Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

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Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel written by Herman Melville, and published in 1852 by Harper & Brothers. It is the only novel by Melville that takes place on land in the United States.

The publication of Pierre was a critical and financial disaster for Melville. It was universally condemned for both its morals and its style. He never published another conventional novel, although he subsequently wrote and published many exceptional stories, including Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, and the experimental "masque" The Confidence-Man.

1 Plot
2 Critical Reception
3 Renditions in other media
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

It tells the story of Pierre Glendinning, junior, the 21-year-old heir of the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Pierre is engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, who controls the estate since the death of his father, Pierre, senior. When he encounters, however, the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, he hears from her the claim that she is his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Pierre reacts to the story (and to his magnetic attraction for Isabel) by devising a remarkable scheme to preserve his father’s name, spare his mother’s grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.

He announces to his mother that he is married; she promptly throws him out of the house. He and Isabel then depart for New York City, accompanied by a disgraced young woman, Delly Ulver. During their stagecoach journey, Pierre finds and reads a fragment of a treatise on “Chronometricals and Horologicals” on the differences between absolute and relative virtue by one Plotinus Plinlimmon. In the city, Pierre counts on the hospitality of his friend and cousin Glendinning Stanley, but is surprised when Glen refuses to recognize him. The trio (Pierre, Isabel, and Delly) find rooms in a former church converted to apartments, the Church of the Apostles, now populated by impecunious artists, writers, spiritualists, and philosophers, including the mysterious Plinlimmon. Pierre attempts to earn money by writing a book, encouraged by his juvenile successes as a writer.

He learns that his mother has died and has left the Saddle Meadows estate to Glen Stanley, who is now engaged to marry Lucy Tartan. Suddenly, however, Lucy shows up at the Apostles, determined to share Pierre’s life and lot, despite his apparent marriage to Isabel, and Pierre and the three women live there together as best they can, while their scant money runs out. Pierre’s writing does not go well—the darker truths he has come to recognize cannot be reconciled with the light and innocent literature the market seeks. Unable to write, he has a vision in a trance of an earth-bound stone giant Enceladus and his assault on the heavenly Mount of Titans. Beset by debts, by fears of the threats of Glen Stanley and Lucy’s brother, by the rejection of his book by its contracted publishers, by fears of his own incestuous passion for Isabel, and finally by doubts of the truth of Isabel’s story, Pierre guns down Glen Stanley at rush hour on Broadway, and is taken to jail in The Tombs. There Isabel and Lucy visit him, and Lucy dies of shock when Isabel addresses Pierre as her brother. Pierre then seizes upon the secret poison vial that Isabel carries and drinks it, and Isabel finishes the remainder, leaving three corpses as the novel ends.

[edit] Critical Reception

The novel Pierre might be described as a parody of Gothic melodrama, and it includes many elements and themes found in contemporary popular fiction. Its emotions and gestures are exaggerated, and its language is particularly dense and opaque, even for Melville. Moreover, its suggestions that virtue and vice, good and evil, are at times indistinguishable and that “young America” might harbor some deadly inherited sin leading to murderous retribution were extremely unpalatable to a contemporary audience. It was suggested, even within his family, that Melville had gone somewhat mad.

This opinion was held by most critics, even during the revival of interest in the 1920s, and some critics since have concurred that the book was a mistake. Nonetheless, the work contains some of Melville’s most concentrated and accomplished writing, and it is his most direct treatment of the literary life and the process of literary creation.

Hershel Parker has argued that the passages concerning Pierre’s career as an author were added at a late stage, in response to the negative critical reception of Moby-Dick; and he has edited and published a version of the novel (the “Kraken” edition, illustrated by Maurice Sendak) that elides those parts, which he argues detract from its overall unity.

Other Melvillians, however, have found in Pierre a dark masterpiece that repays multiple re-readings by unfolding unexpected moral and philosophical depths. It was the first of Melville’s works that does not employ a first-person narration, and the relation of its narrator’s voice to Melville’s own thought is an unresolved question. The book certainly dares more than almost any other above-ground work of the nineteenth century, and it challenges the reader in ways suggestive of post-modern literature.