The elements in Pierre Glendinning's vision of himself as Enceladus, when late in the novel Melville's hero contemplates the ruin of his life “with prophetic discomfiture and woe,” provide by analogy a significant comment on Pierre's career in its penultimate moment.¹ Like Enceladus he is a rebel, and the “doubly incestuous” (408) Titan prefigures Pierre in his relationship with his mother and Isabel. But another element in the Enceladus myth has not received sufficient attention: he was an armed giant, not an Olympian god, and his war was with a society of gods. Enceladus's fate was to be buried in the earth. Although in spirit he was similar to Prometheus, another Titan, the general assault of Enceladus differed from the single, daring act of defiance against a single god. Pierre's spirit is akin to Ahab's but his immediate quarrel is with society.² His fate is to be buried alive in the social environment, until in a wild moment he destroys himself: scorned as an author by a Philistine publisher, trapped by poverty in a household of three dependent women, and assaulted by an outraged social convention represented by Glendinning Stanly and Frederic Tartan—the conventional lover and brother.

What Melville later calls “conventionalness” is the key to an understanding of the opening idyllic scenes of the novel. The picture is ironic. William Braswell has written about the early love scenes: “Instead of showing an inexplicable loss of taste, or the debilitating influence of cheap, sentimental fiction he is known to have thought ridiculous, his style reveals a satirical purpose.”³ Braswell observes that extravagance and overstatement are the principal devices that reveal the irony. Conventionally conceived, Pierre's early world is a rural Eden. Yet convention, the enforcing arm of social authority, can be a relentless coercing power.

The environment of Saddle Meadows, locale of Pierre's youth, brings immediately to the novel an element of social authority. The feudal atmosphere makes great demands of the Glendinnings. They are looked to as examples of good conduct by those socially inferior to them, and their peers expect them to maintain at least the reputation for goodness so that their class may not be betrayed. As a member of the landed gentry, Pierre has an obligation to society, “for the country is not only the most poetical and philosophical, but it is the most aristocratic part of this earth” (13). Mrs. Glendinning sees it as her duty to be the biggest contributor to the church of the community, to provide for the poor and the sick, and to organize and oversee community functions. Such activities, of course, are the warrant for her authority as arbiter of manners and morals for the entire area. Her training of Pierre is designed to fix in him this same sense of what she conceives to be social responsibility.

The Glendinning family history, recited with grand extravagance by Melville, is another element in the novel that creates and enforces the social pressure on its hero. Pierre's paternal great-grandfather, General Pierre Glendinning, had fought an Indian battle in the meadows that slope away from the rear of the manor house. Mortally wounded in the encounter, the general had sat unhorsed upon his saddle in the grass, cheering his men in the fray. From that incident had been derived the name Saddle Meadows for the house, the village, and the area. A short distance away, Pierre's grandfather, also a general, had defended a rude stockade for several months against Tories, Indians, and Regulars during the War of the Revolution. With an exaggeration of detail verging on burlesque, Melville portrays Pierre's mother as the daughter of a general, and Pierre's duty to uphold the traditions of two families is constantly brought to his attention. Since his father's untimely death by a fever, Pierre has been the sole remaining male Glendinning. Reared in an atmosphere devoted to proud family memories and surrounded by trophies reminiscent of a glorious family history, Pierre is deeply imbued with an aristocratic sense of duty. Thus from his youth he has been subjected to a form of social pressure exerted by his illustrious ancestors.

Mary Glendinning, the proud matriarch of Saddle Meadows, is the chief exponent of the social pressure that is applied to her son Pierre. Her world is exclusively the shallow world of social status grandly conceived. She is described as “an affluent, and haughty widow; a lady who externally furnished a singular example of the preservative and beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind of medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable grief, and never worn by sordid cares” (2-3). Melville's emphasis on externals characterizes Mary Glendinning as a hollow woman concerned only with forms and social usages. She never felt deeply the premature death of her husband, nor troubled her mind with serious thoughts on any subject. Despite the affectionate veneer of their relationship, her joy in Pierre is simply “triumphant maternal pride” combined with a narcissistic self-love, because she sees in him “her own graces strangely translated into the opposite sex” (3). Mary Glendinning's life is summarized by Melville's statement that “in a life of nearly fifty years” the ordinary qualities of womanhood “had never betrayed her into a single published impropriety, or caused her one known pang at the heart” (15). Her obsession with conduct that is socially correct has always concealed her true inner feelings, if, indeed, she has any. If she was not entirely satisfied with her late husband's conduct, if he caused her any slight pang at the heart, her frigidly correct outward demeanor was all that showed itself to the world. She constantly admonishes Pierre to think of his “dear perfect father” (20). Whether she believes Pierre's father was perfect or not, her one concern is that he be considered so in the eyes of her son and society.

Still another form of social pressure is exerted on Pierre by Lucy's family. Mrs. Tartan is described as the “mistress of an ample fortune,” aware of her wealth and position, and “inclined to force it upon the notice of other people, nowise interested in the matter” (29). The irony of Melville's description of Mrs. Tartan's world is immediately apparent: “Nevertheless, Mrs. Tartan was an excellent sort of lady, as this lady-like world goes. She subscribed to charities, and owned five pews in as many churches, and went about trying to promote the general felicity of the world, by making all the handsome young people of her acquaintance marry one another” (29-30). Mrs. Tartan, of course, is pleased with the marriage match she fancies she has made for her daughter, although her efforts, Melville wryly adds, were about as helpful as “match-making between the steel and the magnet” (31). Thus in Lucy's family the notions of propriety held by Mrs. Glendinning have their counterpart. In the seemingly idyllic community of Saddle Meadows inexorable forces are at work. The feudal environment, the proud Glendinning family background, the unsullied reputations of three Pierre Glendinnings, the two mothers so conscious of social status—these elements are the forces of society that surround and coerce the unfortunate Pierre.

Pierre is a “conventional” hero in two senses of the word. In the first place, he is a conventional romantic hero. The faceless young men in the romances so popular in Melville's day all had similar character traits and ideals. Melville begins the novel with an appropriately exaggerated setting of rural bliss. Pierre is first seen walking across a green and golden meadow to make a morning call upon his ideal young lady, whom he finds peering out of an upper casement surrounded by flowered vines. After an exchange of compliments and sentiments, Pierre proceeds on his way, marching under her colors, as he says, because he has plucked a flower from her hedge and pinned it conspicuously in his bosom. This first scene sets the tone for the first part of the book. Pierre's upbringing has molded a passive youth, a product of an ideal world far removed from ordinary facts of life. He had, in fact, spent long summer afternoons in his father's library, “where the Spenserian nymphs had early led him into many a maze of all-bewildering beauty” and had inspired “imaginative flames in his heart” (5). If Pierre fancies himself a modern version of the Red Cross Knight, it is because he cherishes the same ideals (and lives by the same conventions) as his literary predecessor.

Pierre's ideality is best revealed in his attitude toward women. Melville pictures the early Pierre-Lucy relationship as having all the characteristics found in popular romantic fiction, and Pierre reveres his mother with the “profoundest filial respect” (14). Pierre lacks only a sister, the one omission in his seemingly idyllic world: “Oh, had my father but had a daughter! … some one whom I might love, and protect, and fight for, if need be. It must be a glorious thing to engage in a mortal quarrel on a sweet sister's behalf!” (6). Melville's specific irony in this passage, which is only revealed later, indicates his attitude toward Pierre's entire romantic world. Pierre will find that the real fight in his sister's behalf will be the very opposite of glorious. Whatever villainous foe Pierre has in mind here can be nothing like the sordid enemy he soon finds himself pitted against. It is obvious that Pierre is ill-equipped to wage the battle into which he thrusts himself.

The young Pierre is also a “conventional” hero because of the oppressive conventions of society that have shaped him in his youth and that now bind and obligate him. Pierre's plight is that the very conventions that have so inexorably molded him will be of no use to him in his struggle. In fact he will be forced to take a stand against the very social conventions that have been given so much emphasis in his life. His education has stressed sentiment, sensibility, and the appreciation of beauty, and his forebears have exemplified martial courage in the face of danger or even death. Such values and examples are not sufficient: “Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and life some burdens heavier than death” (6). Had Pierre been allowed to live out his days in the ideality of Saddle Meadows, the conventions of society would have served him as an adequate guide to life. This was not to be: “Now Pierre stands on this noble pedestal; we shall see if he keeps that fine footing; we shall see if Fate hath not just a little bit of a small word or two to say in this world” (11). When Fate steps into Pierre's life, he soon finds that the social conventions offer no adequate solution to his dilemma.

Before Pierre makes his decision to leave Saddle Meadows but after he has heard of the existence of Isabel, he is permitted to witness a sample of the conventional response to the affair of Delly Ulver, “forever ruined through the cruel arts of Ned” (130). His mother personifies that response and indeed dictates what is to be done about Delly. Pierre himself assents to the notion that Delly “is forever ruined” and that seduction is a “cruel art” practiced by the male on the unwitting, innocent female. The conventional response is to banish the offending female from the community despite the fact that her sin springs from weakness rather than cruelty. Pierre is present when his mother indicates to the village clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Falsgrave, that her attitude toward Delly is uncompromisingly severe. Because it is relevant to Isabel's unhappy state and to his memory of his father, Pierre asks Mr. Falsgrave about the attitude he would have had toward Delly and her child if it had lived. Mrs. Glendinning interrupts to say that sinners deserve to be miserable, but Mr. Falsgrave seems more humane: “‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children to the third generation,’ … But Madam, that does not mean, that the community is in any way to take the infamy of the children into their own voluntary hands, as the conscious delegated stewards of God's inscrutable dispensations” (118). Mrs. Glendinning then speaks as the voice of social authority: “But if we entirely forget the parentage of the child, and every way receive the child as we would any other, feel for it in all respects the same, and attach no sign of ignominy to it—how then is the Bible dispensation to be fulfilled?” (118). Mr. Falsgrave is silenced by this question. The force of society also coerces the man of God, who dares not offend a prominent patroness.

In case there was any doubt in Pierre's mind, Mrs. Glendinning's reaction to the affair of Ned and Delly demonstrates to her son the futility of appealing to her in behalf of Isabel, and of course her maternal vindictiveness would increase when in addition her own pride is at stake. While Mrs. Glendinning serves notice that she is prepared to enforce vigorously Old Testament injunctions, Melville portrays Mr. Falsgrave somewhat more sympathetically. The minister's unassuming opinion that members of a community should not appoint themselves stewards of God's inscrutable dispensations is sound enough, but it is timidly expressed at a time when timidity is no virtue. Still Pierre agrees readily with Falsgrave's little sermon on the foolishness of adopting universal maxims to embrace all moral contingencies—a point relevant to the absolutism of the chronometrical man introduced later in the novel. Pierre is disappointed in Falsgrave, or perhaps more specifically the institutional church as represented by Falsgrave, but later he comes to the conclusion that not too much can be expected of one who “is unavoidably entangled by all fleshly alliances, and can not move with godly freedom in a world of benefices” (193). Thus the church is buried in the social environment, and the minister cannot directly reproach his chief contributor with her lack of Christian charity. The result is that the society of Saddle Meadows heartlessly expels its wayward members. The force of social authority operates on Delly and Ned just as later it is to coerce Pierre and Isabel.

When Melville entitles the chapter of Pierre's decision to leave Saddle Meadows “The Unprecedented Final Resolution of Pierre” (202), he is referring to a decision that has no precedent in the annals of romance or in the mind of conventionalness. Pierre's decision to leave with his supposed sister and to tell the world that she is his wife is an unconventional solution to a problem faced by a conventional hero. Yet Pierre's character clearly shapes the resolution. His decision is “not only strange and extraordinary in its novelty of mere aspect,” but also it is “wonderful in its unequaled renunciation of himself” (202). Romantic heroes are noted for their self-sacrifice, and thus it appeals to his ideal nature. Unprecedented as this resolution is, it derives in this respect from his early upbringing.

Pierre's new knowledge of his father's transgression and his new experience with the harshness of what had seemed an ideal world has a profound effect on him, but he is not left totally without moral resources. Pierre no longer believes that he exists in a perfect society, and once he finds that the authority of his society is based neither on truth or right, he cannot continue to believe in it or obey it. Pierre's secluded, rural nurturing has protected him from that “darker, though truer aspect of things” (80). Unsettling as this new awareness is, still “he seemed to feel that in his deepest soul, lurked an indefinite but potential faith, which could rule in the interregnum of all hereditary beliefs, and circumstantial persuasions” (102). Pierre's unprecedented decision, consciously setting aside hereditary beliefs yet unconsciously shaped by them because it is romantically self-sacrificing, derives ultimately from an indefinite faith in his own ability to perceive right and to act upon it.

Although Pierre's obligations to his father's memory and to Isabel are important in his decision to flee Saddle Meadows, he is mainly concerned with his mother's pride. He wishes to spare his mother because he does not believe that she is to blame for the way she is made: “He too plainly saw, that not his mother had made his mother, but the Infinite Haughtiness had first fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further molded her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her” (105). God, society, and conventional religiosity have thus created his mother and confirmed her in haughtiness. Pierre joins Ishmael in perceiving the powerful, mysterious authority of God the Creator. Melville makes the identification conclusive when he writes that at the moment of this perception Pierre feels “entirely lonesome, and orphan-like,” as if he were “driven out an infant Ishmael into the desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him” (105). This loneliness is the price Pierre must pay for alienating himself from his mother and her society.

After Pierre leaves Saddle Meadows, the elements of the novel combine to portray Pierre as a social delinquent; he is a rebel against social forms. Pierre has not violated any standard of morality or the law. He has outraged his mother by eloping with an unknown girl, and later when Lucy joins his New York household Pierre is charged with exercising an undue influence over her. But he is not charged with immorality with Lucy—she thinks he is married to Isabel. And there is no evidence that there is a physical consummation of the love between Pierre and Isabel. In his study of Pierre and Manfred, Joseph J. Mogan expresses what seems to be the critical consensus that in the case of Pierre the “actual incest itself remains ambiguous.”⁴ Floyd C. Watkins is less tentative: “… the relationship between mother and son verges on the latently incestuous; this is a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the potential incest that probably becomes real between Isabel and Pierre.”⁵ John Bernstein maintains that “it is clearly indicated—or at least as clearly as the mores of the time would permit—that on one occasion the love between Pierre and Isabel is consummated.”⁶ On the other hand, in the introduction to the Hendricks House Edition of the novel Henry A. Murray thoroughly elaborates Pierre's double incestuous relationship but concludes that the love for Isabel is not consummated: “With this in mind [that a sister is the proper object of love in the courtly love tradition] we might guess that one of Pierre's secret motives was to avoid marriage, ‘that climax which is so fatal to ordinary love,’ and to commit himself forever to a wholly spiritual relationship. This hypothesis would explain Pierre's declaration that he has resolved ‘to follow Virtue to her uttermost vista, where common souls never go,’ and his apprehension lest ‘the uttermost virtue, after all, provide a betraying pander to the monstrousest vice.’”⁷ Such seems to be Pierre's conscious motivation, and it may be, as Nathalia Wright suggests, that there are hints of repressed homosexuality in Pierre's relationship with Glen Stanly and that a retarded sexual development “is partly responsible for his decision to abandon Lucy and to assume the relationship of brother and the masquerade of husband to Isabel.”⁸

For Pierre to pursue the wildly unnatural, unprecedented, and self-sacrificing course of living with Isabel continently is perfectly in character. The motif of incest runs through the book, of course; it gives a flavor of unique folly to Pierre's action. He enjoys it while he despairs of it. Pierre is obviously attracted sexually by the dark Isabel, and he expresses doubts that he would so readily commit himself to the rescue of a supposed sister who lacks her appeal. Isabel's caresses in their darkened New York apartment stir him to a wild excitement, and Isabel definitely shows a sexual jealousy of Lucy when Pierre receives the letter announcing her arrival in the city. Yet in this same conversation it is made clear that the Pierre-Isabel relationship has not included sexual intercourse:

“Oh, I want none in the world but thee, my brother—but thee, but thee! and, oh God! am I not enough for thee? …”

Pierre spoke not; but he listened; a terrible burning curiosity was in him, that made him as heartless. But still all that she had said thus far was ambiguous. (367-68.)

In this conversation Pierre recognizes an invitation in her wild questionings, however ambiguous. A “terrible burning curiosity” is aroused about her sexual favors; lust makes him heartless. The temptation is clear, but equally clear is the fact that he has resisted it in the past and continues to do so. The conversation here does not result in physical consummation, and proof of past celibacy follows immediately. Isabel asks Pierre if Lucy is to sleep with her in her room, and Pierre answers: “On thy account; wishful for thy sake; to leave thee incommoded; and—and—not knowing precisely how things really are;—she probably anticipates and desires otherwise, my sister” (369). Thus late in the novel Pierre reminds Isabel that Lucy does not know precisely how things are, that their intimacy is only apparent, not real.⁹ The story then moves rapidly to its conclusion, and there is no reason to believe that their relationship changes.

In his new social environment in New York Pierre still remains an outcast. He does not, then, substitute the mores of one society for another. He does not seek to adapt himself to the rough democratic society of his poor tenement house. He treats his fellow tenants like servants; he is rudely condescending to those who befriend him, even after Glendinning Stanly has given him the same treatment. He appeals to Charlie Millthorpe for help, and this son of a Saddle Meadows farmer, who is now apparently a successful lawyer in the city, responds with aid and the offer of friendship. But Pierre is “startled by his exceedingly frank and familiar manner” and shocked by his lack of “old manorial deference” (329). In the eyes of his new acquaintances in the city Pierre has defied his mother's authority to break off his engagement to a rich girl and has married a poor orphaned servant girl. No one knows, of course, not even Delly Ulver, that Isabel may be his half-sister. In the Bohemian society of the tenement there are many who would have respected his independent attitude had he desired to make friends with them.

There is no Ishmael to view Pierre's career and tell his story, but despite Melville's obvious sympathy for Pierre (he is a deep diver, a box of treasure that sinks, and Charlie Millthorpe a weightless floating bladder) one part of the author also judges his hero.¹⁰ Pierre is quite capable of supporting himself financially while he is writing his book: the practical Charlie Millthorpe suggests that people will pay to hear Pierre lecture on Kantian philosophy. Three young women—Isabel, Delly, and later Lucy—are willing to aid him in any way they can, but he makes no effort to direct their energies toward some financial return. The practical, the expedient cannot be completely ignored. One recalls the lessons learned by Wellingborough Redburn and not learned by his English friend Harry Bolton.¹¹ The same impulse that brings Pierre away from Saddle Meadows, an impetuous pursuit of the heart, results in his isolation and ultimate death in the city. Yet on the grounds that “all the world does never gregariously advance to Truth” (195) Pierre stubbornly justifies his attitude and behavior.

Melville enlarges Pierre's struggle against society so that it gains cosmic significance. He learns about the vast mystery of life, that “all the world … was steeped a million fathoms in a mysteriousness wholly hopeless of solution” (150). Pierre concludes, like Ishmael, that “human life … partakes of the unravelable inscrutableness of God” (166). One specific aspect of the problem of life is set out by the pamphlet that Pierre finds in the coach carrying him to New York, the chronometrical and horological argument of Plotinus Plinlimmon. Pierre has already discovered and identified the horological pressures as the conventions of society. The chronometrical man is assaulted by social forces: “… the never-entirely repulsed hosts of Commonness, and Conventionalness, and Worldly Prudent-mindedness return to the charge; press hard on the faltering soul; and with inhuman hootings deride all its nobleness as mere eccentricity, which further wisdom and experience shall assuredly cure” (197). The pamphlet warns that man must not do precisely what Pierre has done: man must “by no means make a complete unconditional sacrifice of himself in behalf of any other being, or any cause, or any conceit” (251). The chronometrical man will “array all men's earthly time-keepers against him, and thereby work himself woe and death,” become involved in “strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before,” and commit “a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world” (249-50). Pierre fulfills precisely these predictions.

Plinlimmon's dichotomy is a form of absolutism which Melville does not approve.¹² Two characters in the novel have been notably conquered by the hosts of commonness, prudent-mindedness, and conventionality—Mr. Falsgrave and Glendinning Stanly. They and their horological solutions are not sympathetically treated. Charles Millthorpe seems less objectionable, but because of his intellectual limitations and his humble origin he may have less obligation. Pierre's chronometrical soul, like Ahab's higher perception, does not receive Melville's unqualified approval either. As Melville says directly to the reader, the pamphlet “seems more the excellently illustrated restatement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself” (246).

The cause of Pierre's social rebellion is his obedience to a moral imperative, “the loftiest behest of his soul” (244), which happens to be contrary to the dictates of social authority. The sanctions of society in the end have more force than the mere strength of moral right. This is the pessimism of Melville's Pierre. And the personal tragedy of Pierre Glendinning has as its cause the fact that though he rebels against the authority of his former society, nevertheless its shaping influence is precisely the reason for his downfall. Melville's attitude is ambivalent. On the one hand, he is sympathetically drawn to the war of his Enceladus. Yet Pierre is a “fool of Truth, … fool of Virtue, … fool of Fate” (422), noble and foolish (the concept is ambiguous) to pursue such abstractions in wanton disregard of reason and the demands of this world. These, then, are the ambiguities promised by Melville's subtitle to the novel. Out of Pierre's obedience to a moral imperative in defiance of society have come heroism and foolishness, knowledge and grief, independence and death.

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York, 1949), p. 407. Subsequent page references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.

2. John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville (The Hague, 1964), p. 144, sees Pierre's rebellion as beginning in an attempt to right social injustice but ending with an Ahablike Pierre at war against God.

3. “The Early Love Scenes in Melville's Pierre,” AL, [American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography] XXII (1950), 285. In this article there is also a good summary of the views of earlier critics who had accused Melville of a lapse of taste in the opening scenes introducing the youthful Pierre and Lucy in love. Perhaps the most recent commentator on this point has been Floyd C. Watkins, who writes that in the opening of the novel Melville mocks pride, religion, triteness, and ideality. See “Melville's Plotinus Plinlimmon and Pierre,” Reality and Myth: Essays in American Literature in Memory of Richard Croom Beatty (Nashville, Tenn., 1964), pp. 39-51, passim.

4. “Pierre and Manfred: Melville's Study of the Byronic Hero,” PELL, I (Summer 1965), 239.

5. Watkins, p. 47.

6. Bernstein, p. 131.

7. P. lvii.

8. “Pierre: Herman Melville's Inferno,” AL, XXXII (1960), 180.

9. The arrival of Lucy's letter and their conversation takes place some time after the scene that John Bernstein cites as the one occasion when Pierre and Isabel consummate their love.

10. Watkins suggests that Plinlimmon is Pierre's Ishmael, “the passive observer of his fate, the character who is exactly antithetical to him” (p. 40). Aside from the obvious difference that Ahab's entire story filters through Ishmael's consciousness, Ishmael's intellectual and emotional posture is somewhat different from but not antithetical to Ahab's.

11. Redburn's voyage to Liverpool as ordinary seaman aboard the merchantman Highlander serves as the initiation of a gentleman's son into the discipline of seafaring life; he survives because of his practical self-reliant shrewdness. His English counterpart, Harry Bolton, who signs aboard for the return voyage to New York, lacks the adaptability of the young American democrat and thus becomes the target of the “worst jibes and jeers” of the sailors and in fact “a hunted hare to the merciless crew” (Redburn, Constable Edition [London: 1922-24], p. 333).

12. That Melville does not approve Plinlimmon's pamphlet has long been noted. See, for example, Willard Thorp ed., Herman Melville, Representative Selections (New York, 1938), p. lxxvii; Tyrus Hillway, “Pierre, The Fool of Virtue,” AL, XXI (1949), 202; Charles Moorman, “Melville's Pierre in the City,” AL, XXVII (1956), 572-73.