Pierre: or, The Ambiguities Herman Melville

Herman Melville's "Pierre" offers readers a world simultaneously driven by and struggling against its relationship with the past. Personal and ancestral histories dramatically affect the present interactions and psychology of the book's main...

Both Pierre and The Blithedale Romance are structured around what Lucy would have called, if Hawthorne had written her, exhibiting secrets. Since he didn’t, she prefers the slightly less libidinally charged “disclose,” but this moment of...