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"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"
Style, Spring, 2001 by Scott A. Kemp
(2.) John Wenke's justification for his focus in Melville's Muse is a case in point: "I have chosen to focus on those longer prose narratives that most clearly reveal Melville's attempt to marry fiction and philosophy" (xvii). Consequently, he does not "systematically examine" Melville's short fiction. Moreover, the "historical reconstruction" in Israel Potter makes that work "tangential to his study. But he does acknowledge--importantly for my point here--that Melville was primarily an artist, not a metaphysician.
(3.) As the term "style" has a ubiquitous nature (in that it is used frequently, yet is often not even listed in the index of many grammar books), it is worth establishing the context of its use here. In "Nine Ideas About Language," Harvey Daniels writes that style is essentially a speech pattern of choice--informal, formal, etc.--that is a representation of "sociolinguistic rules which tell us what sort of speech is appropriate in differing social situations" (49). For a writer like Melville, we are better served to think of style as a conscious choice employed at the syntactical level in writing for the purpose of eliciting in the reader an awareness of a particular period-bound and generic allusion. As the argument here maintains that style is a statement of meaning within the context of other rhetorical choices made by Melville, we should be aware that Melville alters his style in writing to meet the rhetorical purpose(s) he intends. Thus, when critics note difficulty in locating a central "voice" in such texts as Moby Dick for example, it is often because Melville employs different styles for different characters (such as Ahab and Ishmael). Melville's "voice," then, emerges often out of the dialogue between competing styles. The example in this study is of the narrator and Marianna in "The Piazza Tale."
(4.) Historically, scholars have recognized the story as "unproportionally complex in imagery and symbolism," something not lost on original reviewers in late 1856 and early 1857 (Breinig 254). Interpretation of the tale, indicative of the "ambiguity" so attached to Melvillian scholarship (in more ways than one), has been diverse. The unreliability of perception, possibilities of creative imagination, and a reaction to the European romantic sublime have all been put forth as issues evident in the text. What persists as the most pervasive interpretation of the story is that it reveals a Melville in emotional crisis. Leon Howard may have been one of the first to raise this issue in 1951, but it hasn't lost its attraction. William B. Dillingham states in his 1977 Melville's Short Fiction 18S3-J856 that "'The Piazza' is not primarily a fictionalized treatment of a universal truth but a highly personalized account of an emotional crisis" (320). References to "The Piazza Tale" are numerous throughout Melville schol arship, but for studies that specifically target "The Piazza Tale," see Breinig, Poenicke, and Stein. For other articles that contain interpretations relevant to "The Piazza Tale," see Slater, Barnett, and Donaldson. Book length studies of Melville's short fiction are listed in an earlier footnote.
