In Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville arranged to have Ishmael rescued by the whaler named Rachel, the biblical maternal figure weeping for her children. Thus, Ishmael lives on, to narrate what he witnesses on the whaler Pequod. In his next fiction, Pierre (1852), the author has Pierre, the implied narrator, take over Ishmael's role and more deeply explore the domestic [mothercentered] sphere. The form of Pierre as a self-referential metafiction allows me to hypothesize that the grip of the mothers - the author's mother Maria Gansevoort Melville and Pierre's mother Mary Glendinning-induces both men to write and behave self-righteously. Nathaniel Hawthorne's abandonment of Melville while Melville wrote Pierre, more specifically, the traumatizing effects this abandonment had on Melville, allows me to further hypothesize that the maternal influence was maximized just at the moment when Melville's putative lover Hawthorne left him. While examining these hypotheses, I have attempted to elucidate that the driving forces of the two (implied) writers [the author Melville and the disguised narrator Pierre] are the imagoes of the mothers [Maria and Mary], and to prove that both imagoes, the mothers' and Hawthorne's, are interchangeable in the author's psyche. For the verification of these hypotheses, I have exposed the fact that far from the traditional masculine hero, Pierre is anything but the Emersonian Self-Reliant Man. In the highbrow American middle-class society, the Emersonian ideal came to be rather falsely accepted. This gave birth to dozens of questionable socialistic communities, including the failed Brook Farm and the polygamous Oneida community. These communities were criticized by Hawthorne in The Blithedale Romance (1852), and also, most probably, by Melville in his depiction of the suspicious residents of the Church of Apostles in Pierre. These facts could undermine Pierre's insistence of both independent thinking and autonomy from his mother-presiding family. Some modernist-minded critics, however, have been misled into praising Pierre for his qualification as a buster of domestic Demiurges, and into uncritically accepting the implied narrator's admiration of Pierre as "the heavenbegotten Christ." Here, comparison between Melville's Pierre and its cinematized version, Karax's Pola X (1999), may help corroborate that Pierre is not chastising the Demiurge but rather unknowingly baptized with a Nazi-like mentality : exclusionism and ethnocentric anti-democracy. The agent that maneuvers Pierre into misbelieving in the successful achievement of independence and Christ-like status is his own widowed mother. As a Mater Tenebrarum [Dark Mother] or mock-Virgin Mary, Mary Glendinning puts Rev. Falsgrave under her control, misuses her financial power, and thus abuses Christianity. In a word, the widowed Mary resorts to Marianism, an expression of faith not necessarily inadmissible to the domestic ideology and sentimental culture forged by the American middle-class Puritans of the day. In complacent and unconscious collaboration with his widowed mother Mary, Pierre formulates the American family romance, the romance made up of the foundling's father and unwedded mother. Thus, we are convinced that Pierre falls under the sway of the phallic mother. By extension, we are justified in assuming that Melville was not merely manipulated by his mother, but also caged by the image of the gender-wise ambiguous Hawthorne, a figure who, in the eyes of Melville, must have symbolically resembled the substitute parent [maternal as well as paternal]. Consequently, we can safely argue that just as Pierre is too deeply trammeled in Marianism to gain independence, so was Melville trammeled by the image of Hawthorne; and that Melville stuck fast to the parental or Hawthornian imago.

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