SOURCE: “Isabel's Story: The Voice of the Dark Woman in Melville's Pierre,” in American Transcendental Quarterly: A Journal of New England Writers, Vol. 1, No. 2, June, 1987, pp. 99-110.

[In the following essay, Egan examines Isabel's story as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative, and interprets it in the light of several key concepts of Romanticism.]

Isabel, the “dark” woman in Melville's Pierre, fascinates critics in part because she appears suddenly to tell a story that becomes the mainspring of the novel's plot. It is surprising, therefore, that her story itself has received relatively little detailed attention. It has, of course, been mined for symbols and themes in general studies of the novel. And in the past it has also been attacked by some prominent commentators. Henry Murray, for example, in his famous introduction to the Hendricks House edition of Pierre, dismisses Isabel's story, saying, “the incoherent flow of her shadowy memories will not be so engrossing to the reader as they are to Pierre” (xlviii). Milton Stern, writing about a decade later, appreciates the story's content but believes it to be misconceived because in it “the person who is supposed to be inarticulate becomes one of the most articulate characters in the novel” (188). Stern, moreover, objects to the form of the tale, charging that Isabel's many pauses—her most obvious trademark as a storyteller—become “peremptory and ludicrously unconvincing” (188). More positive commentators tend to reiterate certain commonplaces and to make general statements without much detail. E. L. Grant Watson noticed long ago, for example, that the story records the “birth of the conscious soul” (206), but neither he nor any successor explains much about how Melville creates this impression. More recently, Eric Sundquist tells us that the prose of the story approximates “the lithe and haunting music Isabel and her guitar make,” but he does not elaborate (164). Thus the form of Isabel's story has never been fully and sympathetically treated.

Obviously, the tale is a short bildungsroman, an explanation not only of the events of Isabel's life but also of her coming-to-be. Less apparent are the patterns that support and constitute this bildungsroman and the philosophy that informs it. Properly considered, Isabel's story is nothing less than a manifesto of the Romantic artist-philosopher, complete with an implied philosophy of language. Of course, the bildungsroman itself, with its emphasis on stages of development and hard-won transitions to new plateaus of understanding, was a favorite form of the Romantic writers. In Isabel's story Melville manipulates this form both to display the seductive attractions of Romantic philosophy and to hint at its disastrous consequences for Pierre.

A close examination reveals first that Melville emphasizes the different stages of Isabel's development by evoking different literary genres or patterns (the fairy tale, the descent into hell, and the pastoral idyll) as backdrop for these stages. Second, the story is developmental also in its portrayal of both Isabel's psychology and her linguistic abilities. Third, the story uses motifs and ideas of Romantic origin to express a specifically Romantic vision of art and epistemology—and to express as well Melville's ambivalence about this vision. Within this context, both Isabel's rhetorical practices and her pauses are purposive, not arbitrary. If there is a problem with Isabel's characterization, it is the fact that she must fulfill a dual role: on the one hand she is a static symbol of nature, but on the other hand, the bildungsroman form commits her to the dynamic process of growth and change.

Of course, Isabel's story in some sense “seduces” Pierre, but the seduction, whatever its incestuous content, is primarily philosophical. Isabel revolutionizes Pierre's life not so much because she gets him to do unconventional things but because she gets him to think unconventionally and thus pulls him loose from the fixities of his early life. The trouble with Romantic philosophy is that its flexibility, imagination, and rejection of conventional order, while at first liberating, lead to a paralyzing lack of certitude and a crippling inability to deal with the world as it is. Isabel's story hints at this; Pierre's life illustrates it.

Pierre visits Isabel after sundown in a little red farm house located near a gloomy wood from which issues a “moaning, muttering, roaring, intermitted, changeful sound” including the “devilish gibberish of the forest-ghosts.” Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker point out that the landscape Pierre must traverse to the cottage suggests the possible terrors that Isabel has in store for him (171-172). Isabel's cottage itself is of a piece with this setting. Overgrown with moss and adjoined at one end by a dairy-shed, it is strongly associated with nature and good food, and vaguely threatening as well. In this setting we also see the first of several manipulations of genre Melville performs in Isabel's story: by approaching the cottage, Pierre steps out of the pastoral idyll of Saddle Meadows into a fairy tale.

“‘I never knew a mortal mother,’” Isabel begins (114). Her first memory is that of a crumbling mansion, perhaps a small chateau, located in a dark and threatening forest somewhere in Europe. Her original language, she believes, was French. Her foster parents, an old man and woman, treat her with frequent disdain, rarely speaking to her but often looking at her as they converse in whispers near the fire. Isabel vividly recalls an incident in which she asked to have some bread they were eating and actually touched the loaf. The man threatened to strike her, and the woman threw the loaf into the fire. Isabel sought consolation from a cat but was only hissed at. When she retreated outside to sit on a rock, the very earth seemed hostile, and its coldness caused her to faint for sheer loneliness. After this time, she says, everything she saw and heard began to be stranger and stranger to her. This early rejection and others like it powerfully shape her life, and later events (as well as her feelings even as she tells the story) consistently evoke the “starings” from her foster parents and her own “bewilderings” of this early period.

In this first part of the story, Melville evokes the world of the fairy tale. The indefinite time and place, the setting of the dark forest, the wicked foster parents, and the theme of the abandonment of a child all commonly occur in the German märchen. Such tales, often seen as children's stories because they express the visions and fears of childhood, are an appropriate literary reference for Isabel's early life. But Melville's use of fairy-tale conventions is subtle, not heavy-handed. None of the frankly supernatural elements common to fairy tales—gnomes, witches, and talking animals—occur here. Melville evokes the fairy tale, therefore, by selecting only those elements of it that can be reconciled with Isabel's generally realistic narrative.

Isabel does not clearly remember leaving her forest home, and she only vaguely remembers crossing the ocean to America. It is at this time, she says, that English gradually came to replace her native French. At this point, acknowledging the vagueness of her story, she gives an apology worth quoting in full:

“Scarce know I at any time whether I tell you real things, or the unrealest dreams. Always in me, the solidest things melt into dreams, and dreams into solidities. Never have I wholly recovered from the effects of my strange early life. This it is, that even now—this moment—surrounds thy visible form, my brother, with a mysterious mistiness; so that a second face, and a third face, and a fourth face peep at me from within thy own. Now dim, and more dim, grows in me all the memory of how thou and I did come to meet. I go groping again amid all sorts of shapes, which part to me; so that I seem to advance through the shapes; and yet the shapes have eyes that look at me. I turn round, and they look at me; I step forward, and they look at me.—Let me be silent now; do not speak to me.” (117-118)

The first of five pauses that punctuate the story follows. Isabel's procedure here sets a pattern that she maintains throughout her narrative. The passage that precedes the pause consists of a repetition of certain key words and phrases—things, dreams, face, shape, and look at me. Of course, there is nothing unusual about repetition in Isabel's rhetoric even when she is not approaching a pause. Here, however, the rhetoric gives the passage cadence, a sense of ending. As she approaches the pause, her sentences and rhythms become shorter, so that the rhetoric seems to turn in upon itself and spiral down to a dead point. Such rhetorical patterns precede nearly all of her pauses. Moreover, the same general feeling brings on all her pauses, a feeling of unreality and bewilderment (or, to use Isabel's term, “bewilderingness”). Thus Isabel cannot stick to the story line; it constantly evokes feelings of loss and confusion which she emphasizes with a pause. These pauses, with their stylized introductions, impose their own rhythm on the narrative as a whole and divide it into a series of prose “stanzas” punctuated by a refrain of despair.¹ Stern condemns the device as “peremptory,” but, seen as an expression of Isabel's character, these pauses become ritualistic; they both express her despair and help her to control it.

The above passage also implies Melville's critique of Romanticism. Isabel employs Coleridge's “esemplastic power” with a vengeance: she can dissolve conventional order and reconstruct things in her own imagination; however, for her even simple matters of fact are surrounded by “mistiness.” As Pierre hears this, he is attracted by the very vagueness of her narrative and its implied rejection of all forms of conventional order, great and small. As one critic points out, however, anyone who can “dissolve solidities” holds much peril for Pierre (“rock”) (Franklin 121). Moreover, Isabel's statement, viewed from the unsentimental perspective of modern psychology, admits that she suffers from both hallucination and paranoia.

When Isabel resumes speaking after her first pause, she describes her second habitation, a large house situated by a river. Although she never uses the term, her words clearly describe an insane asylum. The loneliness she recalls during this period brings on her second and third pauses. Here Isabel again talks to almost no one, and the sights and (more especially) the sounds, evoke both the classical and Dantean versions of hell: people are whipped, chained, and born by mutes to an invisible basement from which issues a cacophony of moans and cries; and even the inmates not directly tortured are, like the inmates of hell, in a fixed state from which they will never escape. The hero of the bildungsroman typically passes through some personal descent into hell. Isabel's stay at this house, located in a treeless “lowland” near a “green and lagging river,” is surely hers.

In the midst of this section, Isabel gives what amounts to a credo, which is all the more interesting because it contradicts what follows in the story. Rejecting happiness, she says:

“my spirit seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace—for motionless—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here.” (119)

This is Isabel's clearest statement of her ideal; and, in such phrases as “the pervading spirit animating all things,” we can recognize not only the transcendentalist over-soul but also the more general Romantic attitude toward nature, expressed in such poems as Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey.”²

Isabel's ideal, however, contradicts the movement of her character. This contradiction becomes evident in the fourth section where, as a foster daughter of a farm family, Isabel first sees natural human affection between the farm wife and her infant. This infant, says Isabel,

“first brought me to my own mind, as it were; first made me sensible that I was something different from stones, trees, cats; first undid in me the fancy that all people were as stones, trees, cats; first filled me with the sweet idea of humanness; first made me aware of the infinite mercifulness, and tenderness, and beautifulness of humanness; and this beautiful infant first filled me with the dim thought of Beauty; and equally, and at the same time, with the feeling of the Sadness; of the immortalness and the universalness of the Sadness.” (122)

This passage (which in a few sentences leads to the fourth pause) rhetorically dramatizes Isabel's change in its very diction.

Contrasted with her identity with “stones, trees, cats”—all stark objects from her early home in the forest—are the newly discovered abstractions. The passage, moreover, is poetic: it is held together by the repetition of “first” combined with parallel structures; the strategic use of “and” in the second half of the passage spaces apart the accents and creates gentle rhythms which contrast with the harsh rhythms of the first portion; even the sibilance of the repeated-ness is used to good effect. Here perhaps is the “music” Sundquist speaks of. And, in passages like this, it is not hard to imagine that Isabel largely accomplishes her philosophical seduction of Pierre. Rarely do abstractions sound so euphonious.

Linked with Isabel's ability to abstract comes a feeling of her separation both from nature and from the other members of the farm family. Isabel tells us that her household chores (“being busy”) made her sensible of being human. As a child between the ages of nine and eleven years old, she begins to distinguish between the “human” and the “not human” in nature and concludes that “‘all good, harmless men and women were human things … in a world of horrible and inscrutable inhumanities’” (122).

She tells us further that, “‘as I grew older, I expanded in my mind. I began to learn things out of me; to see still stranger, and minuter differences’” (123). As a foster child, she does not have the same status in the family as the real children. The farmer seldom speaks to her; the wife shows more affection to her real daughters than to Isabel. And while Isabel suffers from the “starings” and “bewilderingness” she remembers from her forest home, she is thankful that the farm wife loves her even as much as she does:

“I thanked—not God, for I had been taught no God—I thanked the bright human summer, and the joyful human sun in the sky; I thanked the human summer and the sun, that they had given me the woman; and I would sometimes steal away into the beautiful grass, and worship the kind summer and the sun; and often say over to myself the soft words, summer and the sun.” (123)

Melville is trying to have it both ways in his characterization of Isabel. The very growth of her perceptions takes her toward the “individualness” she condemns in her earlier-stated credo. In other words, Isabel's development, her history of individual growth and change, conflicts with her symbolic and static identity with nature. The result is an uneasy compromise. Growing up requires the very separation from nature Isabel deplores; and, perhaps for this reason, Melville does not make the separation complete. An orphan herself, she becomes the woman who sees all of humanity as an orphan of the cosmos. Her vision, however, is not of humanity totally isolated because some parts of nature (e.g., the summer and the sun) and some objects (e.g., her guitar) are “human.” Isabel grows up, then, but only part way. She has the adult's capacity to see man's condition as tragic while retaining the child's capacity to see elements of the cosmos as mystically linked with herself.

The above passage also reveals that Melville interprets this portion of Isabel's life not as a fairy tale or a descent into hell, but as a pastoral idyll. She works on the farm, but, all in all, farm life is idealized. Isabel mentions no exhausting duties, boring routines, or harsh winters. The focus is on the summer and the sun. Her idyll is based upon a measure of domestic love and completed by the visits from her father. Perhaps Melville interprets this portion of her life as an idyll for the purpose of shattering it with her father's death.

Isabel eventually learns that her father had arranged to keep her with the farmer's family by sending them money. After he dies, Isabel must leave and find work in another house. While she is there, she buys a guitar from a peddler. She seems to develop a “personal” rapport with it; when she sings to it, it answers her with its music. She says, “‘the guitar was human … I made a loving friend of it.’” It translates “‘all wonders that are unimaginable’”; it sings of “‘mystic visions’” of those in the insane asylum and of “‘legendary delights’” unknown to her. She ends her story abruptly with the request, “‘bring me the guitar’” (125). Here Melville may, as one critic suggests, be working in the tradition of Gothic heroines who have magical musical instruments.³ But the guitar's creative and artistic significance makes it similar as well to the eolian harp and other stringed instruments, which Romantic poets consistently used as images of both artistic inspiration and the divine presence of nature.

Melville both reinforces and critiques this association with the guitar later when he explains Pierre's domestic routine in Book XXI after the move to the city. At this time Pierre is struggling to write a “mature work” of literature and looks to Isabel's music for inspiration:

When his day's work was done, [Isabel] sat by him in the twilight, and played her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its wonderous suggestiveness; but alas! eternally incapable of being translated into words; for where the deepest words end, the music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations. (282)

The guitar is both inspiring but somehow inadequate. The failure of inspiration was a common crisis among the Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge, who presents “Kubla Khan” as an unrealized dream-vision, a beautiful might-have-been. In that poem Coleridge attributes his inspiration to a “damsel with a dulcimer” (I.298, 1. 37) whom he can no longer hear. Pierre has his own version of this figure under his very roof, but she still does not lead to artistic production. Melville may not be alluding to “Kubla Khan” here, although he probably knew the poem. In any case he does satirize the notion, rather popular during the Romantic era, that inspiration is all. Melville makes it clear when describing Pierre's work routine in Book XXII, that, in order to get work done, Pierre must exclude Isabel from his room.

The scene that follows the introduction of Isabel's guitar is a bizarre and fitting conclusion to what has gone before. Isabel strums her guitar with a wild and wanton virtuosity, intertwining her lyrics of the “‘Mystery of Isabel’” with the melodies she plays. Pierre is so enchanted that he is nearly speechless at the end. Claiming to be her “‘loving, revering, most marvelling brother,’” he kisses her and departs (127).

Clearly Melville juggles different goals in Isabel's story, for upon this rather elusive narrative he tries to impose a certain realistic psychology and attempts to show the development of a philosophy. For example, the early scenes with the cruel foster parents and the insane asylum inmates powerfully affect Isabel and condition her interpretation of later events with the farm family. Here recurring image patterns are important. Isabel frequently feels alone, out in the open, barren of protection, and watched by hostile glances. The earliest habitation that she remembers is in a clearing surrounded by a forest full of threatening pines and “‘unconjecturable voices’” (115). On the ship Isabel again stresses the open space surrounding her, as she does the treeless lowland that surrounds the insane asylum where she stays later. Isabel also feels, to the point of paranoia, that she is the object of hostile glances. The worst part of the rejection from her original foster parents and from the uncompanionable cat is the “starings” which she often mentions in later situations. And we have seen that, even as she speaks to Pierre, she complains of “shapes” that look at her.

At the same time Melville makes an issue of Isabel's developing linguistic consciousness. Isabel stresses, for example, that she has really no one to talk to in either her early home or the insane asylum. Furthermore, she suffers a linguistic dislocation as English gradually replaces her native French. Possibly for these reasons, Isabel is rather tentative both in her use of words and in her acceptance of their meanings. Sometimes she rejects the convenient shorthand that words offer. When she describes her voyage to America (117), she does not say immediately that she was on a ship but instead treats her listener (and the reader) to some rather puzzling description which reveals her situation gradually, somewhat as Isabel must have discovered it at the time. When she describes the insane asylum, she uses a similar tactic, except that this time she refuses to name the reality even after she describes it. She warns Pierre: “‘Do not speak the word to me. That word has never passed my lips; even now, when I hear the word, I run from it; when I see it printed in a book, I run from the book. The word is wholly unendurable to me’” (121).

As her narrative progresses, she compiles an entire list of words to which she struggles to attach meanings: summer, sun, happiness, humanness, sadness, beauty, father, death. To a great extent, living has meant learning the meanings of words that name life's great realities. Even when she does not consciously fix upon a word, however, her very style demonstrates her preoccupation with the mysteries of language. Indeed her procedures imply a rejection of the rationalist attitude that language is a self-evident system of reference neatly categorizing reality. In almost all of the passages quoted above, Isabel's thoughts circle around repeated words and phrases which give even her most ordinary narrative the character of poetry or music. Her story is her work of art, and her language is part of her creation.

If her narrative is her “verse,” then her pauses, as noted above, mark her stanza divisions. The plot of her story naturally invites division between the different settings Isabel lives in: the crumbling mansion, the ship, the insane asylum, the farmer's house, and her current setting. However, Isabel does not regularly pause at the changes in setting; rather—true to the Romantic faith in intuition in art—she divides the story at the dictates of her shifting feelings as she narrates.

The sudden introduction of the guitar toward the end of the story reinforces the impression that the story is about art and allows us to see Isabel's life as a portrait of a developing Romantic artist-philosopher. The Romantic artist, in this portrayal, comes to her art by a recognition of man's tragic situation—his presence among the inhumanities. This view of life happens partially as a consequence of the separations involved in growing up, both individually and as a race. Art is not primarily the result of conscious craft, but of imagination and intuition. (Isabel needs no teacher for her to play the guitar.) Art, finally, attunes the artist to nature, to childhood experience, and to the inspired visions of the mad.

Isabel's narrative, then, is artistically and philosophically sophisticated. On the one hand, it conveys a fairy-tale atmosphere in its setting and some of its elements, and it projects Isabel as a kind of enchantress. On the other hand, it employs realistic psychology both in the recurrent memories of early rejection and in the psychological and linguistic development it portrays. The story also becomes a portrait of a developing artist who displays her art not only with the guitar performance at the end but with the very lyrical order she imposes upon her story throughout. Given the fact that Pierre and even Lucy have artistic aspirations in their writing and painting, it would be wrong to read Isabel's story as Melville's last word about the artist in this novel. In Isabel, Melville portrays the subconscious sources of artistic inspiration, for Isabel is very much a creature of the subconscious. She seems to step out of Pierre's subconscious into his life with her mysterious power and vaguely incestuous appeal; her story, with its fairy-tale setting and its use of fairy-tale elements, seems to proceed from the very unconscious of humanity.

Isabel's ultimate significance, of course, lies in her effect on Pierre. In a number of ways, Isabel's story subtly forecasts the various stages of Pierre's decline. Like Isabel, Pierre comes to feel cosmically orphaned. Melville makes the point that Pierre felt he was a “soul-toddler” deserted by human parents when he first received Isabel's letter. Later, as he is working on his book and feels the indifference not only of man but also God to his aspirations, Melville reports, “the toddler was toddling entirely alone, and not without shrieks” (296). Like Isabel, who can turn dreams into solidities and solidities into dreams, Pierre increasingly loses his hold on reality. He begins having trouble with his vision and at one point suffers a fit from which he awakes in the gutter of a side street. Melville notes ominously, “if that vertigo had been also intended for another and deeper warning, he regarded such added warning not at all” (341). Finally, Pierre himself sees dreams as realities in his vision in Book XXV of Enceladus. All of these conditions are presented with attractive pathos in Isabel's narrative, but are lived out in their real sordidness by Pierre.

Finally, a point needs to be made about incest in this book. James Wilson, in The Romantic Heroic Ideal, points out a division among Romantic authors in their attitude toward sibling incest. British and French authors such as Lewis, Byron, Shelley, and Chateaubriand wrote of incestuous attachments with a compassion amounting to apology. Thus such incestuous pairs as Agnes and Lorenzo (The Monk), René and Amélie, Laon and Cynthna, Manfred and Astarte, and the poet and the “sister soul” (Shelley's “Epipsychidion”) all receive gentle treatment, if not outright justification, from their respective authors. These authors, says Wilson, see incest as a “regenerating alternative to conventional, sterile morality” (135). Wilson notes that the German attitude is quite different; Schiller, Tieck, and Grillparzer all treat incest as a blasphemous crime.⁴

Isabel's story is interesting for the way it invites the British and French interpretation of her relationship with Pierre. For Isabel, the developmental heaven toward which her bildungsroman tends is a passionate brother-sister attachment. Sanctified by their private love, and insulated by a grand indifference to social convention, this attachment appears to offer artistic inspiration. When Pierre joins Isabel, Melville takes up the incest theme where the British and French authors leave it off, and shows the spiritual bankruptcy of their views. The promised regeneration proves elusive, and the world of their private love turns out to be a solipsistic prison isolating them from others and weakening their hold on reality.

Isabel's story has been attacked by some critics, but if there is a problem here, it is chiefly that Isabel does not live up to the expectations she creates in Book VI. She never again quite achieves the quiet power she has when she first appears. In Book VIII Melville engages in facile supernaturalism when he portrays her eliciting a melody from her guitar without actually playing it. After the move to the city, Isabel is more of a vague presence than an active character. She is occasionally jealous or seductive, but in comparison with her appearance in Book VI, she is bland. However, it would be wrong to fault Melville harshly for the difficulty that Isabel presents. Once she is on the scene, it is certainly not easy to know what to do with her. Isabel is mysterious and intuitive, and she thrives better in the misty past, where many more things seem possible, than in the clearer atmosphere of the fictional present. Nevertheless, Melville achieves a great deal by putting this “dark” woman on display in the many ways that he does, and by giving her a narrative resonant with the motifs and ideas of Romanticism.

Notes

1. Larry Edward Wegener makes a similar point though he bases it upon the repetition of Delly Ulver's footsteps heard during Isabel's pauses (xii).

2. Compare, for example, lines 95-102 of Wordsworth's poem in which he speaks of

                                                               a sense sublime
             Of something far more deeply interfused,
             Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
             And the round ocean and living air,
             And the blue sky and in the mind of man:
             A motion and a spirit that impells
             All thinking things, all objects of all thought
             And rolls through all things. (II.262)

3. Newton Arvin argues that Isabel's preternatural relationship with her guitar makes her a descendant of several heroines who are associated with music in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels (41).

4. See Wilson 133-139. It seems likely that Melville knew many of the British works named here, although this is difficult to prove. Of the German works, it is quite likely that he had read Ludwig von Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert, which was in Carlyle's translation, German Romance, a two-volume set Melville borrowed from Evert Duyckink in 1850 (Sealts 47).

Works Cited

Arvin, Newton. “Melville and the Gothic Novel.” New England Quarterly 22 (March 1949): 33-47.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.

Franklin, Howard Bruce. The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1963.

Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker. “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre.” In New Perspectives on Melville. Ed. Faith Pullin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Murray, Henry. Introduction. In Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. By Herman Melville. New York: Hendricks House, 1949. xiii-ciii.

Sealts, Merton M. Melville's Reading: A Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.

Stern, Milton R. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1957.

Sundquist, Eric J. Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy In Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Watson, E. L. Grant, “Melville's Pierre.” New England Quarterly 3 (April 1930): 195-234.

Wegener, Larry Edward. Preface. In A Concordance to Herman Melville's “Pierre, Or The Ambiguities.” Ed. Larry Edward Wegener. New York: Garland, 1985. I: xi-xx.

Wilson, James D. The Romantic Heroic Ideal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940-1949.