Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

Melville and the Problem of Evil 97
reaction is, of course, one of profound disillusionment. Then
comes the question of what to do. How can he correct the
wrong that has been done to this poor girl? She needs not
only money but also the love of a brother, he feels, for Pierre
is an idealist; and he must give her these things without
revealing his father’s dark secret to his mother. In despera-
tion he makes a plan; he rejects the fair Lucy and pretends
that he has married Isabel, hoping by this self-sacrifice to be
able to be with his half-sister and act the part of a brother
to her. His mother immediately disinherits him, and he and
Isabel flee to NewYork, accompanied by another outcast, a
neighboring farm girl who has borne an illegitimate child. In
New York, penniless and rejected by his friends, Pierre
tries desperately to write a novel and the strain of his situa-
tion ruins his health. To his horror he discovers that he feels
toward Isabel passions that are hardly brotherly. At this
point, the rejected Lucy turns up and announces that she has
come to live as a sister with Pierre and his supposed wife.
The resulting ménage is surely the maddest household in
American literature. Finally, driven to desperation by his
accumulated misfortunes, Pierre shoots his cousin Glen, who,
as a suitor for the hand of Lucy, has been hounding him. In
prison that evening Pierre is visited by Lucy and Isabel.
Lucy, still believing that Pierre and Isabel are married, falls
dead from shock when she discovers that Isabel is really
Pierre’s sister, and Pierre and Isabel take poison and die.
Pierre, trying to do what seems to him right, brings destruc-
tion to those he loves and dies himself, as he says, “the fool
of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.”¹⁹

Pierre is, of course, in some ways a ridiculous book, but
it is a fascinating one. Here all sorts of hidden themes, taboo
in Victorian literature and rare in Melville’s work—incest,
the Oedipus complex, even a suggestion of homosexuality—

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