Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Pierre Glendinning is a wealthy, idealistic nineteen-year-old living at Saddle Meadows, his family's ancestral estate. His great-grandfather died heroically in battle there, and his grandfather was a celebrated Revolutionary War general. Pierre is the sole surviving male heir to this aristocratic lineage. He shares an unusually intimate bond with his mother, Mrs. Mary Glendinning, a proud, beautiful widow; the two playfully address each other as "brother" and "sister." Pierre has always longed for a real sister, feeling an absence his mother's companionship cannot fill. He is betrothed to Lucy Tartan, a golden-haired, blue-eyed girl of seventeen who spends summers near the estate. Their engagement is publicly known.

Pierre's sheltered upbringing, steeped in rural beauty, deep reading, and devout Christianity, has never exposed him to genuine moral complexity. He worships the memory of his deceased father as a figure of perfect virtue. Yet beneath this idyll, fault lines lie hidden. During a carriage ride, Lucy asks Pierre to retell the story of a mysterious, dark-eyed face that haunted him after he encountered it at a village sewing circle. Pierre grows agitated and refuses to swear an oath that he will share all his secrets with her. A nameless dread overtakes them both.

The face belongs to a dark, olive-complexioned young woman Pierre noticed sewing quietly at the gathering. When she lifted her face to him, he saw an expression of supernatural loveliness, anguish, and imploring mystery. He concealed the experience from his mother, the first deception of his life toward her. One evening, a hooded stranger delivers a letter to Pierre from Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate daughter of his father. She begs him to visit her at a red farm-house near the lake. The letter shatters Pierre's idealized image of his father and overturns his entire moral world.

Suppressed memories now converge. Pierre recalls his father's deathbed cry, "My daughter! my daughter!" once dismissed as feverish wandering. He also recalls two portraits of his father: a large, formal one his mother cherishes, and a smaller, more ambiguous "chair-portrait" secretly painted by a cousin during a period when Pierre's father frequently visited a group of French emigrants, among whom was a beautiful young woman who later disappeared. With Isabel's letter, the face in the chair-portrait and Isabel's face seem to merge, confirming what Pierre had half-sensed for years.

Pierre realizes he cannot reveal Isabel's existence to his mother. Mrs. Glendinning's immense pride, her devotion to her husband's unblemished memory, and her horror of scandal would cause her to reject Isabel utterly. At a breakfast with his mother and the family clergyman, Rev. Mr. Falsgrave, Pierre probes the clergyman about the moral obligations of legitimate children toward illegitimate siblings. Falsgrave evades the question. Pierre leaves having confirmed his mother's inflexibility and the clergy's inability to offer genuine guidance.

At nightfall, Pierre visits Isabel at the farm-house of old Walter Ulver. Isabel tells her fragmented, dreamlike history: earliest memories of a dark, ruinous house in a desolate clearing, possibly in France, inhabited by a silent old couple; a sea crossing; a large institution where people wept and were confined, implied to be an asylum. She was eventually taken to a farm-house, where a gentleman she called "father" visited intermittently until she was told the word "Dead." She acquired a guitar from a traveling pedler that responded to her voice as if alive. She plays for Pierre, producing an overwhelming musical experience, and he vows eternal brotherhood.

Between their two meetings, Pierre visits the Memnon Stone, a massive balanced rock in the woods, and crawls beneath its hovering mass, daring the universe to crush him if his resolution is wrong. The narrator connects this to the myth of Memnon, the young king who rushed into a righteous quarrel and met an early death, prefiguring Pierre's fate. At their second interview, Isabel reveals she learned the name "Glendinning" from a handkerchief her father left behind and traced the connection to Pierre's family. She also tells Pierre that she secretly buried the dead infant of Delly Ulver, a disgraced young woman living upstairs whose parents have rejected her. Pierre promises to help Delly.

Pierre reads Dante's Inferno and Shakespeare's Hamlet, finding both devastatingly relevant yet offering no solutions. His resolutions are mutually contradictory: He cannot simultaneously acknowledge Isabel, conceal her from his mother, and protect his father's memory. Rising the next morning with terrible clarity, he conceives his plan: He will pretend to have secretly married Isabel. This fiction will allow him to live with her openly and shield his father's reputation, though it will destroy his engagement to Lucy, earn his mother's rejection, and bring worldly disgrace upon himself.

Pierre tells Lucy he is married; she faints into a near-fatal swoon. He confronts his mother, who icily disowns him and expels him from her roof. He tells Isabel of his plan, and she acquiesces. He arranges to bring Delly with them and burns the chair-portrait and all family papers. At dawn, Pierre, Isabel, and Delly depart Saddle Meadows forever.

During the journey, Pierre finds a torn pamphlet, "Chronometricals and Horologicals" by Plotinus Plinlimmon, which argues that heavenly morality and earthly morality operate on incompatible principles and that attempting to live by absolute standards on earth leads to self-destruction. Pierre plans to stay in a city house once offered by his cousin, Glendinning Stanly (Glen), but upon arrival Glen publicly disowns him. After a harrowing night, Pierre secures lodgings and takes rooms in the Church of the Apostles, a former church converted into cheap quarters for impoverished artists and eccentrics. His acquaintance Charlie Millthorpe, a struggling lawyer from Saddle Meadows, helps him settle in. Pierre begins writing a book he hopes will support his household, though his earlier literary career consisted only of slight magazine poems praised more for his social position than his talent.

Pierre soon learns that his mother has died, her mental health having deteriorated from grief over his apparent betrayal. Glen has inherited all of Saddle Meadows, and Pierre has been omitted entirely from his mother's will. Pierre labors in a freezing closet-room, his health failing, his book growing darker and more uncommercial. He recognizes that the more profound it becomes, the less viable it is, yet he cannot write anything shallow.

Lucy writes to declare a heaven-sent conviction that she must come live with Pierre's household as a "nun-like cousin," asking no questions. Isabel is disturbed but consents. Lucy arrives despite violent opposition from her brother Frederic, a naval officer, and Glen, whom Pierre repels by force. Lucy's mother, Mrs. Tartan, pleads and rages, then disowns Lucy. A tense dynamic develops: Pierre looks at Lucy with love, fear, and awe; Isabel senses displacement; Lucy quietly interposes herself between Pierre and Isabel. Meanwhile, Pierre's doubts about Isabel's paternity intensify after he encounters a foreign portrait that unsettles his earlier certainty, though the ambiguities remain unresolvable. He falls into a vision of the mythic Titan Enceladus writhing against an impregnable mountain, the Titan's face transforming into Pierre's own, suggesting he is doomed to futile rebellion.

Two final letters arrive. His publishers, Steel, Flint & Asbestos, denounce his manuscript as a "blasphemous rhapsody" and threaten legal action. Glen and Frederic formally brand Pierre a liar. In cold fury, Pierre takes pistols, encounters Glen on the street, and shoots him dead after Glen strikes Pierre across the face with a cowhide whip. Pierre is seized and imprisoned. In his cell, Isabel and Lucy come to him. Isabel cries, "thy sister hath murdered thee, my brother," and Lucy collapses and dies instantly. Pierre seizes a vial of poison from Isabel and drinks. Isabel gasps, "All's o'er, and ye know him not!" and falls dead upon Pierre's heart.