SOURCE: “Pierre, or, The Ambiguities: A Camp Reading,” in Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville's Pierre, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 93-155.

In the following excerpt, Creech interprets Pierre as a covertly homoerotic novel, with Pierre's attraction to his father manifested through his feelings for Isabel.

Pierre's Two Fathers

“a Word to the Wise”

Pierre has few of the … obviously homoerotic themes which have now been so frequently acknowledged in Melville's other novels. Even beyond these difficult questions of homoerotic content, the wink, or its audience, it is in general difficult to know at all just what Melville himself consciously thought he was doing in Pierre. To complicate an already complicated question, there is reason to think, for example, that the tone, if not the entire nature, of the project may actually have changed, perhaps after the first thirteen or sixteen chapters, perhaps as a...