This section contains 9,677 words (approx. 33 pages at 300 words per page) |
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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 activity...
This section contains 9,677 words (approx. 33 pages at 300 words per page) |
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