Pierre in the Domestic Circle
When Melville wrote to Sophia Hawthorne and promised that his new novel would be a “rural bowl of milk,”1 he may have been referring to a central theme, which, in our predilection for irony, we have overlooked. Melville was assuring Mrs. Hawthorne, of course, that at last there would be no sailor-narrator here, that there would be a sensibility different from the rover in Polynesia, the bitter White Jacket and Redburn, or the ruminating Ishmael. As it turned out, however, the narrative voice in Pierre is not so different, and the phrase presenting his new hero Pierre in the clabber of domesticity is not ironic. What I am labeling the “domestic circle” is not only a setting but is also a symbolic construct in Melville's thought that, it seems to me, has a great deal of power in shaping attitudes and behavior patterns. Since there are two main domestic circles in the novel, one in Saddle Meadows and the other in New York City, we may here be observing a structural principle that will afford us some new insights.
I
Melville's Pierre opens with the idyllic story of Pierre and Lucy Tartan told in the extravagant, sentimental terms of the domestic romance, which Melville is parodying.2 The substance and especially the style of the opening deservedly capture critical attention, not least because the leisure activity of courting Lucy has a central place in the life of a young man whose life is virtually all leisure. The romance, however, is spun out of the domestic circle of which Pierre is a member, and leisure entertainment—usually reading, but in this instance a kind of stagy performance featuring a series of tableaux vivant—is not its sole function. The romance, however, serves not merely to entertain but, more importantly, to praise the behavior and confirm the values of those in the circle. At Saddle Meadows the circle starts with two, Pierre and his mother, but Lucy and Mrs. Tartan are included, as well as other women on the social periphery. Mrs. Glendinning is the chief instrument of social authority, “conventionalness” as Melville terms it, which shapes the domestic circle and vests its highest ranking arbiter with her power.3
The reader is soon given a glimpse of Pierre on a typical morning. It begins as Pierre helps his mother, whom he calls sister at her insistence, finish her toilet in front of her glass at her dressing table, passing a ribbon around her neck and fastening it with a cameo. As they talk pretty talk, he adjusts a stray ringlet of her hair and then kneels to secure the tie of her slipper. At breakfast Pierre attentively supplies his mother with all of her needs, several times admonishing the butler Dates to adjust the window sashes is order to block from his mother's neck any “unkind current of air,”4 and to swing around a hinged painting on the wall into a favorable light. All the while the hovering Pierre takes great interest in “Sister Mary's” food. The talk between Pierre and Mrs. Glendinning here and in the other opening scenes of the novel is largely about domestic detail.
It is apparent that normal aspects of a young man's education are denied Pierre. There are books at Saddle Meadows, of course, “his father's fastidiously picked and decorous library,” but because they cultivate only “delicate warmths” and “soft, imaginative flames in his heart” (p. 6), we may infer that they were chosen for a young wife. Occasionally Pierre sojourns to the city for the purpose of “mingling in a large and polished society,” but that society seems to be essentially feminine, for there Pierre “had insensibly formed himself in the airier graces of life” (p. 6). Finally, Pierre is “companioned by no surnamed male Glendinning” (p. 8). Without a male model in this domestic circle, 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: in the “vain-gloriousness 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” (p. 8).
Pierre is unlike most other nineteen-year-old males. He keeps no secret from his mother, but, after the chance encounter with Isabel, seeing her and haunted by her face, he conceals from his mother for the first time ever a circumstance in his life and evades her questions. Mrs. Glendinning stresses Pierre's docility whenever she thinks of his character. She recalls her late husband's attitude toward women and applies it to Pierre as well: Pierre's father had said that “the noblest colts, in three points—abundant hair, swelling chest, and sweet docility—should resemble a fine woman.” She adds “so should a noble youth” (p. 20). Yet in her musing she is at the same time fondling old General Glendinning's baton, part of the Saddle Meadows collection of mementos, which she recognizes as a “symbol of command” and incompatible with “sweet docility” (p. 20). But Pierre has thoroughly accepted the values of the domestic circle, as exemplified by his attitude toward the beautiful, girlish Lucy:
Methinks one husbandly embrace would break her airy zone, and she exhale upward to that heaven whence she hath hither come, condensed to a mortal sight. It can not be; I am of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an impious thing! (p. 58)
Frail heavenly femininity, that is, crushed by brutal earthly masculinity makes marriage itself a sacrilege, a rather unusual view about himself and sex from a nineteen-year-old male.
Pierre was unaware, as Melville writes, of the foreboding and prophetic lessons taught by Palmyra's ruins. Melville's version of the lesson of Palmyra is particularly appropriate in this context. That ancient city is said to have had an avenue lined by 750 limestone columns, each over fifty feet high topped by a statue. Melville writes only about one column: “Among those ruins is a crumbling, uncompleted shaft … crushed in the egg; and the proud stone that should have stood among the clouds, Time left abased beneath the soil” (p. 8). That ruin is an image of Pierre's masculinity, crushed in the egg and left abased in the domestic circle.
The baton that is incompatible with docility, the folly of aspiring to cap the fame-column, the abasement of the proud shaft—all this phallic imagery is summarized when Melville begins Book IV, which is entitled “Retrospective” and, looking back on the romantic section of the novel, brings it to an end. He begins by writing that he is dealing with the unconscious:
In their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. … The metaphysical writers confess, that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences. … things not wholly imputable to the immediate apparent cause, which is only one link in the chain; but to a long line of dependencies whose further part is lost in the mid-regions of the impalpable air. (p. 67)
He then suggests that the shrine in Pierre's heart, the vestibule of his religious feeling, is his late father's reputation, now laid low by the revelation of the existence of Isabel. The image of the shrine is that of a “niched pillar, deemed solid and eternal, and from whose top radiated all those innumerable sculptured scrolls and branches, which supported the entire one-pillared temple of his moral life.” In the niche of the pillar “stood the perfect marble form of his departed father; without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene; Pierre's fond personification of human goodness and virtue” (p. 68). The retrospective summary of the first part of the novel sees the shrine as devastated before a “withering blast” that had “stripped his holiest shrine of all overlaid bloom and buried the mild statue of the saint beneath the prostrated ruins of the soul's temple itself” (p. 69).
Melville writes specifically in this retrospective passage that Pierre's entire early life had been a product of rural influences because Pierre “had never yet become so thoroughly initiated into that darker, though truer aspect of things, which an entire residence in the city from the earliest period of his life almost invariably engraves upon the mind of any keenly observant and reflecting youth of Pierre's present years” (p. 69). This situation precisely reflects the “familial interpretation of power relations” described by Jane Gallop in her book The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Gallop says feminism sometimes mistakenly accepts the familial interpretation as true of the world outside of what I have termed the domestic circle. Feminism, that is, complaining about men in power, “endows them with a sort of unified phallic sovereignty that characterizes an absolute monarch, and which little resembles actual power in our social, economic structures.”5 Pierre's vision of the one-pillared temple is well described by the phrase “unified phallic sovereignty,” and that temple is removed by more than a country mile from the darker, truer aspects of power in citified social and economic structures.
Without a masculine role in the early part of the novel, his maleness crushed in the egg and abased in the domestic circle, Pierre is effectively a daughter, a sister. Isabel emerges from the darker, truer life of their father (the dark lady's contrast to the snow-maiden Lucy has often been noted), and thus Pierre's seduction by the father through Isabel is similar to the model outlined by Jane Gallop. The main result of this encounter is “the introduction of heterogeneity (sexuality, violence, economic class conflict) into the closed circle of the family.”6 In terms of Melville's novel, into the domestic and asexual circle of Saddle Meadows Isabel brings sexuality (Pierre's mysterious depths of attraction for Isabel never felt for Lucy), violence (his confrontation with his mother on a stairway after which he trips and falls down on the stone portico of the house), and economic class conflict (his befriending of Delly Ulver). Pierre chooses to flee, leaving the ruins of Saddle Meadows laid low by the “withering blast.”
II
With crushing irony Melville shows us Pierre not escaping but transferring the domestic circle to New York City. The company of Isabel, Delly, and later Lucy in the Apostles', the three-room tenement in the abandoned church building, evidences a sensibility and a set of values exactly like that left behind at Saddle Meadows. Aside from the fact that their number makes it manifestly absurd that Pierre could ever hope to support them by his writing, this circle is completely unprepared for citified life and even for the rough, masculine democracy of the other tenants of the Apostles'. There is ready sympathy available for Pierre and his poverty-stricken household, and on one occasion willing male helpers offer protection by forcibly ejecting Lucy's brother Frederic Tartan and Pierre's cousin Glen Stanly as they attempt Lucy's rescue. Yet Pierre cannot relate to the others in any way, partly because of a lingering class consciousness, but mostly because he has no idea how to act with other men.
Pierre's domestic circle in New York is held together by certain fictions. Isabel's rhetoric maintains their brother-sister relationship except in certain moments as they sit together in the dark. Yet Isabel's seductive beauty is always present, and her jealousy of Lucy surfaces with little provocation. Delly, on the other hand, because of her sense of propriety, must make an effort—and she seems successful in doing so—to convince herself that Pierre and Isabel are married. She knows nothing of their family relationship. When Lucy joins them, fleeing from her new suitor Glen Stanly and her mother and brother, and determined to sacrifice her life to Pierre's well-being, she too believes that they are married and knows nothing of their kinship. It is, ultimately, the revelation of the filial relationship, while she still believes that they have lived together as man and wife, that causes her to drop dead from shock at the climax of the novel. Incest is certainly one type of sexuality that can destroy the domestic circle and those in it as well.
Melville's way of depicting Pierre as out of place in New York City is through imagery typically applied to a young woman: “Like a flower he feels the change; his bloom is gone from his cheek; his cheek is wilted and pale” (p. 271). The verdant youth had not yet come to maturity in the summer of Saddle Meadows: “Oh, woe to that belated winter-overtaken plant which the summer could not bring to maturity! The drifting snows shall whelm it” (p. 296). To further emphasize the non-masculine nature of his arrested sexuality, Lucy says to Pierre that he has “no love as other men love,” but “thou lovest as angels do” (p. 309). The remark is true but ironically somewhat different from the intended high compliment.
Pierre's sexual stirrings toward Isabel continue, and she encourages them by words, movement, and touch—hers is the volition, not his—but if further evidence were needed in the sometime critical disagreement as to whether their love is in fact consummated the picture of Pierre as sexually immature angel should settle the disagreement.7 Phallic insistence, the love that other men have, is inappropriate in this circle.
Since Charlie Millthorpe never appears in the Saddle Meadows section of the novel, his presence in New York City as a boyhood friend of Pierre's continues Melville's irony. In helping Pierre to find a place to live in the city, Charlie's earnest and practical kindness stands in contrast to the diffident and haughty dismissal Pierre suffers at the hands of his cousin Glen Stanly. Charlie, the son of a farmer on the Glendinning lands in Saddle Meadows, now after his father's death removed to the city with his mother and sister, attempts quite unsuccessfully in his blustery, masculine way to relate to Pierre. Eventually Charlie pays the rent for Pierre and even offers to help him move furniture about when Lucy arrives to join the household. Pierre smiles condescendingly at Charlie's lack of sophistication and mutters that he is “plus heart, minus head” (p. 320), but Pierre addresses Charlie only once directly in the several times they meet. That one time is after the porter bringing Lucy's belongings is dismissed: “The porter is gone then? … Well, Mr. Millthorpe, you will have the goodness to follow him” (p. 319).
Some expository details are given about how Pierre and Charlie played together as children in Saddle Meadows, but that happened long before Pierre's adolescence. Charlie went on to school and to assume responsibility for his family. In contrast to Pierre, Charlie had a male presence in his life, although his father was rough, inarticulate, and given to drink. Charlie is Pierre's friend to the end, and when he holds the dead Pierre in his arms in the jail cell at the end of the novel Charlie's speech inadvertently hints at Pierre's arrested sexuality:
Ah, Pierre! my old companion, Pierre;—school-mate—play-mate—friend!—Our sweet boy's walks within the woods! … What scornful innocence rests on thy lips, my friend!—Hand scorched with murderer's powder, yet how woman-soft! (p. 362)
This speech prompts Isabel's dying sentence in the same scene, essentially Pierre's epitaph: “All's o’er, and ye know him not!” (p. 362). Read as a response to Charlie, it is a remark probably not meaning that the author withheld the one secret of his character's life, his incestuous relationship with Isabel,8 but that Charlie and the world were ignorant finally of Pierre's psychosexual immaturity and his real relation with Isabel and the other women in his household.
It is, unfortunately, this same arrested sexuality that keeps Pierre from succeeding as a writer. He had promised his publisher a “popular novel,” and that could have been spun out of the rural Saddle Meadows just like his life's activities there, but in the city what he writes becomes “blasphemous rhapsody” (p. 356). The controlling metaphor of writing in the nineteenth century is “literary paternity” according to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. They make the observation that “male sexuality … is not analogically but actually the essence of literary power. The poet's pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis.”9 We have seen that Pierre lacked unified phallic sovereignty, and Melville is writing in the tradition in which the literary text is a manifestation of power. Again, according to Gilbert and Gubar:
In patriarchal Western culture … the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. More, his pen's power, like his penis's power, is not just the ability to generate life but the power to create a posterity to which he lays claim. … In this respect the pen is truly mightier than its phallic counterpart the sword. …10
Thus unlike the idyllic harmony of Saddle Meadows, Pierre's desperation in New York City results from a growing awareness of his incongruous place within the group of women who encircle him. His murderous assault on Glen Stanly with a brace of pistols stolen from the chambers of another inhabitant of the Apostles' is an unfocused and suicidal attempt to escape into maturity. As he leaves the Apostles' for the last time, Pierre passes through the room of Isabel, who sits in her chair as if petrified; and then through the room of Lucy, unstirring in her chair as though entranced. In the corridor between the two outer doors of each room, he pauses with outstretched arms and then breaks the domestic circle forever with this wish: “For ye two, my most undiluted prayer is now, that from your here unseen and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive” (p. 358). It is a harsh leave-taking from the women who have been close to him, but Pierre's bitter awareness of the stultifying, exclusively female, “rural bowl of milk” is a measure of Melville's response to all that was unnatural in the early life of his youthful hero and to his belated disastrous entry into a masculine world.
Notes
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Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, eds., The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 146.
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Melville's satirical purpose is argued convincingly by William Braswell, “The Early Love Scenes in Melville's Pierre,” AL [American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography], 22 (1950), 283-89, which essay also provides a good summary of earlier critics who had accused Melville of a lapse of taste in the opening scenes.
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In an earlier essay, Nicholas Canaday, “Melville's Pierre: At War with Social Convention,” PLL [Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature], 5 (1969), 51-62, I have characterized Pierre as a rebel against social authority.
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Herman Melville, Pierre; or the Ambiguities, ed., Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, Northwestern-Newberry Edition (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1971), p. 17. All subsequent citations, which appear parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.
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Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. xv.
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Gallop, p. xv.
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For a summary of critical comments on this point, see Canaday, pp. 58-59. More recent support for the argument that their love is not consummated is found in Paula Miner-Quinn, “Pierre's Sexuality: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Herman Melville's Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, HSL [University of Hartford Studies in Literature: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism], 13 (1981), 111-21.
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Henry A. Murray, ed., Pierre: or, The Ambiguities by Herman Melville, Hendricks House Edition (New York: Farrar Straus, 1949), p. xcii.
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Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 4.
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Gilbert and Gubar, p. 6.
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All's o’er and ye know him not’: A Reading of Pierre
Isabel's Story: The Voice of the Dark Woman in Melville's Pierre