He who is sisterless, is as a bachelor before his time. For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already lies in the sister.
Pierre Glendinning, the titular hero of this novel, may well be the only character in the history of American fiction who is willing to trace at least part of his future failures and unhappiness back to the singular fact that he grew up without a sister. It is worth nothing that Pierre is a little psychologically confused on the issue of close family relationships; he routinely refers to his mother as “Sister Mary.” But then again, she is a mother of the domineering type, so the psychology of that quirk could be interpreted in a number of ways.
For the more and the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts.
This novel is often considered one of Melville’s more autobiographical works. Like Pierre, Melville may have known of an illegitimate half-sister (though he did not fall in love and try to make a wife of her) and he definitely experienced the downside of a writing career. Pierre tries to fashion a novel out of real events as way to understand and control the narrative which is not so easily controlled in real life and this very book fits that comparison quite well.
Love is built upon secrets, as lovely Venice upon invisible and incorruptible piles in the sea. Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite.
This novel was Melville’s follow-up to Moby-Dick. Though recognized as one of the great works of literary genius today, it was virtually ignored upon publication and initiated the descent of Melville from wildly popular writer early in his career to nearly forgotten by the end. That descent was hastened by the reception to Pierre which was attacked for a variety of reasons. Perhaps—just perhaps, not definitely—the most ridiculous criticism of the book focused on Melville’s prose which reviewers dismissed as needlessly florid at best and hopelessly entrenched in overwrought philosophical meanderings at worst. In the end, however, Melville would have the last laugh from the grave as yet another of his works has managed to outlast the memory of every literary critic in America who panned the novel.
Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and the profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash.
An admittedly more substantial element to critique for those forgotten reviewers is persistent sense that Melville is nursing a grudge against all those who spectacularly failed to recognize the achievement that was Moby-Dick. Pierre’s difficulties as a writer mirrors Melville in an autobiographical way that is more thematic than literal. In this passage and many others it would have been quite evident to reviewers at the time that Pierre’s failure as a writer is not due to an inherent lack of talent or quality, but rather to the tastes of the time. That taste strongly leaned toward sentimental romance—of which the allegedly “florid” writing style above is actually a satirical parody. Many modern critics have deemed Pierre the first 20th century psychological novel despite its being published in 1852. While the novel transcends being merely an attempt to get even, it cannot be denied that it could be seen as a legitimate complaint.
