We Are Family: Melville's Pierre

Despite the fact that today, Melville's reputation and readership is greater than those of Caroline Lee Hentz's or Mary Jane Holmes's, two very popular antebellum writers, and despite Pierre's harangues against "the countless tribes of common novels," Pierre was (and is) desperate to be one of them. On the most practical level, Melville wanted to write a popular novel that would make money. On a more theoretical level, "common novels" begin with absent parents who leave their children alone, a condition to which Pierre aspires. Although the separation between parents and children is painful and often inexplicable – why can't Ellen Montgomery in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World go with her mother and father? What takes Gerty's father in Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter so long to find her? – these young girls become women. They develop precisely because they have been freed from their biological parents. Gerty and Ellen grow, they learn, they live. If we can use Pierre as counter-factual evidence, we find that Pierre shrivels up, deludes himself into thinking he's learned something about "the all-comprehending round of things" (NN Pierre 111), and dies. Why the difference?