"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"

Even the clarity of this sentence could be improved by eliminating the figurative language associated with royalty--"royal," "coronation," "Charlemagne"--and replacing it with concrete description. But the figurative language demonstrates just how obsessed he is with his material reality. Now for the narrator to go without the "convenience" of a piazza for a year, "a deficiency" so pronounced that he mentions it first in his story before his beloved Charlemagne, may indicate that he lacks the financial means to build one. This fact is reinforced when he says it is because of his "narrow fortune" that he could not build a piazza around his entire farmhouse-a dream in keeping with his romantic ideations (2). The result of his lack of wealth produces one of his most realistic statements in the whole story: "Upon but one of the four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now, which side?" (2). Being forced to make a prudent financial decision would not set well with this narrator. ft meant that he had to compromise his idealistic preoccupations of the whole "picture-gallery" all around his farmhouse in favor of just one side. Picking a side wasn't easy; each had its advantages: to the east were the "Stone hearth Hills"; to the south were "apple-trees"; to the west an "upland pasture, alleying away into a maple wood at the top"; but, as the narrator says, "to the north is Charlemagne" (3). By picking the north side of his farmhouse for the piazza, the narrator unwittingly plays into his romantic illusions; he strays farther into an interiority at odds with an ability to communicate with others in a dialogically conceived relationship.

Significantly, immediately after his discussion of where to build the piazza, the narrator reflects on how his neighbor, a man named Dives, "broke" into a laugh regarding a piazza facing northerly weather. In essence, neighbor Dives is a part of the real world the narrator is trying to escape. Again, to him that real world is associated with economic deprivation and a lack of romantic vision. Dives is exemplary of it; he chides the narrator's sense of vision by saying he no doubt wants to watch the "Aurora Borealis, I suppose; hope he's laid in good store of Polar muffs and mittens" (3). But the narrator's romantic vision is not as fleeting as the Aurora Borealis, nor is it in need of home comforts like polar muffs and mittens. In essence, Dives juxtaposes literally and figuratively the narrator's romantic vision. That he "cast down the hill a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his piazza to the south" is indicative of the arrogance of his perception, a fact consistent with his a ffiliation with Don Quixote (3).

Of course, the purgatory of Dives's world is really economic in nature. The narrator disdains his sense of practicality; this "work-a-day neighbor" is identified by how he juxtaposes the narrator's idealized perception. Thinking the vision he sees is a fairy-land, the narrator rejects his neighbor's belief that "it was some old barn-an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity its background" (5). Of course, the egoistic narrator says such a view is false: "though I had never been there, I knew better" (5). By positioning himself and his value system above his neighbor, the narrator has effectively alienated himself from other people. So it is no wonder he suffers from depression, as other scholars have pointed out; but his "weariness" is symptomatic of a hostility to the practical, daily work habits that characterize the life of his neighbor. He would rather live a life of "convenience," one where he "leisurely" reclines in his "easy chair" while viewing his fairy land (2).