"Tranced Griefs": Melville's Pierre and the Origins of the Gothic

I want to advance three main propositions in this essay. The first is that Herman Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities is closer to the English Gothic romance than is generally understood. This apparently uncontentious statement is actually more complicated than it seems. As a genre, the Gothic romance is English in origin. However, this origin is not a simple matter of a set of generic features coalescing in a peculiar way at a particular time and place. The term Gothic, as in Horace Walpole’s “a Gothic story,” was not a neutral, value free description of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, Gothic, meaning Albion’s liberty-loving Saxon forbears, was a key element of Whig political discourse.¹ In the peculiar meaning these phrases had during the 1740s and 50s, one could say that a Whig patriot was apt to wrap himself, not so much in the flag, as in a gothic structure. Thus the Temple-Grenvilles constructed their Gothic Temple at Stowe, while Horace Walpole took refuge in his gothicized Strawberry Hill, each a highly visible vindication of their rival claims to uphold, indeed to embody, the liberty that defined true Whiggism. ² In The Castle of Otranto, Walpole extended his conceit to the novel. The first preface declares his hand by averring that the book was a sixteenth-century, anti-Reformation document. That is to say, Walpole claims that it was a text arising out of the very nexus that defined Whiggism as Whigs saw it: the conflict between despotism and a historical vocation for reform, providentially vouchsafed to England. So when I say that Melville’s Pierre is closer to the English Gothic than is generally understood, I mean that it is nearer to the ideological provenance of the English Gothic. This brings me to my second proposition, which is that Melville’s Pierre is an extraordinarily informative interpretation of the relationship between the genre’s ideological origins and the genre itself. My third proposition (and, as I see it, the least contentious) is that the applicability of the English Gothic to the contemporary American scene was a major focus for Melville’s irony. I will begin with my third proposition before dealing with the first two in turn.

I. The American Fantastic

We often forget that American Gothic is an oxymoron signalling its own uncanniness: in antebellum America, the Gothic was not supposed to be there. The matter goes deeper than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous observation that America lacked crumbling ruins and wrongs, at once “picturesque and gloomy.” ³ The Gothic ought to have undergone ideological erasure, for its meaning was essentially anti-American: it spelled entrapment, enclosure, the inescapable, parasitic power of the past, the inglorious triumph of class, feudalism, vestigial institutions, and even nature itself.

In Israel Potter, Melville’s narrator says of the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, “the Western spirit is, or will yet be . . . the true American one.” ⁴ I think this is Melville’s trope for American writing at large. Certainly, nobody was saying that the Eastern, Gothic spirit was the true American one, nor was anyone arguing that the Gothic romance—tales re-iterating the sad history of European mystery and misery—was the true American genre. On the contrary, the Gothic was ostensibly un-American; and yet Gothicized sensation romances dominated the popular market. ⁵ Melville had, of course, imported the Gothic into Moby Dick. Ahab is a Transcendentalist caught in the throws of the egotistical sublime, a self-centredness expressed as the disease of Gothicism. An American writer had to touch the Gothic in this ironic manner, if he were to touch it at all. Unfortunately, Melville’s readership was sunk in debased forms of the Gothic, without any sense of its inappropriateness at a time when American literature was supposed to be taking shape.

The general view was that Melville used the formulas of sensation fiction as a cynical bid for popularity. More recently, critics have argued that Melville was sincere in trying to get the formulas right in order to sell books. ⁶ Generally, the profound alienation...