SOURCE: “Pierre, or, The Ambiguities: A Camp Reading,” in Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville's Pierre, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 93-155.

[In the following excerpt, Creech interprets Pierre as a covertly homoerotic novel, with Pierre's attraction to his father manifested through his feelings for Isabel.]

PIERRE'S TWO FATHERS

“A WORD TO THE WISE”

Pierre has few of the … obviously homoerotic themes which have now been so frequently acknowledged in Melville's other novels. Even beyond these difficult questions of homoerotic content, the wink, or its audience, it is in general difficult to know at all just what Melville himself consciously thought he was doing in Pierre. To complicate an already complicated question, there is reason to think, for example, that the tone, if not the entire nature, of the project may actually have changed, perhaps after the first thirteen or sixteen chapters, perhaps as a result of difficulties he encountered at that time.

Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker have suggested that the bad reviews of Moby-Dick, which began coming in during the composition of Pierre, may in part explain why the novel turns so dark, destructive, and just plain weird after a certain point.¹ Melville scholars have puzzled over his promises to Richard Bentley, his English publisher, that Pierre would be a romance in the popular style, and his apparently sincere belief that it was the sort of book likely to generate a high volume of sales—notions that seemed as wildly improbable then as they do to anyone reading the novel today. What did Melville mean when he promised Sophia Hawthorne that his new novel would be as a “rural bowl of milk”?² Concerning this traditional, speculative debate about Melville's intentions in writing Pierre, one can, at a minimum, conclude that the novel was a site of conflicts between conscious and unconscious forces of which Melville was not fully in control. The skepticism displayed by Higgins and Parker is a necessary tonic for anyone approaching this work. “No one is ever going to demonstrate the perfect unity of Pierre from the opening words to the last words.” Or, as they state in an earlier passage, “Our concern should be with understanding the complexity of Melville's compulsion to protect himself from others and from acknowledgement of what he had done. As Harrison Hayford said in 1946, Melville probably ‘deceived himself into thinking he had submerged the profounder elements of his book far enough below the surface to allow the ordinary reader clear sailing through the romance.’”³

A refinement would thus seem to be in order here. We must remain open to the possibility that a literary text can wink at us about its homoerotic content without, as it were, knowing what it is doing. In such circumstances, the wink may hover ambiguously over the boundary line delineating the unavowable and the unconscious.

Melville clearly goes to considerable pains to put us on notice that there is a mystery in Pierre. Pierre is given “a word to the wise” which Melville no doubt meant as a wink to his readers, too: “Probe, probe a little—see—there seems one little crack there, Pierre—a wedge, a wedge. Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing, Pierre; not for nothing, do we so intrigue and become wiley diplomatists, and glozers with our own minds, Pierre” (102, Library of America; all citations are to this ed.). His oath beneath the Terror Stone mentions “the miseries of the undisclosable things in me” (160). And perhaps most telling of all, in the last paragraph, after all speakable secrets have been revealed, Isabel in effect provides the novel with its final summation: “All's o’er, and ye know him not!” (420).

If, indeed, beyond these generic insinuations, Melville was unable to count on nineteenth-century equivalents to the code of Angora cats and house plants, it becomes crucial to look very closely at the equivalences which he himself actually constructs. Surely an important example is in the opening pages of book 1.

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Melville repeatedly perfumes the early chapters of the novel with strong whiffs of heterosexual incest, underscoring the surprising youth and beauty of Mary Glendinning, Pierre's mother, for whom “a reverential and devoted son seemed lover enough” (8-9). Pierre's “romantic filial love,” his jealousy of any potential suitor, Mary's similarity to “a conquering virgin,” who etherealizes the “nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness” which she feels in the “lover-like adoration of Pierre” (22)—all of this makes mother-son incest pervasive in the first books. Given this relationship at the outset, their subsequent rupture will have about it something of the lover's quarrel. And indeed, the incestuous link comes to seem like a relationship constructed in order to be deconstructed by subsequent events in the novel.

In the meantime, however, the mother-son incest theme will be both sustained and displaced by the habit which mother and son share of addressing each other familiarly as brother and sister: sustained, because calling each other brother and sister is a form of coeval intimacy which transgresses the rigid hierarchical taboo shaping mother-son relations in the bourgeois family; displaced, because it demonstrates at the outset that the primacy of mother-son incest is not so much the thing itself as it is one term in a potential series of analogical slippages. The putatively original (and heterosexual) desire of the son for the mother, in other words, loses some of its prestige when it can be so easily displaced and transmogrified into desire for a sister. And as the plot develops, the “brother-sister” bond between Pierre and his mother does indeed turn out to be Melville's foreshadowing of a counterbond between Pierre and Isabel, also incestuous, but a bond which will totally supplant the mother-son connection with which the novel begins. It seems that this displaceability is part of the general hostility toward the mother that surfaces steadily in the novel's first half.

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In Pierre, then, Melville has not used the gothic and soon-to-be psychoanalytic trope of heterosexual incest in the usual sense as a grounding desire from which all other forms of desire are directly or dialectically derived. If anything, heterosexually incestuous desire is itself derived from another source, and here is where the complexities and ambiguities of Pierre really begin. For, also beginning with book 1, Melville complicates this familiar taboo against mother-son incest with less familiar, homosexual logic:

So perfect to Pierre had long seemed the illuminated scroll of his life thus far, that only one hiatus was discoverable by him in that sweetly-writ manuscript. A sister had been omitted from the text. He mourned that so delicious a feeling as fraternal love had been denied him. Nor could the fictitious title [“sister”], which he so often lavished upon his mother, at all supply the absent reality. This emotion was most natural; and the full cause and reason of it even Pierre did not at that time entirely appreciate. … For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already lies in the sister. “Oh, had my father but had a daughter!” cried Pierre; “some one whom I might love, and protect, and fight for, if need be. … Now, of all things, would to heaven, I had a sister!” (11-12)

Already it seems odd that Pierre should be, in effect, mourning here for a sister he never had, when in fact the “absent reality” in his life, what had been really lost, was his father who had died seven years earlier, when Pierre was twelve.⁴ Other indications of a hidden tension beneath these lines quickly follow. The proleptic “mourning” which Melville just called a “most natural emotion,” is immediately, without transition, reclassified as a “strange yearning.”

This emotion was most natural; and the full cause and reason of it even Pierre did not at that time entirely appreciate. … It may have been that this strange yearning of Pierre for a sister, had part of its origin in that still stranger feeling of loneliness he sometimes experienced, as not only the solitary head of his family, but the only surnamed male Glendinning extant. A powerful and populous family had by degrees run off into the female branches; so that Pierre found himself … companioned by no surnamed male Glendinning, but the duplicate one reflected to him in the mirror. (12; my emphasis)

The logic of this passage is by normative standards incomprehensible. In schematic form it goes like this: Because Pierre is lonely as head of his family and longs to be “companioned by [a] surnamed male Glendinning,” he yearns—not for a brother or a cousin, nor for the father which he in fact has lost—but for a sister. That is, Pierre's yearning for a male companion in the patriarchal position is what Melville terms the “origin” of his yearning for a sister (with which the novel's plot will provide him in short order).

Pierre's yearning for a patriarchal male Glendinning recurs elsewhere in the novel. He has exactly similar feelings when he gazes upon the “fine military portrait” of his grandfather who, like Melville's own grandfather, had been a hero of the Revolutionary War in “that patriarchal time.” “Never could Pierre look upon his fine military portrait without an infinite and mournful longing to meet his living aspect in actual life. The majestic sweetness of this portrait was truly wonderful in its effects upon any sensitive and generous-minded young observer. For such, that portrait possessed the heavenly persuasiveness of angelic speech … declaring to all people, as from the Mount, that man is a noble, god-like being, full of choicest juices; made up of strength and beauty” (38; my emphasis). With homoerotic intensity that is today obvious, then, this “infinite and mournful longing” in Pierre is beyond any doubt desire for a male companion in the family. His mirror image of himself will not do. He longs for the fleshly reality. That this mournful longing should be infinite will come as no surprise to anyone who has considered Judith Butler's reflections on the impossibility of mourning the loss of such primary homosexual love objects.⁵

The shift to desiring a sister is, then, an unmotivated gender leap in the object of Pierre's yearning. Melville does not attempt to smooth over the displacement, but that does not prevent him from simply asserting it without commentary. For Melville to have violated the logic of narrative causality in this way, in which one, ostensibly unrelated thing is said nevertheless to cause another, he must have been responding to some conscious or unconscious desire of his own for there to be this linkage between the novel's elaborate theme of heterosexual incest (the “strange yearning”) and its “origin” in a more mediated and attenuated theme of homosexual incest (the “still stranger feeling”). Homosexual incest is thus acknowledged as unavowable, with all the paradoxes implied in such a formulation: acknowledged and thus recognized; but acknowledged as being unacknowledgeable.

Here, then, is a first moment when Melville is constructing an equivalence, an embryonic code, which he cannot presume to be available at large. Because of prevailing standards of literary “competence,” he can invoke Dante or Shakespeare at other junctures of the novel, fully expecting readers to “get it.” Here he has to take it upon himself to rearrange normal, connotative links. And here, too, is a first wink. The path of displacement that starts with homosexual incest and travels from there to heterosexual incest begins here in book 1, and we shall find that it becomes ever more elaborately marked as the novel progresses. As a first wink, then, it begins to establish the grounds of mutual understanding that will be required for the other winks which Melville, with equal deniability, will direct at us in later pages.

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But where does this leave us? Can we, thus, just open the closet door and peer inside? Should we just cut to the chase and state flatly that in this odd, logically disjoined passage, Melville is cruising for those longed-for readers who might understand him, trying to hook in those who might be able to discern that Isabel is a feminine cover for what logically and psychologically in this novel is a male character? Does a camp reading require us to state crudely that Pierre explores the price a brave man in Melville's situation would have had to pay for owning his homosexuality frankly? Is it the story of a man who forswears his fiancé and runs away to the city with his homosexual lover, who accepts being disowned from family and rejected by society in order to heed a higher virtue of self-determination and integrity? And finally, shall we see Pierre as an early prototype of gay novels which, for over a century to come, would have to end in the annihilation of their gay protagonists, often in a confrontation with a straight object of their (former) affection? Yes, we shall. A great deal in the novel points precisely to such a direct transgender encoding, not unlike that performed in A la Recherche du temps perdu (where Albertine “is really” Albert). To the extent that one approaches it from that perspective, one would want to perform the kind of transgender decoding which George Painter and others have performed in scholarship on Proust.⁶ (The tactic of changing a character's gender to disguise homosexual sensibilities is still commonly called “the Albertine strategy”).

Melville's may well be a “Nathaniel/Isabel” strategy. For we must also read the novel as a necessarily transvested story of a man whose life is abruptly changed when he falls in love with another man, the way Melville did with Hawthorne, the erotic model for Isabel and for whose intelligence much of this may have been imagined. In his daring article, John D. Seelye hedgingly, but correctly, states an important part of the case. He inventories the multiple ways that autobiographical references to Hawthorne are insinuated into Pierre, the placement of the Ulver cottage homologously to the placement of Hawthorne's cottage at Tanglewood, for example. Add to that the detail that the cottage was red, as was Hawthorne's. He then concludes somewhat cautiously, “This is not to say that the love affair between Isabel and Pierre is a thinly-veiled allegory of Melville's friendship with Hawthorne. It is to suggest, however, that Melville seems to have been consciously drawing on his feelings toward Hawthorne as he wrote the story. The incestuous basis of the love between Pierre and Isabel hints at the unnaturalness of the attraction Melville seems to have felt for Hawthorne, later reflected in the attraction felt by Clarel towards Vine.”⁷ Even though we are far from wrong to read Pierre in this way, we must not sacrifice the crucial ambiguities which provide its subtitle, and which were an integral part of Melville's homoerotic fiction once he decided to bring it home.

A gay and lesbian studies project today must indeed undertake the simple translations and revelations where they are appropriate. It is never insignificant to discern closeted homosexual content and, where plausible, to name names. At the same time, Pierre must also be read as a dense reflection on the nature, function, and allure of the closet which, in a different way from La Recherche, forms an important aspect of its substance. The closet is itself as much the subject of Pierre as are any expressions of the homoerotic desire it secretes. In a different way from Proust, and in a different way from other novels by Melville himself, the transgender fiction here is as much about the resistance to what it is seeking to express as it is about the positivity of a hidden truth. While there is hidden homosexuality in Pierre, as indeed there is throughout so much of Melville, in Pierre it is much more than a fact or an aspect of a character or a behavior observed or a temptation felt. In Pierre, homosexuality is explored from the perverse perspective of its impossible place, and thus its closeted space, within the still-sacred configurations of the family.

And finally, a simple transcoding of Pierre would implicitly attribute to Melville an acceptance of his desire, not only to find a male companion and soul mate (a desire he was able to own),⁸ but a whole array of corollary consequences—principal among them being flight from the bonds of family and paternity—which it was simply impossible for him to imagine unequivocally. Although as a camp reading, this analysis is fundamentally enabled by the recognition that Melville, in some imprecise sense, was gay too, it does not proceed from any simple conviction about what that actually could mean in the particular life of Herman Melville, or about how it can come to legibility in his writing.

“HIS OWN LITTLE CLOSET”

The loneliness Melville ascribes to Pierre in the absence of other males at the family's patriarchal pinnacle is not autobiographically inspired since he himself was the third child in a numerous family. The singularity which he shows to be the bane of Pierre's life at this juncture is, in fact, a figuration of the closet which is all bourgeois male subjectivity conceived traditionally.

If a man competes against men for his right to occupy the privileged space of patriarchal masculinity, he loses any unmediated intimacy with other men, which explains Pierre's sense that by winning, by being alone at the top of the fame column, he will, in fact, remain lonely. Winning by default will actually mean losing male intimacy and living wholly entrapped within another closed, privatized, space—the heterosexual closet—of that (en)gendered isolation in which we can recognize “ce sexe qui est bien un,” to parody Luce Irigaray.

Nor does such an assumption deny the profound confusion and pain Melville surely felt because of the sexuality I am attributing to him so matter-of-factly. Indeed, Pierre is in part the expression of a very perplexed passion. As gay confessionals have made clear, such confusion in nineteenth-century homosexuals is in part the result of a strange kind of ignorance.⁹ As we saw earlier, late in his life Melville seems to acknowledge and to lament his own ignorance in “After the Pleasure Party,” from Timoleon (1891):

Could I remake me! or set free
This sexless bound in sex, then plunge
Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge
Piercing Pan's paramount mystery!
For, Nature, in no shallow surge
Against thee either sex may urge.(10)

This lament seems finally to embrace the closed mystery of sex with a sense of regret—“Could I remake me!”—that it took until the end of his life to accept that “Nature” can make us desire “either sex” deeply, “in no shallow surge.” Though the voice here is that of a woman, her name is Urania, probably a giveaway that she is, in effect, a transvested man. Uranian was the word coined by Karl Ulrichs to designate homosexuals in 1864, and one can easily imagine that Melville knew the term through his association with the sex specialist, Dr. Augustus Kinsley Gardner.¹¹

Although William Schurr has suggested that “After the Pleasure Party” might have been begun as early as 1847, the narrative voice in Pierre clearly does not manifest anything like this rueful acceptance and open acknowledgment. Rather, as Higgins and Parker have it, “In the early chapters Melville exploited the device of presenting situations so ambiguous that even the most brilliant reader might not be quite sure what was going on.”¹² Writing this novel was, I believe, part of a lifelong process by which Melville finally did achieve at least enough calm self-acceptance to publish these remarkable lines in Timoleon, and other passages just as extraordinary in Clarel. But forty years earlier he chose a distinctly different approach when he converted his hero's primary desire for a male companion into desire for a sister.

In this perspective, then—the perspective of parallel narratives linking the evolution of overt, first-person homosexual desire in Melville's writing and the evolution of his sexual awareness—we can suggest that at the Pierre stage, converting homosexual desire into incestuous desire allowed him, at a minimum, to preserve homoerotic feeling, feeling which still remains palpable beneath the disguise. Recourse to a kind of transvestism was, in other words, a compromise formation and it allowed Melville to achieve more than one goal. It allowed the expression of transgressive feelings, and at the same time the novel's tragic ending punished those feelings. By picturing intense sexual longings as inadmissible because of their incestuous rather than their homosexual nature, Melville was representing sexual guilt of a kind from which he was (probably) exempt in reality. By transferring his guilt for homosexual desire to a sexual transgression of which he was innocent, he simultaneously achieves both exculpation and punishment, confession and innocence. In Pierre, then, Melville spins a cautionary, masochistic fantasy in which Pierre's ambiguous innocence—in this sense homologous with his own—nevertheless provokes the cataclysmic consequences of moral outrage, social ostracism, loss of family, economic destitution, failure as a writer, and death.

This exorbitant cost is, in short, the price the sea novelist feels he must pay for bringing his sexuality back home. At the same time that he exacts the price from Pierre, however, he voices rage, resentment, and criticism of the patriarchal order which inflicts such pain upon homosexuals who, nevertheless, must continue to live out their assigned roles within its ineluctable institutions. There is, then, a balanced equation in this novel. The force of the punishment which negates Pierre is matched by the iconoclastic zeal of the (disguised) homosexual evangelism which, in the midst of a marked erotic surge, he expresses rather bluntly: “I will gospelise the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!—I will write it, I will write it!” (319).

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We must not disregard the punishment and negation that triumphs over Pierre in the end. This is not a gay-liberation tract. At the same time, it is crucial accurately to discern the other side of the equation in which is figured this potent, revolutionary force. On this second, positive, side, we begin by recognizing that by “gospelising the world anew,” Pierre is certainly not trying to make the world safe for incest. The new gospel is that of his ardor for men, perhaps indeed for Hawthorne, and Melville displays a keen and subtle understanding of the nature and configuration of the forces arrayed against that possibility. One of the most important goals of a camp reading of Pierre, then, must be to acknowledge the novel's critique of patriarchal notions concerning access to manhood.¹³ Melville uses the adjective patriarchal in Pierre (e.g., 38), but more significantly, the novel is steeped in awareness of the institution, its traditional imaginary, and its regulatory norms.

In important feminist, lesbian, and gay theory of recent date, the access route to manhood as it is regulated by patriarchy has been aptly characterized as homosocial. In the conceptual field defined by patriarchal homosociality, homosexual men are thought to seek manhood directly (e.g., sexually) through the manhood of another man. This is their mistake, however, because in the process they miss the apparently moving target of their own manhood. To achieve one's own masculine identity homosocially, and thus to achieve one's rightful place in the patriarchy, one is supposed, rather, to seek manhood not directly by reaching for that of another man but through the indirect mediation of women. As Gayle Rubin has pointed out, one's desire for manhood in such a system is to be converted into a desire for the sign of manhood which comes only in the possession and exchange of women among men.¹⁴ Thus, one accedes to manhood only by entering into competition and conflict with other men, and only via a system founded on the exchange of women among men. According to Eve Sedgwick (who harks back to Lévi-Strauss and René Girard), it is the schematic opposition between these two systems for attaining manhood that is itself the master production of homosocial patriarchy, upon which it depends in order to constitute itself conceptually, and in order to blackmail men into accepting the strictures of patriarchal homosociality.¹⁵ (It underlies the oedipal configuration of the bourgeois family, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, etc.) Deleuze and Guattari get off one of their funniest lines in parodying the grim alternatives with which the law of Oedipus seems to threaten those among us who do not obey:

Je prends une femme autre que ma soeur pour constituer la base differenciée d’un nouveau triangle dont le sommet, tête en bas, sera mon enfant—ce qui s’appelle sortir d’OEdipe, mais aussi bien le reproduire, le transmettre plutôt que de crever tout seul, inceste, homosexuel et zombi.¹⁶

I take a woman other than my sister in order to constitute the differentiated basis for a new triangle the summit of which, turned upside down, will be my child—which is called leaving Oedipus, but which is also to reproduce it, to transmit it, rather than dying all alone, guilty of incest, a homosexual, and a zombi.

Returning to the novel, then, we can see that Pierre's originary desire for a “surnamed male Glendinning” is ambiguously situated between these two opposing schemes.

Homosexually speaking, Pierre's yearning for another male in the family is just that. Its object could be achieved in the primary homosexual incest which underlies all subsequent displacements, such as the one the text clearly performs when it transforms the desired male into a sister. Viewed homosocially, by contrast, Pierre's lack should be fulfilled by exogamous exchange of women between men and by competition among men for those objects of exchange. At least in the beginning, Pierre as scion of the Glendinning family is keenly aware of this norm and ambiguously tempted by it. That is the logic underlying his relationship with Lucy. Significantly, it is immediately after the passage on his “still stranger feeling” of need for a male that Melville first introduces the homosocial alternative with the here-significant conjunction but:

It may have been that this strange yearning of Pierre for a sister, had part of its origin in that still stranger feeling of loneliness he sometimes experienced, as not only the solitary head of his family, but the only surnamed male Glendinning extant. … But in his more wonted natural mood, this thought [of being the lone male] was not wholly sad to him. Nay, sometimes it mounted into an exultant swell. For in the ruddiness, and flushfulness, and vaingloriousness of his youthful soul, he fondly hoped to have a monopoly of glory in capping the fame-column, whose tall shaft had been erected by his noble sires. (12; my emphasis)

Again—this is crucial—this caveat rebounds immediately off Melville's explanation of the “origin” of Pierre's yearning for a sister “in that still stranger feeling” of longing for another male in the family, “but in his more wonted natural mood,” being the sole male at the patriarchal summit was “not wholly sad to him.” The first thought was presented in its strangeness; this second one is presented as more usual for Pierre, and more natural. Indeed, the known, natural pleasure of the second scene is encoded as lusty adolescent masturbation. Melville was as clear as he dared be that the erect family shaft, in the phallocentric logic of this particular circuit, found its direct referent in the shaft immediately in hand, once again (as in the sexual semiotics of Redburn) “in the ruddiness, and flushfulness, and vaingloriousness of his youthful soul”—so to speak—as “it mounted into an exultant swell.” In this version, the boy is clearly growing up to be a healthy, procreative sire of the line because, like his grandfather, he is also “full of choicest juices” (38). Melville depicts this naturalness, grounded in the empiricism of ejaculating penises, as relief from another, competing “mood” in Pierre which ranges from the “strange” to the “stranger still.”

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In summary, then, these two circuits of desire are presented explicitly in their difference from each other, within semantic fields constructed by Melville as oppositions: one is an unknown source of sadness, it is unconscious, it is strange, uncommon, and less natural; the other is more familiar, more “usual,” and a kind of pleasure (“not wholly sad”). The first is a circuit of incestuously based homosexual desire for a male companion in the family (converted into desire for a sister) which progressively will take over Pierre's life; the second is a circuit of heterosexualized desire bound up in homosocial rivalry (the basis of phallocentric patriarchy) which will be acted out in Pierre's competition with Glen Stanley for Lucy Tartan. (Lucy is indeed the “tartan,” of family and lineage.) In the first circuit Pierre homosexually desires the patriarchal phallus as if he lacked it. In the second circuit Pierre desires to take his “natural” place within patriarchal, phallic genealogy by virtue of the simple fact that he has a functioning penis with which he will competitively top “the fame column, whose tall shaft had been erected by his noble sires” (an imperative Melville knew all too well from within his own family's desperate situation).

In this straightforward sense of a choice between binaries, the question is whether Pierre possesses the phallus genealogically and naturally, by reference to the erect phallic glory that is already in hand, or whether his peculiar yearning is homosexual desire for his father's phallus. In more concrete terms, the question is whether he will become a man through phallic competition with Glen for Lucy—and thus mediated through her—or whether will he become a man by following a desire for an incestuous object in Isabel. The entire novel is organized around this phantasmic option which in our day has been more explicitly—but perhaps no less ideologically—theorized as an option between exogamy and endogamy, difference and sameness, otherness and narcissism, heterosexuality and homosexuality. Dramatically, and within this precise scheme, Pierre chooses the latter and leaves home to find it in the city. That choice and the (tenuous) world that emerges from it for Pierre will define the novel until the homosocial/heterosexual matrix makes its dramatic return at the novel's violent end. For although Pierre will make a clear-cut choice for an erotics grounded in homosexual incest, Melville will annihilate that choice.

At a perhaps deeper level, we might also suspect that Melville is not just reflecting his culture by refusing to let Pierre's revolutionary choice stand. In a sense, the more profound significance of this novel might be that Pierre's coming to manhood could, however subtly, be shown to be subjected to the regulation of hypostatized gender choices at all. In that sense, the most important depiction here would be the unacceptability of sexual ambiguity, with its concomitant imposition of the obligation to choose. It is this choice which both gives Pierre a sexuality, and then wrenches his chosen sexuality out of the sphere loosely hinted at by the variety of affects attributed to him in the novel's opening development: “yearning” for “a sister,” “feeling of loneliness he sometimes experienced,” his “more wonted natural mood,” his “exultant swell” as a result of which “he fondly hoped.” In other words, this multiplicity of Pierre's boyhood feelings is presented schematically as if their original complexity and fluidity had already become unacceptable. By Melville's time, this broader range of affects is well under way toward being reduced to the rigid, binary choice Pierre has to make between the two opposing sexualities whose form we very much recognize today.

In any case, it is certain that Pierre lives in a world which acts as if there were no choice to be made. The force of the novel is in its extraordinary revelation that there is, in fact, this choice, and that society has tactics for pressuring him to make the right choice. By choosing wrongly, Pierre then forces patriarchal society to show its hand by acknowledging his choice to the extent required to confront it and to annihilate it through violence. Perversely, then, the annihilation of Pierre's choice by the forces of patriarchy (embodied in Glen and Fred) is indeed a kind of recognition. And as I have already suggested, it is a cataclysm which will remain typical of most American novels dealing with male homosexuality for a long time to come because it is one of the few forms of recognition (from straight society and, as in Melville's case, from themselves) that homosexual authors can imagine. It is a form of recognition through negation which is relayed, for example, by D. H. Lawrence's acknowledgment of Melville's deep yearnings, an acknowledgment which Lawrence, in a mode of homosexual panic all his own, cannot allow to stand. Notice his progression from description to the italicized proscription of something which he knows and fears will emerge despite its illegitimacy.

Friendship never even made a real start in [Melville]—save perhaps his half-sentimental love for Jack Chase, in White-Jacket.

Yet to the end he pined for this: a perfect relationship. … Right to the end he could never accept the fact that perfect relationships cannot be. Each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings.

Each soul should be alone. And in the end the desire for a “perfect relationship” is just a vicious, unmanly craving.¹⁷

A less panicked Lawrence might have seen that Melville has placed two competing circuits of access to manliness into play, at least in Pierre. A less motivated critic might have seen that Melville—precisely unlike Lawrence himself—did not shy away from playing out the temptation and allowing the confrontation between the emergent obligation for men to be alone, and his intense yearning that they might merge.¹⁸ There is plenty of evidence, moreover, that the nervous disapproval displayed in Lawrence's judgment continues unabated in some Melville criticism. “Without a male model in his domestic circle,” writes one recent critic, “Pierre has no idea how to act in the traditional male role, and thus the folly of his longing is presented ironically in Melville's imagery.”¹⁹

Most radically of all, however, Melville stages this confrontation within the family. And already, it is the same family whose foundational principle will be theorized as the prohibition of incest. It is also the same family, one must quickly add, which was already showing signs of being wracked by this law of its founding, and which, in American literature, seemed even to require the invention of transgressive family romances. (One thinks, for example, of J. F. Cooper for whom symbolic incest was paradoxically a kind of solution in The Red Rover and Home as Found.²⁰ It is precisely this family, undermined by that which constitutes it, which is Melville's focus, the same family which would soon find its consummate exegete in Freud and its tortured representations in novels such as Lawrence's own Sons and Lovers.

Pierre does not question the centrality of incest as a formative desire; the novel is, however, savage in its rejection of the assumption that natural, incestuous desire begins between mother and son, and that it is what fuels the homosocial system as a positivity which results from its prohibition. The mother-son theme which is a given from the outset is precisely what Pierre rejects in order to claim a more fundamental desire for the father. The difference in the access each provides to manhood in Pierre is the source of the basic antagonism in the novel and the two incompatible “families” it depicts as it moves from Saddle Meadows to the Apostles'.

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These two incompatible circuits implied fleetingly in book 1 are quickly amplified when they surface in two incompatible images of the father, correlated to two incompatible objects of desire, which quite explicitly preoccupy Pierre. The bourgeois, heterosexual paterfamilias, flower of homosocial culture, is represented by a large oil painting which hangs prominently over the mantelpiece in the drawing room. Pierre's mother admires it unambiguously. Pierre's feelings about it are, not surprisingly, confused. This official father image has its other in the small oil of Pierre senior as a young bachelor, which Pierre's mother finds “namelessly unpleasant and repellent” (88). Pierre, however, adores it and keeps it in a small chamber next to his bedroom. Melville consistently terms this space a “closet.” A closet in this nineteenth-century usage was not the same wardrobe that it is today, but rather a more intimate chamber than the adjoining bedroom, a smaller space in which “privacies” could be assured (87).

Not the least of the autobiographical links between Melville and Pierre is that the descriptions of these two paintings correspond point for point with extant portraits of Melville's father Allan who died when Herman was twelve years old, portraits to which we will return below …

“Even to Pierre these two paintings had always seemed strangely dissimilar” (88). The larger and more formal one in the drawing room seemed to him more “truthful and life-like” because it represented the image of his father that Pierre had directly known in his boyhood. It portrays “a middle-aged, married man, and seemed to possess all the nameless and slightly portly tranquillities, incident to that condition when a felicitous one; the smaller portrait painted a brisk, unentangled, young bachelor, gayly ranging up and down in the world; light-hearted, and a very little bladish perhaps; and charged to the lips with the first uncloying morning fullness and freshness of life” (88). If this “chair portrait,” as it comes to be called, portrays a “blade,” he is also “gay” after a fashion that is not totally exempt from the connotations that that word has come to have in our own time. Melville describes it further by telling us that an art critic required to comment upon it might correctly have written: “An impromptu portrait of a fine-looking, gay-hearted, youthful gentleman. He is lightly and, as it were, airily and but grazingly seated in, or rather flittingly tenanting an old-fashioned chair of Malacca. One arm confining his hat and cane is loungingly thrown over the back of the chair, while the fingers of the other hand play with his gold watch-seal and key” (87; my emphasis). Reading such a description, one has to wonder if Dorian Gray can be far behind. Such a portrayal also recalls Melville's earlier descriptions of masculine beauty and grace of other characters—“matchless Jack” Chase or Billy Budd—whom Melville presents as male objects of male admiration and desire.²¹ It sends us back with a new awareness to Pierre's recollection of his father's “bodily form of rare manly beauty” (83). Because Pierre's speculations about it will be crucial for the plot, Melville delves into the provenance of the chair portrait in great detail. In a flashback we are shown young Pierre learning from Pierre senior's maiden sister that the portrait was painted on the sly at a time when he had just come from visiting noble refugees of the French Revolution. It was thought that he was in love with a beautiful French woman, which explained the particular look on his face captured when his cousin Ralph first sketched the portrait without his subject realizing it. Suspicious that his likeness has been “picked” (94) like a pocket, Pierre senior seeks to gauge the danger such a portrait might represent by buying a book on “Physiognomy … in which the strangest and shadowiest rules were laid down for detecting people's innermost secrets by studying their faces” (96).²² He tells cousin Ralph to destroy the painting or “at any rate, don’t show it to any one, keep it out of sight” (95). Ralph perpetuates this imperative when he gives the portrait to Dorothea, “making [her] promise never to expose it anywhere” (95) that Pierre senior might see it.

This strange imperative seems to attach itself to the portrait which thereby becomes, among other things, an instrument which transfers a closeting requirement to all those who possess it. Mother Mary hates it. Pierre receives it secretly and a tacit pact requires that it never be mentioned between mother and son. “And when the portrait arrived at Saddle Meadows … Pierre silently hung it up in his closet; and when after a day or two his mother returned, he said nothing to her about its arrival, being still strangely alive to that certain mild mystery which invested it, and whose sacredness now he was fearful of violating, by provoking any discussion with his mother about Aunt Dorothea's gift” (98). Mary's allegiance goes, rather, to the drawingroom portrait which she herself commissioned and which addresses its patriarchal desire to her as wife and mother. The erotics of the chair portrait, on the contrary, are directed to another object, outside the family. The complex of relations and positionings which it establishes with its addressees cannot be accommodated in a bourgeois drawing room. Like any woman, surmises Pierre misogynistically, his mother has the ability “to perceive that the glance of the face in the portrait, is not, in some nameless way, dedicated to herself, but to some other and unknown object” (100).

In addition to the imperative of secrecy, another effect that seems to accompany the portrait is the strange desexualization of those who are entrusted with its secret, or more accurately in Pierre's case, a deheterosexualization. The maiden sister Dorothea is the first to figure as a vestal virgin who piously secretes the mysterious portrait away in her own chamber where she worships it privately. But then Aunt Dorothea conceives an “extravagant attachment” to her handsome nephew Pierre who is the natural addresses of the portrait and its mystery because she saw, “transformed into youth once again, the likeness and the very soul of her brother, in the fair, inheriting brow of Pierre” (89). When he turns fifteen, she therefore sends him the sacred portrait. Even in its absence, however, the virgin Dorothea remains strangely bound to the chair portrait, just as will Pierre for years to come. “Henceforth, before a gold-framed and gold-lidded ivory miniature,—a fraternal gift—aunt Dorothea now offered up her morning and her evening rites to the memory of the noblest and handsomest of brothers. Yet an annual visit to the far closet of Pierre … attested the earnestness of that strong sense of duty, that painful renunciation of self, which had induced her voluntarily to part with the previous memorial” (89).

The sister, now a sister in the monastic sense, assures transmission of the portrait as a virginal mission. “She sent it to him trebly boxed … and it was delivered … by an express, confidential messenger, an old gentleman of leisure, once her forlorn, because rejected gallant, but now her contented, and chatty neighbor” (89). A virgin sister sends a desexualized intermediary (reduced from “gallant” to “chatty neighbor”) to deliver this image of a gay blade in heat which is so threatening that it must be “trebly boxed,” and so “boxed” that it is actually treated by Pierre as a threat when he receives it. A threat to what? We are not told outright, but, without telling his mother he puts it in “his own little closet” (102).

The chair portrait is then a “closet portrait” from the beginning and acts as the vehicle for disseminating closetedness into the text: The father did not want his desire to be known, but it showed on his face; in painting his portrait, cousin Ralph “picked” the image of that secret desire. It was then the father's wish that the stolen image remain hidden. That wish to conceal became part of the representation and made those who possessed it afterward complicitious in respecting it, and thereby, partners in the secret of the desire itself. At each step, then, closeting activity itself perpetuated and acknowledged the publication of the father's pleasure as illicit. To own the portrait was vicariously to share that pleasure and to be jealously possessed by its secret—to acknowledge its wink.

The circuit followed by the chair portrait thereby reveals the paradoxical logic of the closet according to which, what it hides, in the hiding becomes knowable as a hidden secret.²³ Like the homosexual wink, closeting the portrait paradoxically acknowledges a taboo pleasure, and the pleasure of taboo, without acknowledging what about it is illicit.²⁴ “The face in the picture still looked at them frankly, and cheerfully, as if there was nothing kept concealed; and yet again, a little ambiguously and mockingly, as if slyly winking to some other picture” (97; my emphasis). The portrait is, then, both frank in revealing its own illicit desire and yet ironic in its campy wink, a wink acknowledging and sharing with Pierre its own truth as that which is repressed in the other portrait. The “frankness” itself with which the chair portrait expresses its own desire reveals the falsehood of the official paterfamalias represented in the drawing-room portrait. The lie perpetrated by the other picture of Pierre senior thus becomes part of the truth which is being protected by hiding the chair portrait but which, paradoxically, the chair portrait shares in a wink to its acolytes. Melville even makes the chair portrait seem to speak the message of its wink prosopopoeially to Pierre.

Pierre, believe not the drawing-room painting; that is not thy father; or, at least is not all of thy father. … I am thy father as he more truly was. In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us, Pierre; the thousand proprieties and polished finesses and grimaces intervene, Pierre; then, we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self, Pierre; in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem. Look again. I am thy real father. … Consider this strange and ambiguous smile, Pierre; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these eyes, Pierre? I am thy father, boy. There was once a certain, oh, but too lovely young Frenchwoman, Pierre. Youth is hot, and temptation strong, Pierre. … Doth thy mother dislike me for naught? (101)

In this way did it enthrall and possess Pierre, submitting him to its example and to its secretive desire. Here we should recall Melville's description of it in terms that are remarkably like those which, historically speaking, were then becoming homosexual stereotypes: “light-hearted” and “bladish,” “a brisk, unentangled, young bachelor, gaily ranging,” “seated airily,” “grazingly,” and “flittingly” on his chair.²⁵ Again, his pose is worthy of Dorian Gray, “one arm confining his hat and cane is loungingly thrown over the back of the chair, while the fingers of the other hand play with his gold watch-seal and key” (87).

The transgressions of the chair portrait are then multiple. Not the least is the very representation of male desire in a male figure, rather than, as is traditional in the West, as projected dialectically outward into a female object desirable to men. Further, in the prosopopoeia, a father presents the images of sexual desire to his son by presenting the seductive spectacle of his own body in an erotic blason: “Consider this strange and ambiguous smile, Pierre; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these eyes, Pierre? I am thy father, boy,” in which we cannot help hearing, mutatis mutandis, something in the semantic field of, “I am thy lover, boy.” For, with the arrival of Isabel this last link will be, in effect, realized.²⁶

In addressing this erotic spectacle of male desire to Pierre, the portrait of the father responds directly to the son's loneliness for another male in the family. Perhaps by analogy to Althusser's well-known term, the chair portrait erotically hails Pierre, and Pierre is brought to a dim recognition of something fundamental about himself and his longings in his spontaneous response to that hailing.²⁷ “This mouth” and “these eyes” address themselves to Pierre both as models of desiring and, more threateningly, as the incestuous, homosexual objects of Pierre's own desire.

Ever so coyly, Melville hints at another scene of masturbation in Pierre's long sessions before his father's portrait in this “closet sacred to the Tadmor privacies” (87).²⁸ The “exultant swell” of homosocial masturbation mentioned earlier is here answered by homosexual masturbation as, for hours on end Pierre remains alone and erect, “standing guard, as it were, before the mystical tent of the picture … unconsciously throwing himself open to all those ineffable hints and ambiguities” (102; my emphasis). In transcoding this closeted scene, one must recall the signifying economy that often made revery a euphemism for masturbation in Melville's time, especially when linked as here to images of liquidity.²⁹ The ciphered meaning then becomes obvious: “Nor did the streams of these reveries seem to leave any conscious sediment in his mind; they were so light and so rapid, that they rolled their own alluvial along; and seemed to leave all Pierre's thought-channels as clean and dry as though never any alluvial stream had rolled there at all” (103; my emphasis.)³⁰ These “trances” were such that, once over, “upbraiding himself for his self-indulgent infatuation, [Pierre] would promise never again to fall into a midnight revery before the chair portrait of his father.” After masturbation, then, once “the stream of those reveries” have flowed, Pierre's mind is clear again for a time, the picture's power over him has been reduced, and he “upbraids” himself and vows never to give in to such self-indulgence again. But of course, in the compulsive and circular logic of guilty masturbation, he always did.

Such conclusions about Melville's suspiciously murky prose concerning Pierre's obsessive activities in his closet seem relatively plausible. But there is a good deal more to be retrieved here, if we can compromise with the epistemological problem of referring to an extratextual source for this chair portrait. Grounds for proposing this reading are to be found in the referential link which connects Melville's description of both the chair portrait and the drawing-room portrait in Pierre to the real portraits of Allan Melville which were in the possession of Herman's family. The descriptions of these portraits in Pierre correspond point for point with those of Allan which are still extant, with the one exception that Melville calls the chair portrait of Pierre's father an oil painting, whereas the portrait of Allan is a water color. The real chair portrait, in any event, was painted in 1810 by John Rubens Smith. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, although it is not currently on display. There can be no doubt that Melville used it as the direct model for the image Pierre kept in his closet. It is still today a very queer figure.³¹

Once one actually begins to take Melville's references to the extant portrait into account, it begins to seem that the focus of Pierre's masturbatory revery is rather explicitly on his father's crotch. For in the real chair portrait of Allan Melville, lying across the figure's lap from his left to his right, is a bulging fold in the breeches which produces a clear, ithyphallic form. As an extraordinarily exaggerated fold in the breeches of a seated man, created by the downward pressure of the forearm posed laterally just above the site, this blousing bulge would ordinarily be perceived as an empty fold which the artist must have intended as innocent sartorial realism.

In this context, however, innocence is not the appropriate term to describe Melville's extended eroticization in Pierre of a portrait of his own father which his family actually possessed. For what are we to make of his depiction of Pierre in compulsive “reveries and trances” (103) “before the mystical tent of the picture; and ever watching the strangely concealed lights of the meanings that so mysteriously moved to and fro within” (102)? Read alongside the portrait of Allan, the whole passage is full of double entendres: the tent metaphor suggests that Pierre was like a soldier standing erect before the tent of the painting, in the military tradition of his family, “sentineling his own little closet” (102). The word tent itself is polyvalent, moreover, suggesting a canvas housing or perhaps in light of the “sacredness” (98) Pierre attaches to it, a religious tabernacle which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a tent containing sacred objects. In this clearly homoerotic context, however, the tent more insinuatingly suggests a reference to the tent of cloth both hiding and hinting the paternal phallus whose exaggerated shape is so visible in the figure's lap. Just what is inside the tent formed by the cloth fold in the breeches is indeed a mystery that Lacanian psychoanalysis will see as the mystery of the phallus, hovering between full flesh and empty air, presence and absence, everything and nothing. In any case, its meanings are indeed “strangely concealed” by such a salient bulge. And as we shall see later, the text returns directly to this precise question, to just this erotic and epistemological dilemma, at the moment when Pierre's relation to his father's image undergoes a revolutionary change.

As a sexual secret betraying homosexual, incestuous desire and masturbatory indulgence before the quasi-pornographic image of his father, it is not surprising that Melville would have protected this content by carefully ciphering his private references. He seems to be reflecting on just this practice and betraying his desire to be understood despite such disguises when he wonders, “That casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that we alone hold the only and chosen key?” (84). And indeed, if the key was the real chair portrait, it was Melville's alone in that the portrait was a private possession.³² If the key to the remarkable homoerotic content of these passages depends on reading Pierre with the real chair portrait before the reader's eyes, then the closet was safe enough to receive his “most final joy.”

But the key figures literally in the chair portrait. We could even say that the portrait comes with key, like batteries, included, for “the fingers of the other hand play with his gold watch-seal and key.” This play of fingers and hand, as we shall see shortly, are laden with distinct erotic content for Melville. Already here, however, the key that the hand is playing with may well operate as a metonymy for the organ that is the key to Pierre's reveries before the painting, and the metaphoric model of Pierre's own masturbation.

In any case, though “we think that we alone hold the only and chosen key” to our most private closet, the key to the portrait is, in fact, the object of contention between mother Mary and lover Isabel. Earlier Pierre had recognized the key in the chair portrait as the same one his mother, who hated the portrait, kept locked away “in a drawer in her wardrobe” after his father's death (96). Beyond the multiple psychoanalytic possibilities for understanding this passage, we can with certainty acknowledge that by locking away the portrait's key, Mary wants to close Pierre out of the sphere of the portrait's desire, precisely insofar as that desire is not addressed oedipally, heterosexually, and normatively to herself. On the other side of this struggle there is Isabel who, hostile to Mary and her classically patriarchal designs for her son, sends Pierre the letter—the instrument—which actually opens his secret desire and prompts this lament about his “casket” being “desecrated at the merest stranger's touch.” In the contest between the opposing sociosexual spheres represented by Mary and Isabel, Mary has the literal key (which she keeps locked away), but Isabel has the more potent key of resemblance to the chair portrait of Pierre's illicit, homosexual desire. When finally Pierre abandons Lucy/Mary for Isabel, that is, when he definitively chooses the chair portrait over the drawing-room portrait, Mary's hysterical exclamation tells all: “Thus ruthlessly to cut off, at one gross sensual dash, the fair succession of an honorable race!” (230). Sensuality (gross) and family successions (honorable) are thus irretrievably dissociated in Mary's mind and in the emergent culture which she represents. It is Pierre's transgression however, like Whitman's, to refuse that separation. Choosing Isabel, he chooses a radically different model of sensuality and succession.

But we are not yet finished with the potent allure of the chair portrait around which the whole novel indeed turns. For there are further, particularly crucial winks to decipher. As far as the senses could detect, “Isabel had inherited one peculiar trait nowhither traceable but to it” (233; my emphasis). And yet Melville never identifies the trait upon whose singularity and peculiarity he has so hintingly insisted. He comes back to this trait several more times, however, saying, for example, that the original body of Pierre's father was now rotted in the churchyard, and “God knows! but for one part … it may have been fit auditing” (234; my emphasis). Again, what is this singular part which Pierre knew, not from memory of his father but from the portrait itself? Here is the passage in full: “There seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and vitality in the picture; because, since in his own memory of his father, Pierre could not recall any distinct lineament transmitted to Isabel, but vaguely saw such in the portrait; therefore, not Pierre's parent, as any way rememberable by him, but the portrait's painted self seemed the real father of Isabel; for, so far as all sense went, Isabel had inherited one peculiar trait nowhither traceable but to it (233).” Opaque as this text may at first seem, it nevertheless is explicit in its insistence that the only real link between the portrait and Isabel was not rational, historic, or empirical. (All Pierre's surmisings concerning the complex of circumstantial evidence for Isabel's relation to his father have already been characterized as “an endless chain of wondering” [165].) Nor could Pierre himself actually recall “any distinct lineament” in his living father that now reemerged in Isabel. He could, however, locate this distinct lineament in the chair portrait, painted before Pierre's birth. “So far as all sense went”—that is, the evidence of sense experience (sight, touch)—she “had inherited one peculiar trait” and it came not from Pierre senior but from the portrait itself.

The link between the portrait and Isabel has thus been narrowed down to a visual particular far more precise and singular than any vague family resemblance. Indeed, it is while raising precisely this question that Pierre recalls his mother's opinion: “it is my father's portrait; and yet my mother swears it is not he” (166). Thus everything about this nexus of questions is contested and mysterious.

The resemblance between the portrait and Isabel, however, is the nodal point of the entire text. How odd, then, that Melville's writing around this crucial question is at its most tantalizingly evasive and suggestive. It is just here that he seems to signal that he is winking. “Omitting more subtle inquisition into this deftly-winding theme [of the portrait], it will be enough to hint” (233). Earlier he had the portrait tease Pierre with an erotic and epistemological taunt which is equally addressed to the reader, and which Melville's very visible hinting prompts us to recall here. “Probe, probe a little—see—there seems one little crack there, Pierre—a wedge, a wedge. Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry.”

If one responds, and if one probes the text for any further clue to this mystery Melville has so visibly spun for us, one finally has to wonder if he has not indicated it in the following image of, precisely, pointing. “The portrait still seemed levelling its prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally emerge” (233; my emphasis). This is a passage to which virtually all commentators on Pierre refer, and it is surely where Melville has himself pointed out the key to the enigma of the “one peculiar trait.” The problem which has prevented its understanding, however, is that his reference is not in or of the published text. Rather, he may well be invoking once again a private and personal reference to Allan Melville's portrait which was the model for the fictional portrait of Pierre's father.

There, in the chair portrait, the index finger of the right hand of the figure does indeed point, discreetly, at what is earlier described as “the mystical tent of the picture” (102), that is, at the phallomorphic bulge in the breeches which so obsessed Pierre's masturbatory moments at Saddle Meadows. … With all his efforts to justify his belief in his kinship to Isabel reduced to “an endless chain of wondering” (165), there remains only this “one single trait” she visibly shares with the portrait. It is this icon, “not Pierre's parent … but the portrait's painted self [which] seemed the real father of Isabel.” In effect, then, Pierre is confessing that Isabel is a masturbatory fantasy come true.³³ This ambiguous, painted image of the paternal penis—both appropriately (as the very sign of paternity), and utterly ironically (as an empty pornographic image)—had indeed sired the companion for which Pierre had always “mourned” (11). After all the enraptured, erotic longing Pierre had addressed to this paternal representation, “Isabel did finally emerge” from it. That is, because she shared the phallic trait with the portrait, the portrait referentially sires her erotic meaning for Pierre, making her the incarnation of the homoerotic object which had heretofore been the focus of all his “reveries and trances” in the closet. In this transitional moment, the portrait itself seems to reveal the real justification for Pierre's choice of this new sister by “levelling its prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally emerge” (233). Though she sprang from a fantasy, Isabel's incarnate emergence has nevertheless changed all the cardinal points of Pierre's life. And foremost among those changes, instantiation in the flesh has utterly desacralized the image. The pornographic spell is broken. Because the “particular trait” in the image has now become flesh in the oneirically transvested person of Isabel, Pierre can at last break out of the guilty thralldom which kept him night after night in his closet.

A new order has dawned as Pierre abandons Saddle Meadows. Once the portrait's “painted self” has been incarnated in Isabel, a whole regime of the dead father present in his absence—underwritten by the imaginary phallus that is both everything and nothing—has been altered. No longer will Pierre need to stand excluded and yearning before the chair portrait, stuck in an impossible mourning and desire. That version of his father is now doubly demoted to a painted image, of “empty air.” No longer will he need to protect and perpetuate his father's legacy of erotic shame. By embracing Isabel, Pierre is seeking to leave his closet behind. When he comes upon the image now he is filled with “repugnance … augmented by an emotion altogether new. That certain lurking lineament in the portrait, whose strange transfer, blended with far other, and sweeter, and nobler characteristics, was visible in the countenance of Isabel; that lineament in the portrait was somehow now detestable; nay, altogether loathsome, ineffably so, to Pierre” (232). Pierre burns the portrait and leaves for the city with the very real Isabel.

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There is one earlier wink which it is now possible to go back and decipher briefly. From the start Melville attributed any feelings of certainty about Isabel to Pierre's strong emotions concerning the chair portrait. Pierre's ruminations concerning an empirical, blood tie to Isabel had always “recoiled back upon him with added tribute of both certainty and insolubleness” (166). And still, despite his awareness of the “argumentative” nature of the factual evidence, the chair portrait continues to persuade him that “Isabel was indeed his sister” (166). We can now discern Melville's coyness in suggesting that, beyond rational evidence, Pierre saw “the Finger of God” (166) in this subjective certainty. “But the portrait, the chair-portrait, Pierre? Think of that. But that was painted before Isabel was born; what can that portrait have to do with Isabel?” (166). The narrator provides the answer.

Now alive as he was to all these searching argumentative itemisings of the minutest known facts any way bearing upon the subject; and yet, at the same time, persuaded, strong as death, that in spite of them, Isabel was indeed his sister; how could Pierre, naturally poetic, and therefore piercing as he was; how could he fail to acknowledge the existence of that all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness, which, when imperfectly and isolatedly recognized by the generality, is so significantly denominated The Finger of God? But it is not merely the Finger, it is the whole outspread Hand of God; for doth not Scripture intimate, that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand?—a Hollow, truly! (166; my emphasis)

In closeted language, Pierre could not fail to perceive that divine intervention, the “all-permeating wonderfulness” associated with what people call the Finger, or the hand of God, was the true guarantor of the connection between chair portrait and Isabel. But in deciphered language, how indeed could Pierre fail to see that the hand-induced pleasures of masturbation formed the only true link between the chair portrait, with its “mystical tent,” and the “all-permeating wonderfulness” promised him in the flesh by Isabel. Melville smiles to think that the penis that he has been hinting as the object of Pierre's imaginary longings could be “recognized by the generality”—that is, by a sexually blind public—only as God's “so significantly denominated … Finger.” Here Melville actually tells us that he is winking, explicitly pointing out that there is a surplus of significance in the denomination of God's “Finger” as the source of “all-permeating wonderfulness.” But he cannot tell us what that significance is. Nor can he tell us why God's “so significantly denominated”—and so wittily capitalized—“Finger” is something which the “penetrating” Pierre could not miss as the link between him and Isabel. And he goes on amusingly to suggest that the divine Finger has been accompanied by the divine hand, at first “outspread,” but then holding us so wonderfully in its “hollow”—wink—“A Hollow truly!”³⁴

We now can see the later passage discussed above as but another gloss on this bundle of signifiers. For there, “the portrait still seemed to be levelling its prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally emerge.” Obsessively focusing all that time on what he now realizes was only “empty air” and only a painted image of the phallus; lost in the “reveries and trances” of masturbatory ecstasy and desire for it; now, finally, that empty air has fathered sexual flesh beyond the semiotic absence of its painted self. Isabel is indeed that progeny as prophesied by Pierre's masturbatory yearning for a male companion in the family transmogrified into a sister. As Pierre's masturbatory revery-come-true, Isabel is indeed the issue of a divine hand and a pointing “Finger.”³⁵

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In summary, then, the two portraits condense the terms of a conflict which we are beginning to see as profound in midcentury American culture. Recent historical and gender studies suggest that authors such as Whitman—and I would emphatically add Melville—felt compelled to resist the onslaught of impoverishment being visited upon many social relationships. Michael Moon catalogs these effects as the “privatizing, standardizing, domesticizing, misogynist, and homophobic social arrangements of industrial, commercial, and (in the post-Civil War era) corporate capitalism that eventually replaced earlier arrangements.”³⁶ In the decades preceding the composition of Pierre, there is good evidence to suggest that a wide variety of social relations among men were being seized by what Sedgwick characterizes as homosexual panic, which would cast its chilling shadow on social relations of all types.

The drawing-room portrait condenses these forces which emerge everywhere in the patriarchal, heterosexual aspects of the novel. As their very image, it addresses Mary Glendinning only as wife and mother. It projects the Glendinning “fame column” which, in keeping with family tradition, had been “erected” around this exclusive version of Pierre's father and all his previous sires, an edifice which—in his “more normal” moments—Pierre desired to extend. In opposition to this image, the chair portrait in the closet condenses and expresses the desires in Pierre which these repressive arrangements render unspeakable. That is why it must be locked away and banished from view. Something about it is intolerable to the family's class position and all its accompanying norms.³⁷ It represents not Pierre's desire for the glory of capping the family's fame column but his desire for a male companion to complete the deep hiatus in his life. In that sense, the chair portrait is the image of Pierre's own desire writ large on the face of his father, a desire figured homosexually as his father's phallus and the fascination it exerts on a son made lonely by his onshore alienation from other men.

Culturally, of course, there is far-reaching significance in the shifting allegiances between the portraits in which Pierre rebelliously embraces, first, the chair portrait, and then its sexual incarnation in Isabel, while Mary Glendinning defensively allies herself with the familial propriety of the drawing room portrait. The drawing room was, after all, what the middle-class American family had set for itself as a cultural ideal: a closed and regulated space characterized by the increasing loss of homosocial possibilities and same-sex intercourse which caused men such pain. Michael Moon has argued well for locating Whitman's appeal in his counterhegemonic hymn to the fluid, masturbatory realm, the same realm characterized so distinctly and so diacritically in Allan Melville's chair portrait.³⁸ The relief and healing, the response to a longing, which is kindled in Whitman's poems is absolutely consonant with the sensibilities which Melville displays in abundance in these passages.

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Pierre is, of course, notable for the way it also prefigures the rigidifying oedipal structure of the bourgeois family which psychoanalysis would begin to codify in the next fifty years. Mary Glendinning is figured as a castrating, (explicitly) phallic mother who must be resisted (27, 213, etc.). Homosexual attraction among boys—“boy love,” as Melville calls it—is figured as part of a latent adolescent phase which is supposed naturally to develop into heterosexual fixation on girls (253-55). In a proto-Freudian mode of female narcissism and penis envy, Mary finds her only satisfaction in her son, whom she desires narcissistically, his beauty mirroring her own (110). Pierre's internalization of the queerer paternal image is what precipitates his breaking away from his manipulating and possessive mother, as he tries (unsuccessfully) to become a separate adult in his own right. From Henry Murray to Edwin Miller, we have not lacked for psychologists to explain the pathologies of Pierre and his family in post-Freudian terms which, paradoxically, are not particularly alien to the novel. On and on, Melville anticipates all of these configurations within the bourgeois family, insights which would soon become clichés of its analysis by the psychological sciences rising up to theorize it. In 1938, Willard Thorp exclaimed, “So startling is Melville's prescience about such subjects as adolescent psychology and the unconscious and so modern in his literary use of dreams and myths that one has constantly to remind oneself of the date of the novel.”³⁹ And indeed, exegesis of Pierre's protopsychoanalytic insights, in which these and other leitmotivs figure prominently, began early in this century. Already in 1929, S. Foster Damon called it “the first novel based on morbid sex,” in which Pierre was “a victim of a profound psychosis of which today we are learning a little under the misnomer, ‘Oedipus complex.’”⁴⁰ More to the point, however, Pierre leaves no doubt that the oedipal family coming to flower in the nineteenth century was, literally, an affair among men, founded on what Luce Irigaray targets in her famous pun, as “hommo-sexuality.”⁴¹

And yet at the same time, it is difficult to imagine a more radical rescripting of normative sexual outcomes within the oedipal family than the one which is performed when Pierre finds—not only the mediated model—but the object of his yearning in the eroticized spectacle of his father's illicit desire. Pierre keeps it in the closet not only to avoid displeasing his mother, but to isolate and protect his incestuous and homosexual “reveries and trances” from her normative incursions. We must finally acknowledge, then, that it is a yearning which links Melville powerfully with Walt Whitman in a shared awareness of what the latter described as “this terrible, irrepressible yearning, (surely more or less down underneath in most human souls)—this never-satisfied appetite for sympathy” to which Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, would seek to give “undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression.”⁴²

“On land,” then, Pierre's closet is a device which also serves to produce the gender segregation that comes naturally in the all-male world of the sailing ship. In Moby-Dick, Queequeg and Ishmael can marry, bed down, kiss their phallic idol Yojo together without having to negotiate gender differences and the familial laws which order them. In Leslie Fiedler's well-put description, “[Ishmael] embraces no woman, no obvious surrogate for the banned mother, only another male, a figure patriarchal enough, in fact, to remind him of George Washington!”⁴³ At Saddle Meadows, however, the hovering figure of Mary and the other cognates for homosocial patriarchy (Glen Stanley, Reverend Falsgrave), though defeated in the end, are only so many obstacles to be dealt with and fended off so that Pierre's phallic idol can finally be openly and homoerotically kissed. Recent criticism of postmodern inspiration which finds in Pierre another confirmation of that insistent psychoanalytic nexus of father murder, guilt, displacement, and writing—whatever its merits in broader terms—must nevertheless be taxed with ignoring this fundamental figuration of homosexual eros in this particular novel.⁴⁴

TWO OBJECTS

Two desires, represented by portraits, also organize Pierre's relation to two objects: Lucy and Isabel.

Although Lucy is Pierre's straight love interest, her character, like her physical description, is entirely formulaic: “The world will never see another Lucy Tartan” (31).⁴⁵ She is from a good family and receives Mary's approbation as an appropriate match which will preserve family tradition. Thinking back on other Glendinning patriarchs who were lions in public and lambs at home (38), Mary sees Lucy as a daughter-in-law she can control, one who will not be an obstacle to her continuing control of Pierre. In this sense, Lucy is figured as one of the emblems of the flourishing bourgeois family order, a structure which, stereotypically, entails this continued tension and competition between mother and wife for the son's allegiance—the stuff of “family romance.”

In this version of the patriarchal scenario, Lucy is the object onto which Pierre's desire for his mother should be exogamously displaced, as required when a son resolves oedipal conflicts. It is also with Lucy that Pierre could aspire to become an alpha male in the phallocentric order who has a swell of triumph at circumventing any competition from other males for the monopoly of the tall shaft. In the novel's terms, Lucy will contribute an essential element to Pierre's natural role as paterfamilias, making him worthy to be displayed in a drawing-room portrait. In psychoanalytic terms, Pierre will have the phallus thanks to mediation via Lucy who is consistently marked as pliant and without threat. In a word, Lucy is phallocentric culture's paragon object, a star in the Lacanian cinema where, in order to have the phallus, sons must give up trying to be the phallus themselves so they can receive it dialectically from women.⁴⁶ And Melville already prepared us to understand that this is a role into which Pierre can “in his more wonted natural mood” partake with “an exultant swell.” Newton Arvin was undoubtedly right in writing that “Pierre's actual behavior, however, is that of a man whose unconscious is lying in wait for the first plausible opportunity to desert.”⁴⁷

And indeed, all this is only a foil, a normative frame set up to be shattered when Pierre encounters Isabel Banford who, as the incarnation of the chair portrait, fulfills his earlier yearnings for a male Glendinning, displaced onto a sister. In Billy Budd, Claggart would have loved Billy but for “fate and ban”; here, although “fate had done this” (Pierre, 170), in Isabel Melville gives Pierre a Ban-ford.⁴⁸

She is a maidservant in a dairy whom Pierre first sees while she is participating in the Miss Pennies' sewing circle. She does not look up at him as he approaches her, but when finally she does, Melville resorts to a vocabulary which is both highly erotic, and quotes and mirrors Pierre's earlier loneliness for a male companion: “Anon, as yielding to the irresistible climax of her concealed emotion, whatever that may be, she lifts her whole marvelous countenance into the radiant candlelight. … Now, wonderful loveliness, and a still more wonderful lonelines, have with inexplicable implorings, looked up to him from that henceforth immemorial face” (58; my emphasis). During their second encounter, Melville performs a master knotting of all these threads when he writes of Isabel's face that it contained “the subtler expression of the [chair] portrait of his then youthful father, strangely translated, and intermarryingly blended with some before unknown foreign feminineness. In one breath, Memory and Prophecy and Intuition tell him—‘Pierre, have no reserves; no minutest possible doubt; this being is thy sister; thou gazest on thy father's flesh’” (134). The closet portrait's homosexual, incestuous prosopopoeia of father to son—the sexual spectacle of “this mouth”—has now become his father's much desired “flesh” displaced onto and incarnated in the person of Isabel. Pierre's incestuous desire for a male, therefore, has followed a precisely prescribed trajectory by transforming itself abruptly into desire for a sister, but a sister of “before unknown foreign feminineness.” Her beauty of the known feminine kind by itself cannot account for the revolution in his life. Rather, her status as transvested incarnation of the father is all-determining, a fact which will be made clear yet again when Pierre will have occasion to doubt whether or not Isabel is really his sister. To the extent that Isabel is for Pierre only a beautiful woman and the object of heterosexual desire, his later anxiety that she might not be his sister could have come as a relief. That is, if she were not his sister, a putatively painful taboo against their heterosexual passion would have thus been lifted. The reverse is true, however, and in his moments of doubt about Isabel's lineage, Pierre will feel only that he has been duped and has lost the object of his passion. All of this indicates another logic behind this passion: she is desirable only insofar as she is the image of his father at last made flesh. All other rationalizations and moral dilemmas are meaningless without this primary insight which the text discerns in multiple ways.

Notes

1. Higgins and Parker “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” in Higgins and Parker, eds., Critical Essays, 257 ff.; Higgins and Parker, “Reading Pierre,” in Bryant, ed. Another useful survey of this argument can be found in Dillingham, Melville's Later Novels, 187-88 n. 7.

2. Melville, Letters, 146.

3. Higgins and Parker, “Reading Pierre,” 234, 233.

4. See Tolchin. The motivation for this sister fixation also struck at least one contemporary reviewer as bizarre. In the American Whig Review (November 1852), he wrote, “Notwithstanding Mr. P. Glendinning's being already supplied with a mother and a mistress, he is pursued by indefinite longings for a sister” (quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., 59).

5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 57-72. This is surely the major dynamic of grief in Melville that still needs a thorough accounting.

6. George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1959). More recently, Mark D. Guenette has performed a far more interesting and productive decoding of Proust's homosexual characters in “Le Loup et le narrateur: The Masking and Unmasking of Homosexuality in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu,” Romanic Review 80, no. 2 (March 1989): 229-46. Guenette concludes that Albertine was, in fact, a displaced version of Robert de Saint-Loup.

7. Seelye, “‘Ungraspable Phantom,’” 439. Higgins and Parker have summarized Seelye's conclusions approvingly, adding, “Ever since Typee … Melville had regarded his manuscripts as places to put private messages.… Overwhelmed by his affinity with Hawthorne as he began the book, to the point of wanting to write only for him, on an ‘endless riband of foolscap’ (Letters, p. 144) stretching from Arrowhead to the little red cottage or wherever else Hawthorne might be, Melville might well have put a private message to him or about him into Pierre” (“Reading Pierre,” 221).

8. We read of Redburn's soul, “yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend,” of Clarel's affection for Celio (who dies), or for Vine (who turns away).

9. Moving evidence of this fact can be gleaned from the responses from men born in the 1890s, in Porter and Weeks, eds. Sedgwick writes of homosexual Englishmen of Melville's class that they “operated sexually in what seems to have been startlingly close to a cognitive vacuum” (Between Men, 173).

10. Melville, Selected Poems, 134.

11. Hugh Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1988). Concerning Dr. Augustus Kinsley Gardner, see Barker-Benfield.

12. Higgins and Parker, “Reading Pierre,” 229.

13. See David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), for many important and useful insights on this topic, esp. 291-306.

14. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.

15. Sedgwick, Between Men, 86-89; Butler, Gender Trouble, 38-43; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Kinship Structures (Boston: Beacon, 1969); René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961).

16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-OEdipe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), 84.

17. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1964), 142.

18. In his essay on Whitman, from which I am quoting here, Lawrence attributes the same negativity to the verb merge. “There [in Whitman's ‘Drum-Taps’] you have the progression of merging. For the great mergers, woman at last becomes inadequate. For those who love to extremes. Woman is inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of man-for-man love. And this is on the brink of death. It slides over into death. David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan” (ibid., 169). This homophobic misreading of Whitman's association of love and death—as somehow different from the lengthy tradition of their linkage in heterosexual love poetry—indicates the extent of the programmatic assumption that homosexuality kills or should kill or should be killed. It is probably the same assumption which comes to full expression in the tradition of gay novels ending with the murder of one of the lovers.

19. Nicholas Canaday, “Pierre in the Domestic Circle,” Studies in the Novel 18 (Winter 1986): 396.

20. Rogin, 8-11; Eric Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 15. Sundquist asserts that Pierre is “a fantasy of self-fathering” (170).

21. Melville describes Jack Chase in Redburn, 360-64, 446-47.

22. Dillingham has identified this book from Allan Melville's library as John Caspar Lavatar's Essays on Physiognomy (Melville's Later Novels, 150 ff.).

23. See Sedgwick's remarks throughout Epistemology on this aspect of closeted homosexuality, “the outer secret, the secret of having a secret” (205); and also D. A. Miller's influential analysis of the “open secret” in The Novel and the Police, esp. “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” 207 passim.

24. The Portrait of Dorian Gray is another novel which links the gothic tradition of hidden portraits with the completely unspoken homosexuality behind their mystery. Dorian's friend, Basil Hallward, says, “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it” (Oscar Wilde, Complete Works [New York: Harper & Row, 1989], 20).

25. In Redburn, Melville consistently used the term blade in referring to the “womanly” homosexual, Harry Bolton.

26. This link, most often scotomized by critics, is so strong that already in 1950 Arvin could write that “Pierre's unconscious wish is to preserve the incestuous bond with his father by uniting himself to this mysterious girl who, as he all too readily believes, is his father's illegitimate daughter, and who at any rate strongly resembles that parent” (224). Arvin either declined to see, or was too cautious to pursue, the difficult ramifications of this insight.

27. Louis Althusser, “Idéologie, et appareils idéologiques d’Etat,” in Positions (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1976). Throughout these passages on Pierre's enraptured sessions before his father's portrait, then, Melville's erotic imagination is clearly not working according to the (Lacanian) psychoanalytic problematic of “the gaze” which feminist theory has explored so fruitfully, e.g., in the work of Linda Williams or Kaja Silverman. I think that, from a queer studies perspective, Sue-Ellen Case got it exactly right in her recent critique when she protested that, because of the “hegemonic spread of the psychoanalytic [which] does not allow for an imaginary of the queer,” feminist theory of the gaze has displaced “queer desire by retaining, in the gaze/look compound, sexual difference and its phallus/lack polarity,” a perspective which “remains caught in a heterosexist reading of queer discourse.” For Case, the important point lost in this discourse is that “the revels of transgression enjoyed by the queer remain outside the boundaries of heterosexist proscription” (Sue-Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” differences 3 [Summer 1991]: 13, 11). My thanks to Valery Ross for bringing this article to my attention.

28. “Tadmor is the pre-Semitic name for the ancient city of modern Syria, Palmyra …,” noted for its remarkably modern comforts (Kier, Melville Encyclopedia, 2:992). The “privacies” in question are thus suggestive of “privies,” of course, but more pertinent are sexual resonances with “privates.” In his dedication to Israel Potter, Melville plays on the word privacy in a way which, according to Dillingham, designates “the external genitals” (Melville's Later Novels, 253 n. 16).

29. To cite another example of its currency in Melville, he writes in White-Jacket that as a “way of beguiling the tedious hours” sailors would “get a cosy seat somewhere, and fall into as snug a little revery as you can” in their grief for home and hearth, … “for every one knows what a luxury is grief, when you can get a private closet to enjoy it in, and no Paul Prys intrude” (528-29; my emphasis).

30. In Disseminating Whitman (59-61 passim.), Moon has discussed the place of “fluidity” in Whitman's literary-sexual universe in ways which reinforce this sense of Melville's contemporary usage here; in The Horrors of the Half-Known Life, Barker-Benfield elaborates on this usage in such contemporary books as Ik Marvel's Reveries of a Bachelor, a best seller of 1850, with thirty-nine printings before 1859 and others beyond that; and The Student's Manual (1835), which had run through twenty-four editions by 1854 (10, 136, 175 passim). Barker-Benfield's analysis of the nineteenth-century's “spermatic economy” (179-88) provides a further pertinent context for this passage, and he mentions, moreover, that in Reveries of a Bachelor, “the bachelor's fantasy also drew sustenance from other men's fantasies. One of his favorites was Melville's Typee (1846), [and] Omoo (1847)” (11).

31. My thanks to Associate Curator Carrie Ribora of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for her kind assistance in allowing me to examine this portrait, currently held in a storage vault at the museum.

32. The records of the Metropolitan Museum do not contain information as to the portrait's provenance which would have allowed me to know whether or not the painting was actually in Melville's possession when he was writing Pierre. Clearly, however, even if he did not have it before his eyes while writing, he had a vivid memory of it in all its detail.

33. In this sense, I would concur with Dillingham's conclusion (Melville's Later Novels, 229) that “Pierre made Isabel.”

34. The coy indirectness (close to incomprehensibility) of this passage reminds us of the oblique tactics Melville felt he had to use to describe the much less threatening scene involving a whale penis in Moby-Dick. Howard P. Vincent (Trying-out of Moby-Dick [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949], 328) pointed out the significant unlikelihood that the great majority of readers understood that “the cossock” refers to the whale's penis. In the present context, we also recall Melville's famous pun, when a sailor literally cloaks himself in the giant penis sheath, thus becoming “a candidate for an archbishoprick,” and a “lad for a Pope.” Further pertinent commentary on the significance of the cossock can be found in Dillingham, Melville's Later Novels, 48-50. Of course, the masturbatory significance of hands and fingers finds its most universally recognized expression in Moby-Dick, chap. 94, on squeezing sperm: “I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings. … Come; let us squeeze hands all round; may, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (Redburn: White-Jacket; Moby-Dick, 1239).

35. Such coded reference was not rare in the 1850s. G. M. Goshgarian quotes a mid-nineteenth-century antimasturbation lecture by William Eliot whose “exceeding delicacy” was nevertheless plain to those “who had ears to hear.” Eliot implored, “If not for God's sake, nor for Christ's sake, yet for your mother's sake, hold back your hand from sin!” (To Kiss the Chastening Rod [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press], 50). Martin (Hero, Captain, and Stranger) cites examples of encoded masturbation which are too numerous to recite. Dillingham concludes that Melville's dedication of Pierre to Mount Greylock “seems flippant, or even silly, unless one gets the joke—which is that he is dedicating his work of art to his male organ” (224).

36. Moon, 10.

37. See Rogin, 160 ff.

38. Moon, 9.

39. Willard Thorp, “Melville's Quest for the Ultimate,” in Higgins and Parker, eds., 191-92. The same volume contains an excerpt from American Renaissance in which Matthiessen reviews a good number of these insights (“The Troubled Mind,” 201-10).

40. Higgins and Parker, eds., 150, 151.

41. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 101-3.

42. Quoted by Moon, 9.

43. Fiedler, 536.

44. A good example of this approach and this conclusion would be Joseph Riddel, “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 323.

45. The cliché quality of her presentation can be compared with Melville's flat descriptions of Fayaway in Typee. His heart was clearly not in these characters. Even a contemporary reviewer noted that “Fayaway is as unreal as the scenery with which she is surrounded” (Higgins and Parker, eds., 58). Fiedler characterizes Melville's treatment of Lucy as yet “another sexless White Lady.” In a rather arch but no doubt apt formulation, Fiedler goes on to claim that Melville “quite apparently … neither likes her nor believes in her [but] is only doing his duty” (275, 276). See also Martin, Hero, Captain and Stranger, 36.

46. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 281-91. See Butler's critique of Lacan in Gender Trouble, extended in her remarks on “wanting to have someone or wanting to be that someone,” in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Fuss, ed., 13-31, esp. 26 ff. Much of this analysis could be inflected usefully and differently through Butler's analysis of links between mourning and gender.

47. Arvin, 223.

48. Pierre … Billy Budd, 1394. My analysis does not support Tolchin's sense that “Pierre's relationship with his mother dominates the novel” (Mourning, Gender, and Creativity, 139). However overwhelming Melville's own mother may have been, Mary Glendinning is not a direct reflection of that relationship in fiction. Mary's overpowering influence on Pierre is, on the contrary, a foil for Pierre's break with her and destruction of her in the name of something else represented by Isabel. Tolchin is also at odds with this analysis, then, when he passes on the notion that “Isabel becomes Mrs. Glendinning's sexual double” or, in his own inflection, a displacement of Mary's own grief as it affects Pierre (139).