Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Unmasking of Poverty in Melville's "The Piazza"

In "The Piazza," Melville layers his landscape with Picturesque imagery that elides the past imperial episodes that mark the countryside, as well as the present inequalities. Concealed under the fantastically Romanticized landscape, Melville links his critique of the Picturesque and landscape aesthetics to the politics of poverty: the movement of the poor from the overwhelmed urban areas to the rural North, the Orphan Trains, and allusions to forced labor encoded into the capitalist ideology.