Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephen Rachman

Critical Essay by Stephen Rachman

SOURCE: “Melville's Pierre and Nervous Exhaustion; or, ‘The Vacant Whirlingness of the Bewilderingness,’” in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 1997, pp. 226-49.

In the following essay, Rachman explores Pierre in the context of male hysteria, asserting that Pierre's nervous exhaustion both shapes and makes problematic the idea that the novel was written as a romance.

The author … has succeeded in producing nothing but a powerfully unpleasant caricature of morbid thought and passion … [T]he details of such a mental malady as that which afflicts Pierre are almost as disgusting as those of physical disease itself.

—Review of Pierre, Graham's Magazine 1852¹

So, if thou wouldst go to the gods, leave thy dog of a body behind thee.

—Pierre²

Fretted Wires

Near the end of his most vexed novel, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852), Herman Melville describes his author/protagonist in the thrall of nervous exhaustion, brought on by literary...
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