SOURCE: “Sex, Toads, and Scorpions: A Study of the Psychological Themes in Melville's Pierre,” in The Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1975, pp. 5-20.

[In the following essay, Kellner explores Melville's treatment of several psychological themes in Pierre,focusing on the relationship between ideal love and instinctive sex, and between sex and death.]

Although Melville was aware of the difficulties in pursuing half-conscious thoughts, he nevertheless persisted with psychological inquiries in his novels, probing “the endless, winding way,—the flowing river in the cave of man.”¹ Melville saw the difference between man's conscious behavior and his unconscious desires as the difference between an open plain and a dark thicket. He believed his job as novelist was equal to the pioneer-explorers of his time, that an author was a scout “following the Indian trail” (p. 84) leading into the thickets of the mind. He was aware, though, of the dangers involved in such scouting. “It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far,” he writes halfway through Pierre. There are some truths that even the most avid truthseeker cannot bear to face, precipices at the end of that Indian trail, and thickets so dense that the prober “entirely loses the directing compass of his mind” (p. 165). Ironically enough, in the case of Pierre, the truth for Melville turns out to be his own fears—and the accompanying abhorrence—of sex.

The main character in Pierre, for whom the book is titled, undergoes a sexual awakening which eventually leads to disgust with, and an attempt to reject, the libido. Pierre is just emerging from his teens, still an adolescent; he is in late puberty perhaps, and inexperienced in love. That he is still a virgin is implied when Melville writes “as yet he had not seen so far and deep as Dante;” he has had no “sensational presentiment or experience” (p. 54) with which to understand his sexual emotions.

Pierre sublimates his sexual energy, releasing it in strenuous physical activity. He rides, walks, swims, and even vaults in order that he might “invigorate and embrawn himself.” His outward concern is with becoming muscular and manly. Yet it is in retreat from masculinity that he seeks this “noble muscular manliness” (p. 50). All his robustness and athletic prowess, felling hemlock trees and fencing and boxing, are manifestations of an inward fear about his masculinity. Pierre is burdened with doubts of his manhood and seeks to hide these fears by a manly outward appearance: “It had always been one of the lesser ambitions of Pierre, to sport a flowing beard, which he deemed the most noble corporeal badge of the man” (p. 253).

There are a number of reasons for Pierre's insecurity. To begin with, his relationship with his mother has confused and stymied his sexual identity. Unfortunately for him, he sees himself both as his mother's platonic lover and as her “First Lady in waiting” (p. 14). This femininity in Pierre's nature is expressed in homosexual overtones in his relations with Glen Stanley and Lucy's brothers. Melville's description of Pierre and Glen's early association borders on homosexual love. Pierre's passionate embrace of Lucy's brothers understandably startles and offends them, just as Glen later refuses to acknowledge any love for Pierre. While other men outgrow their boyhood sexual confusion, Pierre retains his.

Most important though is Pierre's fear of impotency, which has resulted from these identity problems. He is under heavy pressure, sexually, as one of the last male Glendinnings. Pierre's mother has made his responsibility painfully clear—he must produce a son. Pierre has to live up to the image of his father and grandfather in this regard. He is unable to do so. He tries on his grandfather's vest and later, after he has run off with Isabel, gazes at his grandfather's old bedstead: “It seemed powerfully symbolical to him” (p. 270). And well it should—Pierre will not be furthering the line of Glendinning. By choosing his half-sister Isabel, a union which could not lead to any normal offspring, he has chosen extinction. This suicidal aspect of his sexual nature is again symbolized when he murders Glen Stanley, the last living male cousin: “Spatterings of his own kindred blood were upon the pavement; his own hand had extinguished his house” (p. 360). This is an extension for Pierre of his self-castration. “Pierre is neuter now!” (p. 360), he ultimately says.

Pierre's fears for himself are again evident in his Enceladus dream: the Titan is amputated, impotent, “without one serviceable ball-and-socket above the thigh” (p. 346). Pierre sees his own face on the Titan's armless and phallic trunk. Melville uses this image to depict Pierre's impotency and fears of being unable to fulfill his masculine function. The armless giant,

despairing of any other mode of wreaking his immitigable hate, turned his vast trunk into a battering-ram, and hurled his own arched-out ribs again and yet again against the invulnerable steep. (p. 346)

This emphasizes Pierre's inability to have a normal sexual union, one that would lead to offspring and the fulfillment of his ancestral responsibility. He must have unusual stimulation, an incestuous love, simply to be potent. By so doing, though, he cuts himself off from his past and from society's laws, a past and laws which twisted his sexual desires in the first place.

The roots of Pierre's feelings of sexual inadequacy lie in his unusual relationship with his mother. Pierre is more a lover than a son to her. He addresses his mother as “sister” and she calls him “brother,” a foreshadowing of the eventual relationship Pierre has with his real sister.

Pierre's confusion about his filial role is understandable. His mother is attractive to young men and is used to their attentions. She uses her son as she might use one of those younger suitors, to wait upon her and flatter her and feed her ego. Only when she is angry with him or in doubt of his attention does she call him son and put him in his place. She is so successful in her dual role that Pierre has threatened “with a playful malice” to make anyone who tried to marry her and take her away from him “immediately disappear from the earth” (p. 5).

The mother has her own overt sexual problems. She exhibits them when she likens adulterers to murderers. She views sex darkly, quite probably in reaction from her own true desires. She loathes Delly when she hears of that girl's untimely pregnancy; she even hates (fears would be more exact) the girl Pierre “marries.” The girl, to her way of thinking, must be a bastard and vile (p. 131). Pierre's union with such a girl destroys “at one gross sensual dash, the fair succession of an honorable race! Mixing the choicest wine with filthy water from the plebeian pool” (p. 194).

Mrs. Glendinning does not want to believe that Pierre is ready for women. In a distinction she makes between the angelically sexless Lucy and herself—Lucy is “Pale Sherry” while she is “potent Port!”—she pictures Pierre only with pale sherry. Her son isn’t quite ready for port, she says. Or she isn’t ready to admit the physical side of Pierre's nature, particularly as it relates to her and her own latent desires. Her mistaken judgment about her son's libido becomes painfully clear to her when Pierre finally rejects Lucy for Isabel. He is ready for port after all.

His mother plays on his sympathies:

Could you unalarmed see me sitting all alone here with this decanter, like any old nurse, Pierre; some solitary, forlorn old nurse, Pierre, deserted by her last friend, and therefore forced to embrace her flask? (p. 55)

If he marries Lucy, a compliant girl, he will not be leaving her all alone; he will still be under her dominance, still be hers. For Pierre, though, staying with his mother means being her surrogate lover; it means desiring her at least to some extent. By running off with Isabel, who is like his mother (and even related to Pierre by blood), he can break free from his mother's dominance and satisfy his Oedipal wishes at the same time.

The Oedipal aspect of this story is brought directly to the reader in three separate analogies: Pierre is compared to Hamlet on more than one occasion; he identifies himself with the Titan, the son of an incestuous union who later married his mother, compounding the incest; and in a vivid scene toward the end of the story, Pierre is struck blind (although only momentarily)—the fate of Oedipus. “He knew not where he was; he did not have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He could not see; though instinctively putting his hand to his eyes, he seemed to feel that the lids were open” (p. 341). Symbolically, he then falls into the gutter and is covered with mud and slime.

It is in keeping with the situation that Mrs. Glendinning becomes more like an angry mistress than a disappointed mother when she first suspects Pierre is keeping something from her. Her violent outrage upon learning of his “marriage” to Isabel is a logical extension of her sexual frustration. By not marrying Lucy and refusing to allow Mrs. Glendinning continued control over his libido, Pierre is threatening his mother's mental stability. She cannot stand the thought of his being with a “slut”—with “potent Port”—it brings out her own unconscious desires for her son. She is driven into insanity and finally death by the union between Pierre and Isabel: “How agonizedly now did it hint of her mortally-wounded love for her only and best-loved Pierre!” (p. 285).

His mother likes Lucy because she is docile. And so, she thinks, is Pierre. But Pierre needs a woman like his mother, somebody—in nineteenth-century metaphorical terms—with “the jettiest hair” (p. 118). Mrs. Glendinning has twisted Pierre's libido out of shape. Lucy is not the girl to stir his essential passions. She is “transcendent beauty.” She is a blonde angel, sexless. Isabel, described as a dark angel, is quite different from Lucy's transcendence.

Lucy is Pierre's heaven. She is not made for sexual embraces. She is unearthly: “Her flowing, white, blue-ribboned dress, fleecily invested her.” She has for him an “unearthly evanescence” (p. 58). Pierre is caught between this ideal love for Lucy and the forces of his more earthy libido. The subtitle of the novel, “The Ambiguities,” is this dualistic aspect of his nature. On the one hand, Pierre desires sex, he certainly thinks of it—he sees a pillow that belongs to Lucy, “a snow-white glossy pillow reposes, and a trailing shrub has softly rested a rich, crimson flower against it” (pp. 3-4). But when he actually enters her bedroom he does so with “reverentialness,” and the carpet to him seems “as holy ground” (p. 39). There is no crimson flower for him on the girl's bed. On the contrary, the bed is “spotless” (p. 39). And when he catches a glimpse of it in the mirror, he envisions two separate beds, symbolic of his inability to consummate a marriage with her.

Part of Pierre's incestuous longings stem from a breast fixation that manifests itself on several occasions in the book. Pierre fawns over his mother, helping her to dress and fix her hair; he passes a ribbon around her neck, crossing the ends in front across her breasts and then offers to “tack it with a kiss” (p. 14). It is only a few pages later when Melville injects the rather funny pun: “Don’t be a milk-sop, Pierre!”

Isabel is included in this fixation when she tells Pierre, “the lips that do now speak to thee, never touched a woman's breast” (p. 114). Isabel claims that the sight of an infant feeding at its mother's breast saved her from insanity. She describes it as “that white and smiling breast” (p. 122).

Pierre's mother, motherhood, Isabel, and sexuality are all connected to this fixation. And the last dramatic scene in the story tragically underlines the consequences of this fixation. Pierre seizes Isabel and reaches into her bodice with these words: “wife or sister, saint or fiend! … in thy breasts, life for infants lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me” (p. 360). Hidden between her breasts is a vial filled with poison.

Another traumatic stage in Pierre's early development is explored by Melville. Pierre disassociates his father and mother from sexuality. He represses any such knowledge; thinking of his father's sexual nature reminds him of his own and verifies his worst fears about himself. Particularly as they regard his unconscious wish to take his father's place with his mother. When his father rages in his dying moments about his adultery, young Pierre refuses to examine the issue. “Into Pierre's awe-stricken, childish soul, there entered a kindred, though still more nebulous conceit. But it belonged to the spheres of the impalpable ether: and the child soon threw other and sweeter remembrances over it, and covered it up” (p. 71). When he is finally forced by the presence of Isabel to admit his father's sexuality, he must also face that side of his mother's nature: “Not even his lovely, immaculate mother, remained entirely untouched, unaltered by the shock” (p. 88). His parents are no longer saints; love cannot be viewed as ideal, existing above and apart from the corporeal person. Revelations about his father's sexuality shatter the young man's existence because it mocks the sexless love toward which he is aspiring.

The pressures of being the last male heir are not wholly depressing. There is a certain challenge in this that appeals on occasion to Pierre's pride. In a very phallic passage Melville writes:

But in his more wonted natural mood, this thought was not wholly sad to him. Nay, sometimes it mounted into an exultant swell. For in the ruddiness, and flushfulness, and vaingloriousness of his youthful soul, he fondly hoped to have a monopoly of glory in capping the fame-column, whose tall shaft had been erected by his noble sires. (p. 8)

Phallic symbols abound in this novel. Outdoing the symbol of Moby-Dick, the book is dedicated to the mountain Greylock, which gives off “unstinted fertilizations.” Images of sex and sexual organs pervade the entire structure of the story. Pierre goes out for a walk to search for Isabel; he takes his cane along. Melville cannot resist writing: “let thy cane stay still, good Pierre. Seek not to mystify the mystery so” (p. 53). And on another occasion the “mystery” deepens; Pierre burns his hand. When Isabel touches his hand she comments about the soot it leaves on her own: “I would catch the plague from thee, so that it should make me share thee” (p. 202). There is in this last image a contradiction of the positive aspects of “unstinted fertilizations.” Sexual energy can be destructive as well as procreative.²

The unifying force of these somewhat disparate symbols is the character of Isabel. In almost every instance, the symbols are associated with her. Isabel's guitar becomes a womb and a phallic symbol, the very shape of the instrument lending itself to this ambiguity. Isabel plays upon the guitar and Pierre feels strangely drawn to it and her. Its music is described as “supersensuous and all-confounding intimations” (p. 282), and its power “not only seemed irresistibly to draw him toward Isabel, but to draw him away from another quarter—wantonly as it were” (p. 151). Melville's choice of words here, “supersensuous” and “wantonly,” are clear guides to his meaning in these passages.

Pierre's sexual longings for Isabel are represented in yet another phallic symbol, a “primeval pine-tree” alone in a meadow, which “drops melodious mournfulness” (p. 40). Sitting beneath this tree Pierre sees the face of Isabel. The face and the tree are connected in his mind and when the face disappears, he says: “Pray heaven it hath not only stolen back, and hidden again in thy high secrecies, oh tree! But ’tis gone—gone—entirely gone … Thou pine-tree!—henceforth I will resist thy too treacherous persuasiveness” (pp. 41-42).

More obvious is the use to which Melville puts the stove pipe in Pierre's apartments, the last phallic symbol we will discuss in this paper, but certainly not the last one in the novel. Isabel wants Lucy to get the warmth from the stove and suggests that Pierre redirect the pipe to Lucy's room. “‘Pierre, there is no stove in the room. She will be very cold. The pipe—can we not send it this way?’ And she looked more intently at him, than the question seemed to warrant” (p. 322). Pierre must choose between Lucy and Isabel. He chooses Isabel for the expression of his passions, and the pipe remains where it is. “It shall not be done, Isabel. Doth not that pipe and that warmth go into thy room? Shall I rob my wife … to benefit my most devoted and true-hearted cousin?” (p. 323).

Although Pierre is aroused by Isabel, his real wish is to transcend sex altogether. He wants to be like Christ, with “no unmanly, mean temptation” (p. 106) to come between him and his ideals. He would like to be an angel, sexless. In Plinlimmon's terms, Pierre would like to be governed by ideas chronometrical, celestial, rather than horological, terrestrial desires. Pierre strives to be noble; nobility to him means being beyond the stirrings of the libido. Such nobility, as it is made clear in the Plinlimmon pamphlet, is not really possible on earth. And Pierre, “though charged with the fire of all divineness, his containing thing was made of clay” (p. 107).

It remains clear then throughout the novel that there is a difference in relationship between Pierre and the two girls. As for Lucy, “he was never alone with her; though, as before, at times alone with Isabel” (p. 337). In context, being “alone” with Isabel means having had intercourse with her. In comparison, Lucy remains chaste and pure, representative of Pierre's now unattainable Ideal Love. While Lucy is the pure one, Isabel represents abandoned sex for Pierre. A description of her playing the guitar bears this out:

with every syllable the hair-shrouded form of Isabel swayed to and fro with a like abandonment, and suddenness, and wantonness:—then it seemed not like any song; seemed not issuing from any mouth; but it came forth from beneath the same vail concealing the guitar. (pp. 126-27)

Watching her, “a strange wild heat burned” (p. 127) upon Pierre's brow, a reaction not evoked by Lucy.

Isabel is not a jezebel though, not out to seduce Pierre. Her attractiveness seduces him, but only as a result of his own confused inclinations. Isabel is “all plastic” (p. 189) in Pierre's hands, transferring her love for her father onto Pierre. “But it was most the sweet, inquisitive, kindly interested aspect of thy face,” she tells Pierre, “so strangely like thy father's, too—the one only being that I first did love—it was that which stirred the distracting storm in me” (p. 158). Isabel longs to be a part of Pierre's existence, a longing for a family she never had. She does not feel at peace with herself alone. “I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness” (p. 119). She wants to become part of all things, including a union with Pierre. But her response to him was sexual only after he first embraced her. She gave him at first “no gesture of common and customary sisterly affection. Nay, from his embrace had she not struggled? nor kissed him once; nor had he kissed her, except when the salute was solely sought by him” (p. 142). Far from pursuing sex, Isabel actually fears it in her nature and deliberately withholds herself—or tries to.

But Isabel is schizoid in part. After playing the guitar abandonedly, she becomes gentle again, confusing Pierre:

… it seemed well nigh impossible that this unassuming maid should be the same dark, regal being who had but just now bade Pierre be silent in so imperious a tone, and around whose wondrous temples the strange electric glory had been playing. (p. 152)

She is capable of, and is continually expressing, the qualities of passion and frigidity. Whether it is schizophrenia or manic-depression (it is not plain guile), Isabel goes forth “into the places of delight,” but only, according to her words, that she “might return more braced to minister in the haunts of woe” (p. 156).

Pierre is not prepared for the excitations Isabel arouses in him. He is too caught up in his own idealized versions of love; he has tried to repress his feelings about the “secret deeper than beauty” (p. 7). When he thinks about the mystery face, before he finds out Isabel's identity, his thoughts and feelings are accompanied by a touch “of unhealthiness” (p. 53). His repressed sexuality is expressed whenever Lucy asks him about the face of Isabel. He becomes vehemently impassioned and imagines devils taunting him and mocking his love for Lucy. He feels that his “whole previous moral being was overturned” (p. 87) after learning about Isabel.

Pierre's introduction to Isabel is noteworthy. He receives a message from her, delivered by “a hooded and obscure-looking figure, whose half-averted countenance he could but indistinctly discern” (p. 61), the personification of his id, his own unconscious thoughts breaking through and mirrored in the world about him. When Pierre returns to his room with Isabel's letter and sees himself in the mirror, the image is understandably “strangely filled with features transformed, and unfamiliar to him” (p. 62). This evocation by Melville of the unfamiliar and distorted qualities of our unconscious thoughts is one of the strongest themes throughout the book. When Pierre first sees Isabel, before getting the message from her:

The emotions he experienced seemed to have taken hold of the deepest roots and subtlest fibres of his being. And so much the more that it was so subterranean in him, so much the more did he feel its weird inscrutableness. (pp. 48-49)

Pierre's feelings for Isabel are “mixed and mystical” (p. 226); until he ultimately possesses her and satisfies the demands of his id, his “subterranean” feelings will remain mystical.

Pierre's sexual interest in Isabel is evident right away. She reminds him of Francesca in Dante's Inferno, who committed the Unpardonable Sin of premarital intercourse with Paolo. When he looks at Isabel “his eyes fixed upon the girl's wonderfully beautiful ear, which, chancing to peep forth from among her abundant tresses, nestled in that blackness like a transparent sea-shell of pearl” (p. 119). Isabel's features and darkness transfix him. “Thy all-abounding hair falls upon me with some spell which dismisses all ordinary considerations from me” (p. 145). From their first embrace Pierre knows that he will never be able to embrace her with a brotherly attitude. Despite all his protestations of his glorious ideal love, when he first takes Isabel in his arms:

Over the face of Pierre there shot a terrible self-revelation; he imprinted repeated burning kisses upon her; pressed hard her hand; would not let go her sweet and awful passiveness … they coiled together, and entangledly stood mute. (p. 192)

However ambiguous Melville wishes to leave the question regarding ultimate contact between the brother and half-sister, one thing is certain: Pierre is very ardent with Isabel, eager to hold her in his arms. The problem for him is one of ambivalence rather than ambiguousness. He is torn between two different emotions for the girl. He is capable of feeling reverence for her, she soars “out of the realms of mortalness” for him and becomes “transfigured in the highest heaven of uncorrupted Love” (p. 142); and he suffers from “strange wild heat” which she produces in him as well.

Pierre's idea to pretend to be Isabel's husband is a form of wish-fulfillment on his part, a way of dealing with the wild heat she stirs in him. This enables him to succeed in another sense, to complete the transposition he had been trying to make with his mother. “Possibly the latent germ of Pierre's … conversion of a sister into a wife—might have been found in the previous conversational conversion of a mother into a sister” (pp. 176-77). There is a decided change of role for both Pierre and Isabel in their union with each other. Isabel becomes his mother, and he fulfills Isabel's unconscious wish for her father. Isabel unblushingly contrasts her mother's love for her father with her own love for Pierre. “But I saw thee, Pierre; and, more than ever filled my mother toward thy father, Pierre, then upheaved in me” (p. 155). Her father was the first person she loved, and Pierre takes his place. Only by his becoming her father does the later comparison Melville makes with the Cenci portrait hold together. Besides reinforcing the theme of incest, the comparison of Isabel and Beatrice works to clarify some of the ambiguity of the story. It is evident finally that Pierre and Isabel have consummated their relationship in sexual union.

There are several clues in the book to help the reader resolve the ambiguity of Pierre's sexual relationship with his half-sister. Their willingness to aid Delly, for instance, shows their liberalness in the affairs of sex—their uninhibitedness perhaps, which will prefigure their own sexual union. Delly's trouble, in Isabel's words, is not an “unpardonable shame” (p. 155), and therefore Pierre and Isabel's union will also be pardonable.

When Pierre and Isabel are alone in his room they make love.³ But Melville disguises it. They sit on the camp-bed in the dark. “Sit close to me,” says Isabel. “Each felt the other's throbbing.” Pierre puts his arm around her and holds her tight. He trembles and calls out her name “in a low tone of wonderful intensity” (p. 272). His tremor passes over to her as she puts her arm around him. Pierre initially fights against his desire, but he gives in and tells her not to call him brother. He makes love to her on the pretense that she is not his sister. They both choose to ignore reality. In a very imagistic sentence, Isabel says: “I would boldly swim a starless sea, and be buoy to thee, there, when thou the strong swimmer shouldst faint” (p. 274). He will rest his body upon hers. This brings to mind Pierre's earlier comments about lying upon Lucy, about his body being too heavy for her. He has no such reservations with Isabel. “How can one sin in a dream?” he asks her.

And so, on the third night, when the twilight was gone, and no lamp was lit, within the lofty window of that beggarly room, sat Pierre and Isabel hushed. (p. 274)

Substitution of the word “lay” for “sat” seems in order in the above quote.

Their sexual union is harmful to their love. Isabel sees herself as “a vile clog” (p. 355) and tries to kill herself. As an illegitimate child she was “dirty” to the old couple taking care of her (they throw away a loaf of bread because she has touched it); she is considered a slut by Pierre's mother; and the girls at the sewing club refer to her as “some other ruined Delly, run away;—minx” (p. 157). With so many accusing fingers being pointed at her, her association with Pierre must lead to guilt and self-abuse. “Heard ye ever yet of a good angel with dark eyes, Pierre?” (p. 314), she asks him, comparing herself to the still chaste Lucy. She can no longer abide Lucy, who symbolizes what she herself has lost through sexual contact with Pierre. Isabel determines to keep Lucy in her place, purposely arranging to be in Pierre's embrace while the door adjoining their rooms opens to Lucy's view. She becomes as jealous of Lucy as Pierre's mother had been of her. “One look from me shall murder her, Pierre!” (p. 313). The cycle for Pierre is complete.

Once his passions are satisfied, once Isabel is no longer a mystery for him, Pierre becomes embarrassed whenever he finds himself alone with her. It is quite obvious that Pierre's desire for her has faded: “involuntarily he started a little back from her self-proffering form” (p. 332). He no longer wants Isabel to touch him. His love, based on libidinal desires, is gone once those desires are satisfied. Also, he is shocked by what he has done. Pierre accepts the anger Lucy's brother directs at him for having violated (as the brother mistakenly believes) Lucy's honor. Pierre is “thoroughly alive to the supernaturalism of that mad frothing hate which a spirited brother forks forth at the insulter of a sister's honor—beyond doubt the most uncompromising of all the social passions known to man” (p. 336). As the violator of his own sister, Pierre is frothing with hate at himself. So much so that he seeks death. That he finds death at the hands of his sister is symbolically fitting.

Pierre's greatest anguish is caused by his inability to remain pure. The discovery of his father's sexual liaison with Isabel's mother shatters his idolization of his father, and also corrupts his own intentions of living a Christ-like sexless existence. He is initially resolved to help Isabel purely “to assuage a fellow-being's grief” (p. 104), not to exploit her sexually. The discovery that his motives are other than philanthropic is not easy for him to accept. We can see in Plinlimmon's description of the man who tries to be like Christ, Pierre's situation:

in his despair, he is too apt to run clean away into all manner of moral abandonment, self-deceit, and hypocrisy (cloaked, however, mostly under an aspect of the most respectable devotion). (p. 215)

Pierre has sought to make an unconditional sacrifice of himself, a noble act which calls for the rejection of his past and his passions. His inability to do so is underscored by the leering face (or so it seems to Pierre) of Plinlimmon, who is looking down at him from the tower. Plinlimmon becomes the personification of Pierre's guilt feelings. The position on morality taken by Plinlimmon is exactly opposite the high standards Pierre wishes to follow. It is quite right then for Pierre to feel that Plinlimmon is mocking him. The inner torment he feels frightens him, and he fears it will break loose, that everyone will be able to see through him. When a photographer wishes to take his picture, Pierre predictably reacts violently. “To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!” (p. 254) he tells the insistent photographer. He is afraid that his real self will be exposed in the photograph, as was his father's in the portrait that his mother hated.

In summation, Pierre's rather distorted love for his mother is a retreat from normal love. Pierre and his mother have a presex love, anticipatory love, not to be ruined by sex. Their love is “not to be limited in duration by that climax which is so fatal to ordinary love” (p. 16). Their relationship gives Pierre a closeness with femininity which he needs, but a safe closeness. Their love is “etherealized from all drosses and stains” (p. 16). This helps explain Pierre's reactions to Isabel after they have intimate relations. He and Isabel are not able to love as he and his mother. Despite Isabel's assurance that “there is no sex in our immaculateness” (p. 149), Pierre feels that there is no immaculateness in their sex.

Melville regards sex in this novel as a necessary evil. Pierre “seemed gifted with loftiness, merely that it might be dragged down to the mud” (p. 339). Man aspires to love, while his body clamors for lust. The design on the clergyman's cameo brooch emphasizes this: “the allegorical union of the serpent and dove” (p. 102). That’s what marriage and sex are to Melville—the union of lust and love. In another snake image in Pierre, Melville writes: “I felt that all good, harmless men and women were human things, placed at cross-purposes, in a world of snakes and lightnings” (p. 122). These cross-purposes, we must surmise, are the clash of ideal love and instinctive sex.

Sex is man's downfall. Man “stoops” to sex. Pierre insists “I do not stoop to thee, nor thou to me; but we both reach up alike to a glorious ideal!” (p. 192). This is a vision he is not able to maintain. In the end, the chivalrous knight Pierre wishes both Lucy and Isabel dead. “For ye two, my most undiluted prayer is now, that from your here unseen and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive” (p. 358). He has been ruined by his conflicting feelings about sex and women. It is only justice, in Melville's mind, that in a world where sex is the cause of the hero's ruin, all the heroines should be killed off with him.

The equation that Melville makes in Pierre between sex and death is not a very pleasant one, nor does it seem in keeping with the otherwise fearless questioning of restrictive social norms usually associated with this author. But the final statement is a clear one: man is pulled downward, away from the realm of the angels, away from all noble acts and aspirations, by his own sexual nature. Love between a man and a woman might seem a wonderful thing, but to Melville the reality is as “haunting toads and scorpions” (p. 91).

Notes

1. Pierre, or The Ambiguities (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), p. 107. Subsequent references to this edition, volume seven of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Works of Herman Melville edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, will be placed in parentheses in the text.

2. Martin Leonard Pops in The Melville Archetype (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1970), p. 83, writes: “In Pierre and in such later works as “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man possession and use of the phallic weapon suggests that sexual energy is unfailingly destructive.” This is an overstatement, but Pops's discussion is well worth reading.

3. This view is in opposition to the more prevalent one, which insists that Isabel remained “physically unattainable.” The most impressive of these critics remains Henry A. Murray. See his Introduction to Pierre (New York: Hendricks House, Farrar Straus, 1949), p. xcii.