Pierre and Hamlet

FO Matthiessen described Melville’s Pierre as “an American Hamlet,” a novel that attempts to “translate” Shakespeare into 19th-century American life. In part, this is a matter of Melville matching characters and plots: “Lucy’s pale innocence fails Pierre as Ophelia’s did Hamlet; the well-named Reverend Mr. Falsgrave’s cushioned voice of worldly policy is not unlike the platitudinizing of Polonius; Charlie Millthorpe plays a kind of Horatio; Glen Stanly confront’s Pierre’s seemingly mad violence with the decisiveness of Laertes. But the crucial relation here as in Hamlet is that of son and mother. Pierre’s father has died when their only child was twelve, and his mother has grown to treat him more like a younger brother than a son. The current of tenderness between them, now that Mary Glendenning is ‘not very far from her grant climacteric,’ has unconsciously flowed almost into that of lovers.”

Pierre’s crisis, further, involves a shattering of the image of his father: “Isabel’s arrival on the scene, her uncanny likeness to the sketch of his father as a young bachelor, her confused memories of her orphaned childhood are agonizingly pieced together by Pierre into the pattern of liaison and desertion. Worse still, once ‘the long-cherished image’ of his father has been ‘transfigured before him from a green foliaged tree into a blasted trunk,’ once his youthful and middle-aged portraits are seen as unlike as those of Hamlet’s father and uncle, every other image in Pierre’s mind begins to fluctuate and alter.” He begins to see his mother as “haughty and selfish, determined to preserve privileged appearances at all cost,” just as Claudius maintains a show of stability and brightness when Denmark is rotting from within.

Yet, Matthiessen suggests that Melville constructs a quite different story-line for his Hamlet, and in the process challenges his contemporaries’ claims about the American character: “Emerson believed that his America was to find its true genius in speculation akin to that of Shakespeare’s hero; and Poe, in the exaggeration of ignorance, pronounced it the first ‘thinking age’ there had ever been. Pierre is an ironic commentary upon their views: one for the few major efforts of that period to produce a tragedy, its situation resulted from the contrary bias – reckless and unforseeing impulsiveness.” Remembering Shakespeare in the middle of his crisis, Pierre followed “the reverse of Hamlet’s behavior, acted at once and decisively, and accomplished nothing but ruin.” Faced with a world out of joint, Pierre “determines to right the wrong done her by his dead father in the only way left open to him, by giving her his name.” The conclusion of this tragedy of action, however, is as tragic as the conclusion of what Melville, like Coleridge, took as Shakespeare’s tragedy of thought.