SOURCE: “Pierre in the Domestic Circle,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, Winter, 1986, pp. 395-402.

In the following essay, Canaday explores the connection between Pierre's psychological problems and his becoming a male member of a female world as he moves from Saddle Meadows to New York City.

When Melville wrote to Sophia Hawthorne and promised that his new novel would be a “rural bowl of milk,”¹ he may have been referring to a central theme, which, in our predilection for irony, we have overlooked. Melville was assuring Mrs. Hawthorne, of course, that at last there would be no sailor-narrator here, that there would be a sensibility different from the rover in Polynesia, the bitter White Jacket and Redburn, or the ruminating Ishmael. As it turned out, however, the narrative voice in Pierre is not so different, and the phrase presenting his new hero Pierre in the...