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The publication of Herman Melville's Pierre; or The Ambiguities was followed by scathing denunciations of the novel, which called Melville's prose a "string of nonsense," "trash," and "crazy rigamarole" and the entire work a "dead failure" (quoted in Higgins and Parker, 33; 40). The novel seemed to defy categorization. Some literary critics argued that it was a sentimental gothic novel, pointing to the mysterious face that haunts the protagonist, Pierre Glendinning, and portends his family's ruination. Others suggested that Melville's book lampooned sentimental and domestic novels with its overblown language and sexual transgressions. Melville's unreliable narrative voice and his novel's postmodern tendencies annoyed other early critics.

In 1930, E. L. Grant Watson reexamined Pierre and rescued the work from its literary exile. Since that time, critics and scholars have continued to debate the merit of Melville's Pierre. In 1978, Melville scholars Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker wrote that Pierre's "best readers" recognized the "heroic intellectual tasks" undertaken by Melville (Higgins and Parker, 241). Contemporary scholars often point out that numerous parallels to Melville's life indicate Pierre is a thinly veiled autobiography: An extant letter confirms that Melville, like Pierre, had an illegitimate sister; Pierre's frustrations as a writer mirror Melville's own at the time Pierre was written; and the picturesque setting of Saddle Meadows resembles places Melville frequented, including the Berkshire Mountains, the Hudson River Valley, and the farmhouse of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a more recent Melville biography, Laurie Robertson-Lorant called the work "one of the first great modern psychological novels in Western literature," exploring the same murky waters of human nature as Melville's Moby-Dick (Robertson-Lorant, 304). Pierre's psychological demise is strongly influenced by the environments he inhabits. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of Pierre is the novel's ostensible division into two parts: the country and the city. The first half of the novel is set in Saddle Meadows, the Glendinning family's rural estate, while the second half takes place in the quintessentially urban New York City. "Nature planted our Pierre" wrote Melville, "because Nature intended a rare and original development in Pierre" (13). Pierre's "rare and original development" is shaped by themes of economic inequity, class division, and unconventional sexual relationships set against these rural and urban landscapes.

At Saddle Meadows, Pierre enjoys a bourgeois life with his mother, Mary Glendinning, taking in commanding views of a landscape paid for by the displacement of Native Americans. Pierre shares an intense relationship with his mother that resembles the romantic love of siblings, referring to his mother as "sister" while she calls him "brother." Set to marry his social and economic equal, Lucy Tartan, Pierre soon discovers that his deceased father has an illegitimate daughter, Isabel Banford. After anguished deliberation, Pierre dismisses Lucy and assumes responsibility for Isabel by agreeing to marry her. In this way, reconciles Pierre, their family secret will remain undisclosed and Isabel will be removed from a life of abject poverty. After his mother disowns him for this apparent social faux pas, however, Pierre leaves the rural, emotional, and financial comfort of Saddle Meadows for the "urban labyrinth" of New York City with his "wife" Isabel and her mute companion Delly (Kelley, 396). Thus Pierre's mental anguish, the redefinition of his relationships, and his movement away from the country upset not only the appearance of pastoral tranquility but also the reality of his psychological well-being.

The second half of the novel begins when Pierre, Isabel, and Delly enter New York City by way of a dark, desolated, and foreboding street. Seeking shelter with his cousin, Glendinning Stanly, Pierre and his traveling companions meet with disappointment when Glendinning shuns Pierre. Homeless and destitute, Pierre, Isabel, and Delly are forced to live in an abandoned church, known as the Church of the Apostles, where impoverished city dwellers find refuge. In this urban environment, readers suddenly discover that Pierre is a well-known writer, and the novel takes a decided turn into the frustrations of Pierre's work as an author and his further psychological deterioration. Meanwhile, his mother dies of shame and grief and Lucy joins the group at the Church of the Apostles. Lucy's action does not sit well with Glendinning, or with her older brother, Frederic, and the men confront Pierre. In the end, the urban labyrinth--both a physical and a mental construct--confounds them all: Pierre kills Glendinning and is incarcerated, Lucy and Isabel kill themselves over Pierre's imprisonment, and Pierre ultimately commits suicide.

Melville's Pierre anticipated literary theories that examine the associations and images in the country/city dichotomy and the role of rural and urban landscapes in 19th-century American literature (Otter, 352). Raymond Williams, for instance, argues that images of the "country as past" and the "city as future" represent "a growth and alteration of consciousness: a history repeated in many lives and many places which is fundamentally an alteration of perception and relationship" (Williams, 297). For Pierre, this alteration of perception is the result of dislocation from his past life at Saddle Meadows and relocation to New York City and a life of ambiguous meaning. To read Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, then, is to imagine two landscapes--the country and the city--that collide like colored patterns in a kaleidoscope, leaving human identities distorted, rearranged, and reframed, and to call each reader to envision a unique collision of light and shape.

Bibliography:

Higgins, Brian, and Hershal Parker. Critical Essays on Herman Melville's "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities." Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Kelley, Wyn. "Pierre in a Labyrinth: The Mysteries and Miseries of New York." In Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder, 393-406. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1997.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Edited by William C. Spengemann. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Otter, Samuel. "The Overwrought Landscape of Pierre." In Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder, 349-374. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1997.

Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996.

Watson, E. L. Grant. "Melville's Pierre." New England Quarterly 3 (April 1930), 195-234. Reprinted in Critics on Melville. Readings in Literary Criticism, vol. 12, edited by Thomas J. Rountree. 94-100. Miami, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

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