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32 2 “THIS DREAM-HOUSE OF THE EARTH” Books I and II i Despite the elements of conventional plotting we noted at the end of chapter 1, the first two Books of Pierre introduce constant shifts in style and tone that are anything but conventional and confront us with an array of interpretive problems. Difficulties begin almost immediately in the first chapter of Book I, “Pierre Just Emerging from His Teens.” After lushly alliterative picturesque scene-setting in the opening paragraphs (“There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world” [3]), Melville abruptly positions two young lovers in hackneyed Romeo-andJuliet fashion—Pierre standing in the street looking devotedly up and Lucy looking down at him. Speaking and thinking in cloying hyperbole, the lovers affect a ludicrous tutoyering: “Truly, thought the youth, with a still gaze of inexpressible fondness; truly the skies do ope, and this invoking angel looks down.—‘I would return thee thy manifold good-mornings, Lucy, did not that presume thou had’st lived through a night; and by Heaven, thou belong’st to the regions of an infinite day!’” Rather than distancing himself from this artificial language, the narrator employs it in his own voice, as when he describes the lovers “ardently eying each other, beholding mutual reflections of a boundless admiration and love” (4). The problem of how to regard such language is compounded by a further consideration: to think of sexual arousal at the sight of these words might seem a crassly insensitive reaction, but any reasonably attentive reader of Moby-Dick (chap. 87) might remember what act whales engage in when “overflowing with mutual esteem” and what humanlike positions they take during it. The lovers’ idealizing and role-playing are clear enough in this chapter: Pierre idealizes Lucy as an “invoking angel,” while idealizing himself as a soldier marching under her “colors.” She participates in the role-playing, crying “Bravissimo! oh, my only recruit!” when he fastens her flower to his bosom (4). Only later Reading Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 33 does Melville confirm the suggestion in this early exchange that he is also concerned with his young lovers’ unwitting sublimation of sexual impulses, a process he links to their recurrent role-playing. The emphasis on role-playing continues in the second chapter, as Melville moves from the depiction of his protagonist as romantic cavalier to the depiction of his “romantic filial love,” Pierre’s benignly presented but ultimately unhealthy relationship with his “pedestaled mother” (5), whom he also idealizes, as this phrase suggests. The prose of this chapter is ornate, but the narrative voice is now more detached and analytical than in chapter 1. From the first paragraph, attentive readers know that the narrator commands another way of writing than the one he had first displayed, and they may at least begin to suspect that some ulterior purpose underlies the strangely mannered writing they have already encountered. Although the chapter opens with a fairy-tale formula (“Pierre was the only son of an af- fluent, and haughty widow”), later in the first sentence the qualifier “externally ” undercuts the assertion that Mrs. Glendinning furnished a “singular example of the preservative and beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind,” a mind which Melville immediately specifies as being of only “medium” culture. The striking hyperbole in the next sentence is similarly tempered: “litheness had not yet completely uncoiled itself from her waist, nor smoothness unscrolled itself from her brow, nor diamondness departed from her eyes” (4). Here attentive readers are likely to be alerted by the word “completely” and unsettled by the surprising use of the verb “uncoiled” with the noun litheness, the use of the verb “unscrolled” with the noun smoothness, and the startling coinage of the noun “diamondness,” just as they probably will have been surprised by the use of the verb “uncankered” as applied to Mrs. Glendinning ’s equivocally cultivated mind in the previous sentence. The use of “uncankered” together with the notion of the “preservative” influences of “unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth,” suggests, not altogether respectfully , that Mrs. Glendinning is, whatever else, a rare biological specimen. The startling use of language continues in the second paragraph, where we...

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