Chapter 3

There is a sense in which Pierre is an abortive complement to Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick, great fable that it is, contains a good part of human life under one figure or another; but it does not contain everything. I would claim much for it; I would claim much for Melville’s work as a whole; but there is still a great segment that remained unexplored till Melville wrote Pierre, and that, to the end, he never satisfactorily penetrated or freely brooded upon.

All Melville’s books about the sea have the one anomaly and defect of the sea from the central, human point of view: one-half of the race, woman, is left out of it. Melville’s world, all too literally, is a man-of-war’s world. Woman neither charms nor nurtures nor threatens: she neither robs man of his strength nor rouses him to heroic frenzy: she is not Circe: she is not Rosalind or Francesca or even the Wife of Bath—she simply does not exist. When the Pequod spreads sail, woman is left behind: she is the phantom of home for Ahab and Starbuck. The whales dally in Moby-Dick and beget offspring; but all the trouble, beauty, madness, delight of human love, all that vast range of experience from the mere touch of the flesh to the most enduring spiritual loyalty, all that is absent. One looks for some understanding of woman’s lot and woman’s life in Moby-Dick; and one looks in vain. One looks for it again in Pierre, and one is disappointed, although its ambiguities are concerned with nothing else. With experience of woman in every relationship, daughter, girl, sister, wife, mother, matron, he described her in only one aspect—that of the remote and idealized mistress of romantic courtship. Mother, sister, sweetheart, all appeared to Melville’s hero in this brief and peculiar aspect.

There was, one is driven to believe, something in Herman Melville’s life that caused him to dissociate woman from his account of man’s deepest experience. Mr. Waldo Frank has suggested, in general social terms, that the quest of power, which has preoccupied Western man since the Renaissance, has incapacitated him as a lover and kept him from understanding woman and all her essential concerns. If that is true, Melville pushed his aberration to a logical extremity; and he, who captured to the full the poetry of the sea, became as bashful as a boy when he beheld Venus, born of its foam, rising from the waters he knew so well, the most unexpected of monsters, and the only denizen of the sea he dared neither snare nor harpoon nor otherwise dispose of, except by flight....