SOURCE: “Compromising Politics and Herman Melville's Pierre,” in American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 719-41.

[In the following essay, Nixon examines Pierre in its historical context, maintaining that Melville preferred ambiguity to political allusion.]

In a now rather famous chapter at the midpoint of Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, “Young America in Literature,” Herman Melville announces a thoroughly uncompromising narrative agenda:

Among the various conflicting modes of writing history, there would seem to be two grand practical distinctions, under which all the rest must subordinately range. By the one mode, all contemporaneous circumstances, facts, and events must be set down contemporaneously; by the other, they are only to be set down as the general stream of the narrative shall dictate; for matters which are kindred in time, may be very irrelative in themselves. I elect neither of these; I am careless of either; both are well enough in their way; I write precisely as I please.¹

With a characteristically paraliptic flourish, in which he simultaneously posits and rejects the “conflicting modes of writing history,” Melville emphasizes his refusal to abide by prescribed novelistic rules and unapologetically celebrates what appears to be narrative whimsy—the whimsy in which he has seemingly indulged in the three preceding chapters.² Not surprisingly, “Young America in Literature” has generated conflicting critical responses. Critics like Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker focus on “why Pierre went wrong,” and consequently on Melville's problematic breaking of the narrative compact between readers and authors.³ More recent critics like Gillian Brown, Myra Jehlen, and Wai-chee Dimock view the disruption of that compact as symptomatic of Melville's preoccupation with individualism and the vicissitudes of authorship in antebellum America, arguing that the protagonist is essentially a cipher for the “Young American” Melville, who was struggling to achieve authorial autonomy against the tyranny of mediocrity.⁴

I want to suggest that Melville was quite deliberate in placing “America” at the point in the novel at which he emphasizes his refusal to produce narrative continuity. Pierre is heterogenous by design precisely because any smoothly homogenous representation of “contemporary circumstances, facts, and events” and “matters which [were] kindred in time” would have involved a textual and ideological compromise that Melville was unwilling to make. Instead, he offers only “ambiguity.” But then again, the entire idea of “compromise”—literary or otherwise—was extremely fraught, particularly in the context of an increasingly discordant sectional politics whose stridency had been exacerbated—not mitigated—by the Compromise of 1850. Published in 1852, Pierre reflects the ideological fissures in the Union that were concretized by the incendiary rhetoric surrounding that political Compromise ostensibly between North and South, urban industrialism and rural agrarianism, democratic egalitarianism and aristocratic feudalism. The novel registers, in effect, the fissures in “Young America in [a] Literature” that forcefully and self-consciously eschews any mode of narrative union. And if Melville's contemporary critics, with their legendary attacks on his sanity and morality in reviews of Pierre, failed to acknowledge the degree to which Melville was representing a Union whose coherence lay increasingly in language alone, they also expressed obliquely the same romantic desire for cohesion that had characterized the placatory, concession politics of Zachary Taylor's Whig administration, which had ushered in the Compromise, and the statesmen who had argued for its acceptance.

From January to July of 1850, the Union witnessed an oratorical war of words among its most famous and venerable orator-statesmen: Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster. Clay had proposed the Compromise as an omnibus bill designed to replace the contentious Wilmot Proviso and deal with the political fallout of the Mexican War, and Webster had eloquently endorsed it—much to the horror of his abolitionist supporters.⁵ While the Compromise was generally achieved, neither side was satisfied. Arising from it was, of course, the newly strengthened and highly contentious Fugitive Slave Law, another unworkable compromise that not only produced far more problems than it purported to solve but galvanized abolitionists into militant civil disobedience. The enactment of the statute, when mythologized sympathetically as the plight of the runaway slave, plucked at the heart strings and consciences of all proclaiming themselves champions of freedom. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, appeared in serialized form in 1851, only a year after Clay's bill was passed. And the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law pitted Melville's colleague and friend, Richard Henry Dana—author of Two Years Before the Mast (1841), founder of the Free Soil party, and abolitionist lawyer—against Melville's father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, in the infamous Thomas Sims case of 1851.

If ultimately only a convenient metaphor, the “Union” nevertheless served a crucial iconic function for the statesmen-rhetoricians, especially when its celebration was ostensibly the touchstone for their polemic during the seven-month debate on the Compromise. South Carolina's Calhoun could thus work from the same syllogistic premises as Kentucky's Clay: both could profess to endorse the ideal of Union, testify to their good faith on the basis of that endorsement, yet arrive at mutually exclusive interpretations of it. Calhoun could conclude with a barely veiled incitement to secession, and Clay, with a reassuring resolution to conflict, both making, in the process, grand pronouncements about the essential characteristics of “North” and “South” (the “sides”). Although this hyperbolically polarized discourse proved rhetorically masterful, it reduced the North and South to a set of wholly antithetical linguistic constructs, a series of opposed attributes or qualities that were just as iconically powerful and obfuscatory as the “Union,” thus ensuring that the emblematic identity of each was virtually manufactured out of the polemic. This was not, of course, the only occasion on which the Union's statesmen had had the opportunity to capitalize on factional politics; but the debates on the Compromise—the last of that scale before the Civil War—were highly publicized and exposed wide rifts that both fashioned and solidified seemingly disparate geographical and ideological constructs.

About a month into those debates Melville began writing Moby-Dick—a text that, not surprisingly, articulated the radical contradictions around which the Union was organized. Melville figured Ahab as embodying the opposing forces inherent in what he diagnosed as American demagoguery: how the democratic could give birth to the tyrannical, or how, as Michael Rogin suggests, one figure could combine “democratic equality … [and] familial hierarchy.”⁶ And, as various critics have pointed out, Ahab could easily represent any one of the key statesmen, the masterful rhetoricians and demagogues who hammered out or opposed the Compromise.⁷ When Melville wrote Pierre the following year, however, he did not fuse contradictory elements into a single figure in order to map an internal trajectory from democrat to demagogue. Instead, he presented those antagonistic forces as relentless ambiguities formally and generically yoked together in two seemingly discrete narrative sides, arranged around “Young America in Literature.”

Melville was not exactly misrepresenting Pierre when he assured Sophia Hawthorne and Richard Bentley that it was a “rural bowl of milk” and “a regular romance”; he was merely telling half the story—the first half.⁸ While the initial pages of Pierre might indeed qualify as “romance,” they are more jarringly provocative and strange than “regular,” offering what Henry A. Murray describes as “an overcompensatory Eden, a poetical feudal paradise,” and what Eric Sundquist judges an “insanely pastoralized opening.”⁹ There is no question that Melville begins the text by deploying the chivalric romance to stress the intense feudalism of the Glendinning rural seat of Saddle Meadows. Its current young lord, Pierre Glendinning, the only heir to “the historic line of Glendinning” (5) and grandson of an illustrious Revolutionary War hero and slave owner, is clearly an aristocrat. And the old Major General's captured British banners now function, ironically, as testimonies to an aristocratic heritage: they adorn the arched windows of an ancestral manor that would not shame an English peer.¹⁰ These Glendinning aristocrats have far less kinship with the anonymous and “unobtrusive families in New England” than with the “old and oriental-like English planter families of Virginia and the South” (10) and the Dutch Patroons in the North, the “mighty lordships in the heart of a republic” (11).

Melville's allusion to the Patroons—the landed gentry “whose haughty rent-deeds are held by their thousand farmer tenants … [and whose] own river, Hudson, flows somewhat farther and straighter than the Serpentine brooklet in Hyde Park” (11)—is not merely ornamental. With his country seat situated somewhere in New York State, Pierre's “great genealogical and real-estate dignity” (12) is distinctly analogous to that of the Patroons, the same aristocrats whose “genealogical dignity” Melville's mother (née Maria Gansevoort) could claim. But the shared geography of Saddle Meadows and the Patroon land claims along the Hudson is not the only point of convergence between the Glendinnings and the Northern feudal lords figured by Melville. Pierre's name is the hereditary Christian name of the prominent Van Cortlandt Patroons of New York, who had, like the Glendinnings, at least three generations of Pierres. With their extensive property in the Hudson Valley, their distinguished military careers, and their involvement in Congressional politics, Pierre Van Cortlandt Sr. (1721-1814) and Pierre Jr. (1762-1848) cut fine and obtrusive figures in New York State. Pierre Sr. was, for example, George Clinton's lieutenant governor; Pierre Jr. married Clinton's eldest daughter Catherine. Born late in his father's life, Pierre III inherited the Hudson Valley properties as a young man.¹¹ If Pierre Van Cortlandt III thus seems to offer a Patroon prototype for Pierre Glendinning—at least in terms of his “genealogical and real-estate dignity,” the location of his hereditary property, his illustrious forebears, and his name—this fictional/historical coincidence nonetheless raises some critical questions as to where to situate Pierre Glendinning geographically and historically.

When Melville assures us, in 1852, that Pierre Glendinning and Saddle Meadows represent a current landed aristocracy in New York, he seems at first not to register some rather spectacular assaults made on that hereditary stature only a few years before. New York had, after all, just experienced the violent and protracted anti-rent wars (1839-1846), wars between feudal land owners and their tenants that had heralded the waning of a coherent Northern landed gentry. When the Patroon General Van Rensselaer died in 1839, having stipulated in his will that back rents on his lands should be used to pay off his considerable debts (some $400,000), he proved the posthumous powder keg for a bitter struggle between generations of farmer-tenants, who had been treated as freeholders for years, and the Patroon families. When Van Rensselaer's son Stephen IV attempted to extract the unpaid rent from the tenants—who, of course, could no more pay large lump sums than they could claim aristocratic roots—they simply refused to pay. As justification they pointed to Northern claims to democratic freedom, relative classlessness, equal economic opportunity, and so on, claims that the North was making tirelessly in its effort to assume the moral high ground against the South. The tenants' struggle snowballed, in part because a large number of other New York tenants wanted to ensure that no precedent was set with Van Rensselaer, and in part because the Anti-Renters recognized their struggle as an acid test of the continued aristocratic status of the Northern landed gentry. After years of escalating violence, militia intervention, and political fighting, and after the Anti-Renters' successful election of the sympathetic Whig candidate John Young as governor of New York, the feudal land claims were more or less dissolved in 1846; in 1850, two years before Pierre was published, the Supreme Court invalidated the Van Rensselaer title and “held that the hated quarter sales, whereby a tenant who sold his farm paid one-fourth or one-third of the price to the landlord, were unconstitutional.”¹²

In the midst of his panegyric upon Pierre's richly aristocratic and very American heritage, which adroitly avoids direct mention of the Van Rensselaers—or, for that matter, the similarly affected Van Cortlandts—Melville slips in a strangely provocative reference to New York's recent history:

In midland counties of England they boast of old oaken dining-halls where three hundred men-at-arms could exercise of a rainy afternoon, in the reign of the Plantagenets. But our lords, the Patroons, appeal not to the past, but they point to the present. One will show you that the public census of a county, is but part of the roll of his tenants. Ranges of mountains, high as Ben Nevis or Snowdon, are their walls; and regular armies, with staffs of officers, crossing rivers with artillery, and marching through primeval woods, and threading vast rocky defiles, have been sent out to distrain upon three thousand farmer-tenants of one landlord, at a blow. A fact most suggestive two ways; both whereof shall be nameless here. (11)

If the English feudal lords had private men-at-arms, the Patroons had the support of “regular armies.” In other words, the Northern aristocrats had their right to retain feudal lordships sanctioned and defended by a state-funded militia which, according to Melville, went to tremendous lengths to defend that right.

While not taking an overt political position on the rent-wars—Whig supporters were at first militantly opposed to any assault on the sanctity of private property, while Democrats organized support rallies for the embattled farmers—Melville nevertheless alludes to the controversy. With a rather neat paraliptic gesture, in which he at once raises and pointedly passes over the larger implications of the Patroons and the rent-wars, Melville emphasizes the controversial and recent past while nonetheless insisting that the Patroon's feudal system still exists: the “present patroons or lords”; “our lords, the Patroons, appeal not to the past, but they point to the present”; the “mighty lordships in the heart of a republic … survive and exist … and are now owned by their present proprietors” (11, emphases mine).

Now this seemingly anachronistic disjunction between a recent, historical interrogation of the constitutionality of feudalism and the blithely unproblematic representation of its continued existence might be explained as Melville's deliberate refusal to reconcile a fictional/historical contradiction. And such an unwillingness is certainly aided and occluded by Melville's highly burlesqued, artificial, and self-consciously antiquated version of the genre and language of romance—what Higgins and Parker dub “pseudo-Elizabethan bombast”—and his insistence on Pierre's “aristocratic condition” as established “poetically” in the first part of the novel.¹³ But this disjunction does offer a historical analogue to “Young America” generally, with its problematic embracing of Manifest Destiny as its birthright.¹⁴ Young America had, after all, not only proven itself in the Mexican War just as capable of aggressive expansionism as the Old World imperialists, but it had also found itself, as Eric Sundquist points out, “more and more an anomaly [in light of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1833 and the Dutch and French Islands in 1848], its own revolutionary drama absurdly immobilized.”¹⁵ The banners of Pierre's Revolutionary War-hero grandfather adorn the present, aristocratic Saddle Meadows, offering a mute commentary on the supposed triumph of democracy, just as the rent-wars highlighted the presence of aristocratic “mighty lordships,” and just as the Compromise accentuated the coexistence of liberty and slavery within the Union. Melville can, in other words, gesture toward Old World feudalism and New World democracy as coexisting in both North and South, suggesting a political geography that was not—as the rhetoricians of the Compromise insisted—neatly delimited by the Mason-Dixon line.

What Melville challenges, then, is the absolutist, Manichean, and self-serving rhetoric that infused the Compromise—in particular, the rhetoric of Northerners who conveniently forgot their own recent history. For example, in Webster's famous speech supporting Clay's bill on 7 March—a speech bitterly denounced by the likes of Dana, Emerson, Summer, and the other Northern abolitionists who had hitherto supported Webster—the orator attacked Louisiana Senator Solomon Downs for his misconceptions of the North. Responding to Downs's unflattering comparison of the Northern laborer and the Southern slave, in which the latter allegedly enjoyed superior conditions, comforts, and happiness, Webster objected strenuously to Downs's claims, characterizing the North as unshakably and unequivocally democratic: “Why, who are the laboring people of the North? They are the whole North. They are the people who till their own farms with their own hands; freeholders, educated men, independent men. Let me say, Sir, that five sixths of the whole property of the North is in the hands of the laborers of the North.”¹⁶ Only, of course, after the rent-wars, only after the Anti-Renters had forced the sale of hundreds of thousands of acres owned by the landed gentry, could Webster deliver this statistic so confidently. But his speech also characterizes the “whole North” as either Northern laborers working with “their own hands” on their own farms or urban wage earners whose accumulated capital will eventually allow them to become freeholders.

Saddle Meadows is clearly not part of that “whole North.” But Melville's bare whisper of its jeopardy or instability because of the rent-wars serves not only to remind Northern readers of their complicity in a conveniently reviled “Southern” feudalism but also to pave the way for a heralded change in the situation of the Northern landed gentry. Melville seems to acknowledge the anachronism of Saddle Meadows by gesturing to Pierre as its product: “[I]f you tell me that … [Pierre's inordinate pride in his ancestry] showed him no sterling Democrat, and that a truly noble man should never brag of any arm but his own; then I beg you to consider again that this Pierre was but a youngster as yet” (13); and he promises Pierre's eventual maturation: “[B]elieve me you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy” (13).¹⁷ Melville thus places the chivalric romance, with its championing of aristocratic codes, beneficent feudal condescension, and patrilineal privilege, in an overtly political register, anticipating his forthcoming dissolution of romance as synonymous with Pierre's ideological emergence into the democratic field mapped out and enunciated for itself by the North. And the trigger for Pierre's emergence from an idyllic youth and a future as a young lord happily married to the angelic Lucy Tartan is the disruptive appearance of Isabel Banford, his alleged illegitimate half-sister. On a certain level, Isabel functions as the conventional mysterious dark heroine of romance, who, through her plight and sexuality, lures Pierre away from his fiancée. But her presence also galvanizes Pierre's maturation by forcing him not only to reassess his private memory of his dead father when (like Stephen Van Rensselaer) he inherits his father's problems, but also to rethink his conflicting social responsibilities to his mother, his tenants, his betrothed, and the woman his father abandoned.

Pierre's decision to preserve—for his proud mother's (and, to a degree, his own) sake—the public memory of his father as a noble and dignified family man, and also to rescue Isabel from her loneliness and obscurity, satisfies his desire to be a romance hero, to exhibit a “loftier heroism” (178). His sense of self-sacrifice encourages him to figure himself as both Christ-like and chivalric, as a true Spenserian knight. But at the same time that he embraces such a heroism, Pierre is cutting away the structures that guarantee his aristocratic position. If, as Melville suggests, the romance and its heroes are contingent on patriarchal distinction, Pierre's ostensible rejection of his heritage in order to embrace a “glorious equality” with Isabel effectively destabilizes his heroic stature. For to achieve that equality—which he articulates for Isabel as “I do not stoop to thee, nor thou to me; but we both reach up alike to a glorious ideal!” (192)—he is forced to disengage himself from his family's illustrious history: “Henceforth, cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past; and since the Future is one blank to all; therefore, twice-disinherited Pierre stands untrammeledly his ever-present self!—free to do his own self-will and present fancy to whatever end!” (199). When Pierre “Crosses the Rubicon,” he moves from pastoral feudalism to urban democracy, abandoning his paternal birthright; he departs from Saddle Meadows to become the embodiment of the much-celebrated Emersonian self-reliant man. As Rogin points out, in accepting the beliefs implicit in “self-reliance,” the “democratic, imperial, national self reject[s] inherited aristocratic distinctions for equal economic opportunity.”¹⁸

But Pierre's decision to reject one social order and embrace another is not a complete rejection or even really a subversion; instead, it ultimately proves an uneasy compromise, a false marriage of irreconcilable ideals that cannot succeed because he opts to leave both intact. By pretending to be married to Isabel he can preserve untainted the (fictive) historical order, his father's public stature, and his family's distinction, even while he is apparently leaving it all behind. But the pretense of marriage equally prompts him to embrace equal social status with Isabel, which is precisely what that historic, feudal order does not admit. Pierre's inner conflict, the geographical/political crossing from Saddle Meadows to New York, thus highlights the problematic coexistence of the feudal and democratic, especially when there is no apparent intersection between them. In exchanging feudal aristocracy for democratic equality, exchanging one American social order for another, Pierre actually interrogates neither—even though his “life revolution,” like the revolution of his forefathers, is ideological. Pierre's conversion or maturation from aristocrat to democrat does, however, have profound formal reverberations in the text.

More than simply a personal revolution, Pierre's break with his mother and Lucy and his escape to New York City with Delly and Isabel create a substantial narrative rupture. Parker and Higgins argue that this break marks the point at which the text begins to go seriously wrong, since it produces not the smooth progression typical of the maturation tale but a glaring inconsistency, a blatant generic substitution. At the point of rupture in Book 14 (“The Journey and the Pamphlet”), the inflated language of romance suddenly collapses, displaced first by Melville's contemplations on the virtues of textual silence, then by his seemingly wholesale incorporation of Plotinus Plinlimmon's “Chronometricals and Horologicals.” The paean to silence precedes the verbose sophistry of Plinlimmon, who waxes less than eloquent on the necessity for men to compromise: to sustain a “virtuous expediency” (214), to cease trying, and failing, to unite a horological (earthly) practice with a chronometrical (celestial) ideal. Given that Melville has announced, just prior to the pamphlet, that all “profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence” (204), the cheap veneer of profundity in Plinlimmon's text is doubly suspect. Indeed, the pamphlet seems to present a stinging indictment of the limp logic of expedient or laissez-faire compromise—the sort of compromise, perhaps, that the Union had witnessed just two years earlier, couched in a similarly austere and earnest rhetoric, though delivered as orations rather than pamphlets.

But if Plinlimmon's pamphlet offers a tempting historical analogue for the Compromise, Melville does not drive home its larger implications. Instead, he allows it to stand as a figuration of fictional/textual compromise at precisely the point in Pierre when he is rejecting textual continuity. In another apparent about-face, Book 15 begins without the slightest comment on the pamphlet and concerns itself instead with a supplemental history of Pierre's former relationship with his cousin, Glendinning Stanly. By insisting that Pierre is now on the other side of the Rubicon and can therefore recognize the essential instability of his past status, Melville shifts perspective; he focuses on the unnaturalness of Saddle Meadows, not by deploying artificial language but by offering the symptomatically aberrant fact of Pierre's youthful sexuality.

With Glen Stanly, Pierre had “cherished a much more than cousinly attachment” (216); as boys “nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life” they had shared the “empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes” (216). Their love has “fillips and spicinesses,” occasional bouts of Othello-like jealousies, sentimental sonnets, and a protracted record in two thick bundles of love letters. In fact, Pierre's rather silly and tepid feelings for Lucy appear retrospectively as pallid substitutes for the more “ardent sentiment” (218) he cherished for Glen Stanly.¹⁹ Pierre's earlier passions are, naturally, “nurtured” at Saddle Meadows, “amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life”; and Glen Stanly's passions are “the finest feelings of the home-born nature” (218). However, through exposure to foreign travel Glen Stanly's feelings are replaced “with a fastidious superciliousness, which like the alleged bigoted Federalism of old times would not—according to a political legend—grind its daily coffee in any mill save of European manufacture, and was satirically said to have thought of importing European air for domestic consumption” (218).²⁰ Given that Saddle Meadows is every bit as aristocratic as an English country seat, it comes to represent just such residual (if perhaps less bigoted) “Federalism of old times,” one that gives rise to homosexual passions that—despite Melville's ironic insistence that they are somehow common in boys born to “elegancies” and comforts—stand out as inbred, as perhaps symptomatic of a precious, European, aristocratic decline.

But such inbreeding was not wholly European either. The practice of intermarriage, particularly the marriage between first cousins, was very much a feature of an American aristocracy as represented in, say, Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) or Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851). As Bertram Wyatt-Brown points out, while the practice of intermarriage had declined significantly in the North by the mid-nineteenth century, it was distinctly on the rise in the South.²¹ If Poe and Hawthorne offer lurid, gothic configurations of an atrophied, diseased, or inbred American aristocracy, Melville presents something else: a male first cousin as the ironic and definitely unfruitful object-choice for the aristocratic Pierre. Indeed, with Glen Stanly established as the demonic parody of a marriageable cousin, Melville stresses not only Pierre's sexual inversion but his affiliation with both the inbred Northern Pyncheons and the equally inbred Southern Ushers.

Unlike Poe and Hawthorne, however, Melville inscribes not merely an atrophied aristocracy trembling on its last legs but a hyperbolically inflated inbreeding. All of Pierre's familial relations appear incestuous: his peculiar “romantic filial love” (5) for his mother, his brotherly romantic love for Isabel, and his romantic and cousinly love for Lucy and Glen Stanly. Rather than expanding outward generationally, Pierre's family contracts inward, co-opting anyone associated with it and determining almost all relations in familial terms only. And each family member plays numerous roles, whether or not he or she is actually a blood relation. In fact, the entire incest theme—the constantly intersecting bloodlines or confusions over them, the persistent overlapping of sexual passion and familial roles and duties, the homoeroticism—serves to represent the aristocratic Glendinnings in opposition to the plebeian, hybrid robustness and good health of Delly and the Glendinning tenants. Interestingly enough, Melville does not trace the aristocratic decline of the Glendinnings within the inflated and flowery discourse of romance, as we might expect given some of the writings of Poe and Hawthorne. Instead, he reveals Pierre's symptomatically decadent homoerotic relation with Glen Stanly at the beginning of the second part of Pierre, after romance has been ostentatiously rejected.

If Melville backtracks over Pierre's history with Glen Stanly to set the stage for Pierre's cruel introduction to New York City after Glen rejects him, he similarly returns to Pierre's youth to establish the means by which he can support himself in the City. Having rehearsed Pierre's past sexual proclivities, Melville introduces Pierre's talents as a young author. This oddly parallel history of Pierre as an author of sentimental sonnets is laid over the earlier narrative—in which Pierre appeared to be merely a young, leisured, feudal lord-in-training—as if it is somehow supplemental. But instead of adding to his initial inscription of Pierre's development, Melville's paraliptic rewriting of that history—or, better, his pretense of retrospectively enhancing his earlier representation of Pierre's youth—creates virtual lacunae after the fact. In other words, Melville seems to punch holes in the fabric of the earlier text only so that he can fill them with almost egregiously unlikely swatches from Pierre's apparent history. And this supplemental history is designed to call into question the smooth and untroubled romance-development of Pierre's youth by forging tenuous and dubious links between Pierre's life of idleness in Saddle Meadows and his new working life in New York.

With this reconstruction of Pierre's past, Melville at once casts a cold democratic light on the rosy elegance of the aristocratic Saddle Meadows and destabilizes Pierre's self-congratulatory heroism when it emerges in New York, the apparent locus of democratic individualism. In embracing a truly democratic selfhood, Pierre is forced to become the social equal not only of Isabel but also of the coachman who drives him from Saddle Meadows, the policeman who has to point out to him that the coachman has “rights,” and Charlie Millthorpe, the son of one of his tenants. The romantically pastoral Saddle Meadows is replaced by the naturalistic New York, with its slums, red-light districts, rabble-filled police stations, and gutted and burnt-out buildings. Melville thus inverts the Emersonian idealization of the rural/pastoral as the topos of man's equality in nature and his freedom from the hierarchies and organizations that characterize the collective constructs of cities.²² The rural in Pierre is no Walden-like retreat from urban strife and the mechanistic dissociation of man and nature where man can find his true connection with the world; nor is it a mythologized frontier. It is “the most aristocratic part of this earth” (13). The rural Saddle Meadows is the site of the most pronounced social hierarchies, the grossest disparities in class and privilege.

When Melville commences his tacit celebration of Pierre's decision to provide for himself and be finally self-sufficient, he contrasts Pierre not only with his former idle self but also with other such idle gentlemen: Pierre is unlike “unprofessional gentlemen of the aristocratic South, who happen to own slaves, give those slaves liberty to go and seek work, and every night return with their wages, which constitute those idle gentlemen's income” (261). Urban New York, in which Pierre can become a self-sufficient, democratic laborer, is the arena for “political and social levelings” (275). Melville plots Pierre's trajectory from hierarchical country to egalitarian city, for only in the city can Pierre reject the aristocratic idleness associated with both Saddle Meadows and Southern gentlemen, participate in an economic equality with his fellow man by laboring with his pen, and thus celebrate his “practical capacity” to live by the “wages of labor” (261).

This trajectory is, however, ironically double-edged. While Pierre may reject his aristocratic heritage, transplant himself in the truly democratic city, and thus become “his own Alpha and Omega” (261), his real Northern aristocratic counterparts are busy moving to the city precisely to maintain and perpetuate their superior social stature. The Astors, the Macys, the Van Rensselaers, and the Clintons had all relinquished their positions as landed gentry, sold off most of their land—the Van Rensselaers' was relatively late going on the auction block in 1845—and established themselves as urban plutocrats, captains of industry.²³ As Melville points out, “the more prominent among us, proudly cite the city as their seat. Too often the American that himself makes his fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street of the most metropolitan town” (13). Instead of emulating that move from country to city, from aristocrat to plutocrat, instead of working an expedient compromise, Pierre seems to embrace the much propagandized Northern ideal of democratic egalitarianism, with its attendant configuration of labor as constituting self-worth. Celebrating Protestant (or Emersonian) conceptions of labor as a “calling,” Pierre does, in fact, begin to labor in earnest on a mature work; but he fails to recognize the basic incompatibility of his two motives for writing: to deliver to the world what he perceives as a “new, or at least miserably neglected Truth,” and to “realize money” (283) by means of fictional self-glorification.

While the second half of the text contains Melville's slashing condemnation of the “dynasty of taste” in America, which decreed that decorous mediocrity would reign at the expense of writing considered “ungentlemanly” or lacking in “Taste” (245-46), Melville does not figure Pierre's attempts to write a “mature work” as representative of a good author's failure to be recognized or published.²⁴ Instead, the narrative constantly undercuts Pierre's efforts to deliver the “Truth” by questioning whether Pierre actually has any such truth to deliver. And thus, even though he attacks the publishing industry and its supposed slavish catering to public taste, Melville does not finally represent Pierre as one of its victims.²⁵ The literary elite and the public may be deeply flawed, but Pierre's gloomy “plagiariz[ing] from his own experiences” (302), his articulation of what is “hard and bitter in his lot” (303), is equally so. Ultimately Pierre's failure to transform his writing into a “practical capacity” derives from his belief that his personal experiences, his truncated autobiographical writings, have universal appeal or applicability—a belief perfectly consistent with his former position of idle privilege—and from his inability to divest himself of his romantic self-perception. His apparent ideological conversion becomes, at last, merely a form of bad faith. Regularly postulating a position for himself as superior to other men, he both celebrates and violates the North's perception of itself as wholly democratic. In other words, he cannot actually become the promised “thorough-going Democrat” because he conceives himself as substantially above yet sorely “surrounded by the base and mercenary crew” (311).

Pierre's authorial aspirations, his yearnings towards democratic selfhood, and his rejection of youthful homosexuality—all of which are opposed to his lordly idleness, his contentment with aristocratic privilege, and his embracing of Lucy as a replacement for Glen Stanly—are sutured into the text around “Young America in Literature.” But, as I have suggested, Pierre's new predispositions only seem to offer ambiguous counterpoints to those in the first half of the text: each is compromised by Pierre's inability to divest himself completely of Saddle Meadows. What Melville posits as radical ambiguities or contradictions are, in fact, peculiar consistencies arrayed along an only apparent trajectory of psychological maturation. If, for example, the feudalism of Saddle Meadows represents a historical anomaly in the wake of the rent-wars, its aristocratic structures are simply recapitulated in urban New York through both Glen Stanly, the classic Europeanized Northern dandy, and Pierre, the would-be author with an elitist sensibility.

Pierre inscribes, in other words, a logic of substitution, in which Melville suggests that he is substituting one entire structure for its opposite—in the name of ambiguity—but the novel contains ample evidence that what is really being substituted is merely one mode for another. New York substitutes for Saddle Meadows, proffering the appearance of democratic egalitarianism for feudal aristocracy, yet only the mode of the aristocracy's representation changes. The urban aristocracy typified by Glen Stanly is just as much a “mighty lordship” in the heart of the North as its Patroon precursor—or, for that matter, as the aristocratic planter families of the South. Melville thus draws broad lines of analogy that not only challenge the representation of an iconic “whole North” but transcend as well any rigid geographical codifications of North and South. This marking of economic and political analogues that connect Saddle Meadows and the aristocratic South, New York dandies and Virginia planters, is wholly consistent with Melville's capitalizing on the spatial metaphors inherent in the etymology of “ambiguity”; ambiguus is Latin for “moving from side to side.” Melville revels in the implications of this spatial dynamism, first by having Pierre decamp to New York City, then by having Saddle Meadows reinstate itself there.

In the midst of Pierre's failing (and flailing) efforts to discover real self-worth through the labors of his own hand, he receives a letter from his past. Lucy Tartan writes to reclaim Pierre as a romantic hero who is “too noble,” has “superhuman angelical strength,” and sits in the “calm, sublime heaven of heroism” (309-10). The return of Lucy signals the rearticulation of seemingly discarded, earlier textual paradigms, the return, as it were, of the repressed. In New York City, however, the position of the chivalrous, pastoral romance hero is highly problematic. When Pierre dons his gloves, seizes his dueling pistols, and sets out to avenge the blemish to his honor made by Glen Stanly, the pretender to the Glendinning inheritance, he is made almost ridiculous by the inappropriateness of his actions in the teeming metropolis. Striding purposefully down the middle of sidewalks thronged with people, Pierre is a distinct peculiarity: seeing “his wild and fatal aspect,” witnesses either “took the curb” or “took the wall” (359). Simply to shoot Glen Stanly, who has struck him with his “cowhide,” he has to shake off the multitudes—“the sudden white grasp of two rushing girls” (359). And after Pierre wins his duel by killing Glen Stanly, he is seized “by a hundred contending hands” (360): a duel in New York is, after all, just murder.

Melville lampoons the ludicrously anomalous and seemingly anachronistic modes of chivalry Pierre reenacts in New York, insisting that they are out of place or, rather, displaced from another context: Saddle Meadows. And the entire constellation of signifiers—Pierre's overinflated sense of his manly honor, his quest to avenge its bruising, his ostensible (although not actual) adherence to the cult of chivalry, his demand for the satisfaction of a duel—all resonate as either anachronistically Northern or currently Southern. The duel and the aristocratic cult of manly honor and chivalry had long been associated, in both the North and South, almost exclusively with the Southern planter elite.²⁶ By 1838, for example, when Maine Congressman Jonathan Cilley participated in a famous duel with Kentucky's William Graves, Northerners were apparently horrified. In fact, as Steven Stowe points out, the “duel was so identified with the South that commentators looked for something ‘southern’ in Cilley's background and temperament.”²⁷ Clearly, the “Northerner” Pierre cannot be divorced from Southerners by his “background and temperament”; the only difference between them lies in Pierre's ignorance of all the conventions of dueling: he fails to secure a second and shoots Glen Stanly before the latter has even drawn his weapon.

In invoking feudal aristocratic codes (albeit badly) in New York City, Pierre ultimately succeeds in dissolving them permanently. Pierre is the “only surnamed Glendinning,” and “his own hand had extinguished his house” (360). The shooting of Glen Stanly and the final, body-piling scene in the prison, where he and Isabel take poison after Lucy has died from a stopped heart, become travesties of chivalric codes, travesties of real tragedy. Pierre's failure, as a knight and as an author, stems from his inability to adopt one role wholeheartedly, to actually cross the Rubicon in earnest by choosing between two contradictory conceptions of the individual and modes of behavior. Unchanged, he cannot be transplanted in New York amidst the democratic individualism established as a polarity to the aristocratic feudalism of Saddle Meadows; but changed, he cannot return to the unassailable sense of entitlement that is the legacy of his paternal ancestors. Some sort of transformation is, however, inevitable. As the beginning of the text suggests, “the democratic element operates as a subtile acid among us; forever producing new things by corroding the old” (9).

While Melville initially represents Saddle Meadows and the Glendinning family as eternally present, as defying Time—unlike, say, the “families [that] rise and burst like bubbles” in the cities or the “vast mass of families [that are like] blades of grass” (9)—the promised corrosion proves inevitable. The “democratic element” does finally surface at the expense of the aristocratic Glendinnings, but not necessarily because the two have clashed. The feudal House of Glendinning, at first linked with something able to resist natural progression and law, finally withers away unassisted, destroying itself, like the House of Usher, with its decadence and inability to accommodate a nonlocalized social order. Melville's initial figuration of the Glendinnings as the enduring oak trunk is eventually supplanted by the naked, impotent, and imprisoned Enceladus, whose “whole striving trunk” is inescapably rooted in the earth.²⁸

When the Glendinnings become like any other American family—the metaphoric equivalent of rising and subsiding bubbles or annually replaced blades of grass—they cease to be an elite body, separated from the land-working tenants and the natural cycles, and become, like Enceladus, mere fodder for the whimsical reveries of bad artists like Pierre. In effect, the second part of Pierre, while deliberately disconnected from the first, offers the terms upon which the ephemeral and saccharinely artificial first half can be critiqued. Beginning with the highly problematic paraliptic rewriting of Pierre's history, a rewriting that seriously undermines the text's continuity, the second half of Pierre offers itself as a fictional democratic acid that corrodes the “old” romance form that preceded it. And the two halves of the text remain separated by a rocky, self-consciously failed transition because the prospect of narratological compromise is airily rejected out of hand in the interest of articulating Young America.

In presenting Pierre as a set of structural counterpoints—the chivalric romance versus the American individualist myth of ascendance through self-reliance—Melville thwarts expectations that the novel is a generically unified form. This is clearly consistent with what he does in Mardi (1849), in Moby-Dick, and later in The Confidence-Man (1857). But Pierre's interrogation of the novelistic form and consequent glaring display of heterodoxy amounts to substantially more than Melville thumbing his nose at fictional conventions. When the highly self-referential narrator proclaims in “Young America in Literature” that, while aware of the “conflicting modes of writing history,” he is “careless of either”—when he insists airily, “I write precisely as I please” (244)—Melville signals that his “pleasure” involves the inscription of coexistent opposites. Because Pierre, like Young America, does not quite relinquish anything to gain its apparent opposite, his promised political conversion is suspect: his move from rural to urban, from aristocrat to democrat, from lord to wage-slave, might represent a move from side to side, but the sides are not marked geographically within an identifiable rhetoric of the Union's sides. He may cross the Rubicon, but he goes back; he may live in New York, but he imports Saddle Meadows; he may become a wage slave, but he tries to earn money by aggrandizing himself; he may be a democrat, but he believes himself to be a chivalric hero. In other words, Pierre bounces back and forth—geographically, ideologically, historically, and politically—between oppositions supposedly determined by geography alone. And thus Melville interrogates and demystifies the firmly antithetical codifications of rural South/urban North, aristocratic South/democratic North, agrarian South/industrial North, Old World South/New World North.

If Melville suggests that democracy is a process, a potential evolution and maturation, he never actually represents that process; instead, at the point when the transformation should take place, he renounces any concession to textual unity and proffers Plinlimmon's pamphlet as a dismissible parody of morally expedient compromise. The pamphlet stands as a metonymic figuration of both the logic of compromise and the Plinlimmon-like compromisers themselves. While Pierre takes his crumpled copy of Plinlimmon's pamphlet to New York, he is never able to recover it; nor is he able to retrieve any of the other copies apparently disseminated there. Hidden from sight in New York City, in the deep pocket-lining of Pierre's Saddle Meadows coat, the pamphlet offers a potential point of convergence between Saddle Meadows and New York City; but it is a convergence that Melville rejects, first implicitly through parody, and later explicitly through Pierre's failure to reaffirm its limp message.

In The Civil War World of Herman Melville Stanton Garner maintains that Melville was essentially like Abraham Lincoln: seduced by the ideal of Union and placing it before the cause of abolition, Melville questioned the “merit of remedying one flaw in the national character [slavery] at the cost of the nation itself. … Was not gradual manumission preferable to irreversible rupture?”²⁹ Yet Clay and Webster were the authors of Compromise, and they were, as Sundquist remarks, quite plainly “blinded by the ideology of Union.”³⁰Pierre suggests that Melville was neither seduced nor blinded; and while he does not in Pierre elaborate on the upshot of that blinding to the degree he later would in Benito Cereno, he most certainly dismantles the premises of the Compromise in the earlier work. In fact, Melville proffers a glaringly heterogenous, ruptured narrative in Pierre that seems almost to anticipate a far more substantial rupture to come.

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 244. All further references to Pierre will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Richard Lanham describes paralipsis (from the Greek for “disregard” or “omission”) as a rhetorical figure that emphasizes through the statement of what will not be discussed; I use it that way to describe, for example, Melville's raising of the rent-wars, immediately followed by his refusal to discuss their implications; see Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971). Gerard Genette amplifies the sense of the term to include what he refers to as the “retrospective filling in” of a narrative, the offering of a curious supplementation where none was apparently needed or even suggested; see Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980), 52. I use Genette's modification of the term to denote Melville's narration of aspects of Pierre's youth in the second half of the novel.

3. See, for example, Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1978), 162-96; and “Why Pierre Went Wrong,” Studies in the Novel 8 (Spring 1976): 7-23; Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1984), 28-30.

4. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986); Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989).

5. Clay's Compromise actually failed as an omnibus bill, but passed when it was broken down into five component bills: to admit California into the Union as a free state, to provide territorial government to newly acquired Mexican territory, to draw the border lines of Texas to exclude New Mexico and assume Texas's debts, to prohibit the slave trade but not slavery in the District of Columbia, and to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Law; see Empire for Liberty: The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America, vol. 1, ed. Dumas Malone and Basil Rauch (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1960), 569.

6. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 129.

7. Melville had been accused, by William Gilmore Sims in the Southern Quarterly Review, of painting a “loathsome picture” of Calhoun in Mardi (1849), but Ahab seems an unlikely analogue for Calhoun; see Melville: The Critical Heritage, ed. Watson G. Branch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 187. Charles Foster argues that Ahab represents Daniel Webster, the “senior senator from Massachusetts [who] had sold his soul to the devil” (“Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick,” New England Quarterly 34 [March 1961]: 28).

8. The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), 146, 150.

9. Henry A. Murray, introduction to Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, by Herman Melville (New York: Hendrick's House, 1949), xxxvi; Eric Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), 150.

10. Carolyn Karcher argues that “Melville in fact comments on the double irony that America might have sold her democratic birthright for an aristocratic mess of pottage, and that the ingredients constituting that pottage—lineage, title, landed property—are all tainted” (Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980], 94).

11. See the Correspondence of the Van Cortlandt Family of Cortlandt Manor: 1815-1848, vol. 4, ed. Jacob Judd (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1981).

12. Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 69. See also David Maldwyn Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region: 1780-1850 (New York: Octagon, 1967); and Henry Christman, Tin Horns and Calico: A Decisive Episode in the Emergence of Democracy (Cornwallville, N.Y.: Hope Farm Press, 1975).

13. Higgins and Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” 167.

14. Rogin has an acute analysis of Melville's association with the Young America crowd of John O’Sullivan and Evert Duyckinck's literary circle in the 1840s; see Subversive Genealogy, 70-79.

15. Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 142.

16. The Papers of Daniel Webster, vol. 2, Speeches and Formal Writings, 1834-1852, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England for Dartmouth College, 1988), 545.

17. The Van Cortlandt Pierres' politics were notoriously mercurial. According to Jacob Judd, the “family members underwent rapid political transformations from Jeffersonianism, to becoming Democrats, shifting to Whiggism for a brief period, and finally, upon reexamining their true beliefs, a return to an earlier Democratic allegiance” (introduction to the Correspondence of the Van Cortlandt Family, xxxii). Melville suggests that Pierre's shifting politics, like those of the Van Cortlandts, are of a piece with an aristocratic immaturity.

18. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 21.

19. James Creech does not focus on Pierre's relationship with Glen Stanley as representative of Melville's interest in figuring homosexuality; instead, he argues that Isabel, as an extension of Pierre's father and the patrilineal phallus, offers the occluded masculine sexualized object: incest had an “ample degree of speakableness [which] emphatically did not apply to the other nameless awfulness of homosexuality” (Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville's “Pierre” [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993], 162).

20. Glen Stanly and his preferences are not necessarily of “old times” at all; rather, they could well represent New York “Knickerbocker” society. Miller describes New York socialites as typically “scorn[ing] anything American”: “These aristocrats aped European fashions in everything from the cut of their clothes to language and manners. A work of art or a style of dress was not favored with fashionable approval unless it was known to be in vogue in London or Paris” (Jacksonian Aristocracy, 78).

21. Bertram Wyatt-Brown observes that the decrease in the number of marriages between first cousins in the North occurred at the same time as an increase in the South: “No doubt the strategy [of intermarriage in the South] reflected the concentration of wealth in an ever-narrowing circle at the top” (Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982], 217).

22. For a detailed examination of the rural in America, see Leo Marx, “Pastoralism in America,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 36-69.

23. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy, 68-69.

24. Gillian Brown would not agree, arguing instead that Melville is not simply attacking the sentimental predisposition of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and its attendant cult of celebrity in the “puffery system,” but also positing Pierre as the preferred individualist author/hero who can reject that marketplace wholesale because he is writing a mature work. Brown maintains that Pierre is a mouthpiece for Melville; see Domestic Individualism, 135-52.

25. Paul Royster argues that, unlike Moby-Dick, Pierre offers Melville's “negative version of the symbolic language of correspondence between man, nature, and the invisible world,” and he maintains that Pierre's attempt at professional writing is a classic case of Marxist alienation: his production of a literary commodity isolates him from the “product of his labor, from his activity of producing, and from his common humanity” (“Melville's Economy of Language,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, 324, 327).

26. Steven Stowe observes that “[a]fter 1800 dueling rather swiftly came to be perceived as a southern phenomenon by southerners and northerners alike. … [T]his form of violence and self-control became distinctive of the planter-class South” (Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987], 39, 6). And Wyatt-Brown points out that the “duel set the boundaries of the upper circle of honor” in the Old South (Southern Honor, 352).

27. According to Stowe, the duel led to an investigation by a specially appointed “committee on House privileges,” who referred, in their investigation, to the “code of honor as a ‘relic of unenlightened and barbarous ages’” (Intimacy and Power, 39, 45).

28. For an extensive examination of the connection between the genealogical family tree of the Glendinnings and the Enceladus as its demonic counterpart, see Mark Z. Slouka, “Demonic History: Geography and Genealogy in Melville's Pierre,” ESQ [A Journal of the American Renaissance] 35 (Spring 1989): 147-60. Royster interprets Enceladus as a mythic figure of the bourgeois social climber, whose “upward struggle represents a middle-class image of the social process.” As a “naturalized” form of bourgeois ideology, Enceladus masks Pierre's real alienation; see “Melville's Economy of Language,” 332, 334.

29. Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1993), 27.

30. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 176.