Melville's Pierre Nervous Exhaustion; or "The Vacant Whirlingness of the Bewilderingness"

This essay examines nervous exhaustion in Herman Melville's most problematic novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852). Nervous exhaustion, as it is figured by Melville, is an issue in which disease and literary understanding converge. Pierre can inform our understanding of nineteenth-century nervous disease (or more broadly still, diseases of culture) and its connection to literature and how it was that Melville came to articulate this nervous vision.