The Destruction of Fairyland: Melville's "Piazza" in the Tradition of the American Imagination

Abstract

The comparative neglect of the greater part of Melville's shorter writings by most Melville critics, justified by considerations of literary and intellectual weight, has left untried quite a number of possible ways of analyzing them. However, even the most insignificant looking of these pieces will repay close attention as specimens of Melville's experiments in complex symbolism and metaphorical allusiveness. Among them, The Piazza has been noticed as unproportionally complex in imagery and symbolism and as not quite unimportant because of its introductory position in The Piazza Tales. Its connection with the other tales has been explained chiefly in terms of thematic parallels. I think that it deserves a more important place as a demonstration of Melville's views on range and limits of the artistic imagination and on the possibilities of art as epistemology, as well as of his method of trying out the values of ideas by putting them into action. To achieve this aim, Melville placed The Piazza deliberately in a literary tradition or convention which had been adopted by other American writers of fiction before him in their attempts to transcend the limits of mere story-telling. It will be useful to follow this tradition through some of its major stages.