pierre resumes his writing career, he does it with the same excess that he displayed in courting Lucy or rushing to the aid of Isabel: he announces that he will “‘gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!’” (273). However, what happens is that, as Pierre becomes more and more obsessed with his book, he loses himself in what the narrator refers to as the “devouring profundities” (305). His attempts to overturn convention and replace it with Truth (for Pierre, always capitalized) result in such passages as the following, where Vivia, the protagonist of his book, soliloquizes:

“A deep-down, unutterable mournfulness is in me. Now I drop all humorous or indifferent disguises, and all philosophical pretensions. I own myself a brother of the clod, a child of the Primeval Gloom. Hopelessness and despair are over me, as pall on pall. Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a tickle. Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye can not. Tell me not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe can not spare thee and thy immortality, so long as—like a hired waiter—thou makest thyself ‘generally useful.’ … Thou wert but the pretensious, heartless part of a man. Lo! I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from which the meat hath been sucked.” (302)

Here, once again, we see Pierre's anger and his instability, and we see him striking out blindly at imaginary adversaries. Above all, we see the same dangerous fanaticism that has characterized him throughout the novel, except that here his early sentimentalism has been replaced by an equally immature nihilism. Indeed, Vivia's self-indulgent despair is just the reverse image of the sentimental rubbish that Pierre wrote and published as a youth—such poems as “The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet,” “The Weather: a Thought,” and “Honor: a Stanza.”

Pierre never finishes his book, because finally he can only attack conventional wisdom and morality, not replace it. He cannot write the new Gospel for, as he discovers, “the more and the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth” (339). In all aspects of his life, Pierre finds himself surrounded by contradiction and uncertainty. He comes to doubt whether Isabel is truly his sister, realizing too late that the evidence supporting her claim was always tenuous and that his willingness to believe her had resulted not from fact or probability, but from an “intense procreative enthusiasm” (353)—a desire to believe. Isabel, like everything else in Pierre's life, becomes to him “an enigma, a mystery, an imaginative delirium” (354). Thus Pierre falls into the ultimate intellectual trap: he cannot live with uncertainty, and yet he cannot achieve certainty; he cannot live with the contradictions that plague him, and yet he cannot resolve those contradictions.

The final sequence of events begins when Pierre receives two letters, one from his publishers accusing him of being a swindler for sending them the early pages of his “blasphemous rapsody” instead of the “popular novel” (356) he had promised, and one from Glen Stanley and Lucy's brother accusing him of being a “villainous and perjured liar” (356) for his many crimes (which, by this time, include not only jilting Lucy and running away with Isabel, but allowing—or seducing, as they see it—Lucy to come live with them in a menage of four). To this last accusation, Pierre responds with violence; he searches out a brace of pistols and rushes into the street to meet his accusers. Earlier in the novel, after he learned that his mother had died and left the Saddle Meadows estate to Glen Stanley, Pierre had pondered the subject of murder as an intellectual possibility: “when he thought of all the ambiguities which hemmed him in; the stony walls all round that he could not overleap; the million aggravations of his most malicious lot …—then the utmost hate of Glen and Frederic were jubilantly welcome to him; and murder, done in the act of warding off their ignominious public blow, seemed the one only congenial sequel to such a desperate career” (337). Now idea becomes reality as Pierre, in an attempt to break out of the stasis in which he finds himself and play the hero once again, shoots and kills Glen Stanley. “‘Tis speechless sweet to murder thee!’” (359), Pierre says as he slays his cousin, who has become the focus of Pierre's wrath, not only because he represents the values of the conventional society that Pierre has rejected, but because he has replaced Pierre as heir to the Glendinning estate and would-be suitor to Lucy.

Pierre is immediately “seized by a hundred contending hands” (360) and taken to the city prison. There he finds himself, like Enceladus in his dream, confined by massive stone walls “partly piled on him” (360). Likewise, he is still trapped in his belief that life is “ambiguous still” (360). Here Pierre has played out all his possibilities save one, and it is at this point that, as Isabel reasserts her power as a symbol of Pierre's unconscious death-wish, Pierre embraces the idea of suicide. Before he went out to murder Glen Stanley, Pierre had told the two women that his “‘most undiluted prayer is now, that from your here unseen and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive’” (358). Now he expresses for himself this same wish for death: “‘I long and long to die, to be rid of this dishonored cheek’” (360).

It is significant that, before he takes the poison that Isabel has concealed in her bosom, Pierre cries out that he is “‘neuter now’” (360). Pierre is neuter both sexually and psychologically, and also in the sense that he is powerless to act the warrior now, powerless to find other “insulted good causes” to defend. Also, as we have already seen, Pierre is intellectually barren in that he has failed in his attempt to “gospelize the world anew.” Neutered in all of these ways, Pierre turns to Isabel and the poison that she has hidden in her breast:

“Girl! wife or sister, saint or fiend!”—seizing Isabel in his grasp—“in thy breasts, life for infants lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me!—The drug!” and tearing her bosom loose, he seized the secret vial nesting there. (360)

Isabel follows Pierre's lead and, as her “long hair ran over him and arbored him in ebon vines” (362), their final embrace is an embrace of death in a scene that mocks, at the same time it borrows, the conventions of the tragic denouement.

Henry A. Murray concluded that Melville actually “defends” Pierre's rash behavior in spite of the tragic consequences that it produces. Murray argues that Melville “defends this form of behavior [furious aggression] as stoutly as he justifies impulsiveness” (c). However, I do not think that Melville defends or justifies Pierre's extremism at all. (That Melville is more sympathetic to his protagonist toward the end of the novel does not constitute an endorsement of “aggression” or “impulsiveness.”) Rather, what Melville has done here is to show how violence is the end result of Pierre's sentimental education, for the very qualities—his absolutism, his romantic illusions, and his emotional immaturity and volatility—that Pierre acquired in the idealized world of Saddle Meadows cause him to self-destruct once he moves out of the closed, incestuous world of his forefathers.

Melville's young protagonist is naive and self-deluded, as many critics have remarked, but he is also a victim of his society and its socially-transmitted illusions of romance and heroism. Thus, Pierre can be read as an indictment of the sentimental education of Pierre Glendinning and, by extension, the social world of privilege represented by Saddle Meadows. The theme of violence, and its relation to Pierre's sentimental education, is important because it helps unify an otherwise discordant novel and suggests that Melville, from the very beginning of Pierre, intended to subvert the genre of the popular or sentimental romance while working (more or less) within the confines of its artificial and essentially trivial form.

Notes

1. Leon Howard assumed in the Historical Note to the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Pierre that Melville initially conceived of the novel in terms of a popular romance. However, other critics have viewed Pierre as a satire of a popular novel. For example, Robert Milder in “Melville's ‘Intentions’ in Pierre,” characterizes the novel as a “diabolical parody of the romance.” See also William Braswell's “The Early Love Scenes in Melville's Pierre,” and Richard H. Brodhead's discussion of Pierre in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel.

   Still other critics have argued that Melville intended Pierre to be a psychological novel. See especially Henry A. Murray's 1949 introduction to the Hendricks House edition of Pierre and, more recently, the work of Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins.

2. The most thorough work on the composition of Pierre has been done by Hershel Parker in “Why Pierre Went Wrong,” and in his work with Brian Higgins, including “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre” and their introduction to Critical Essays on Melville's Pierre. For an opposite view, see Robert Milder's “Melville's ‘Intentions’ in Pierre”; Michael S. Kearns' “Interpreting Intentional Incoherence: Towards a Disambiguation of Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities”; and William B. Dillingham's discussion of Pierre in Melville's Later Novels.

3. For a summary of the scholarship on whether Plinlimmon's pamphlet represents Melville's own views, see Brian Higgins' “Plinlimmon and the Pamphlet Again,” and William B. Dillingham's discussion of the controversy in Melville's Later Novels.

Works Cited

Braswell, William. “The Early Love Scenes in Melville's Pierre.” American Literature 22 (1950): 283-289.

Brodhead, Richard H. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Dillingham, William B. Melville's Later Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Higgins, Brian. “Plinlimmon and the Pamphlet Again.” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 27-38.

Higgins, Brian, and Parker, Hershel. “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1978.

———. “Introduction” to Critical Essays on Melville's Pierre. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1983.

Kearns, Michael S. “Interpreting Intentional Incoherence: Towards a Disambiguation of Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 16 (1983): 34-52.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971.

Milder, Robert. “Melville's Intentions in Pierre.” Studies in the Novel 6 (1974): 186-199.

Murray, Henry A. “Introduction” to Pierre or The Ambiguities. New York: Hendricks House, 1949.

Parker, Hershel. “Why Pierre Went Wrong.” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 7-23.