Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Phillip J. Egan

Critical Essay by Phillip J. Egan

SOURCE: “Isabel's Story: The Voice of the Dark Woman in Melville's Pierre,” in American Transcendental Quarterly: A Journal of New England Writers, Vol. 1, No. 2, June, 1987, pp. 99-110.

In the following essay, Egan examines Isabel's story as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative, and interprets it in the light of several key concepts of Romanticism.

Isabel, the “dark” woman in Melville's Pierre, fascinates critics in part because she appears suddenly to tell a story that becomes the mainspring of the novel's plot. It is surprising, therefore, that her story itself has received relatively little detailed attention. It has, of course, been mined for symbols and themes in general studies of the novel. And in the past it has also been attacked by some prominent commentators. Henry Murray, for example, in his famous introduction to the Hendricks House edition of Pierre, dismisses Isabel's story, saying, “the incoherent flow of her...
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