In Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) Melville repeatedly addresses the virtue of staying calm and not getting "ruffled," especially in social conversation. Before counting them up, I did not realize the ideal of keeping oneself "unruffled" was such a favorite with Melville in Pierre: ten instances total of "ruffle" (1x) and variants "ruffled" (3x); "unruffled" (3x); "unruffledness" (2x); and the truly delightful "unruffleable" (1x). That's not counting four references to literal ruffles.
Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852:
"... after directing the unruffled Dates" --Melville's Pierre, p21
"... it must be hard for man to be an uncompromising hero and a commander among his race, and yet never ruffle any domestic brow." --Melville's Pierre, p25
"... of the most wonderful unruffledness of temper." --Melville's Pierre, p38
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| Allan Melvill / 1810 portrait by John Rubens Smith via Wikimedia Commons |
"...and much liked to paint his friends, and hang their faces on his walls; so that when all alone by himself, he yet had plenty of company, who always wore their best expressions to him, and never once ruffled him, by ever getting cross or ill-natured, little Pierre." --Melville's Pierre, p100
She was a noble creature, but formed chiefly for the gilded prosperities of life, and hitherto mostly used to its unruffled serenities; bred and expanded, in all developments, under the sole influence of hereditary forms and world-usages. --Melville's Pierre, p120
"... in some other hour of unruffledness or unstimulatedness...."
--Melville's Pierre, p309
"He has translated the unruffled gentleman from the drawing-room into the general levee of letters...." --Melville's Pierre, 334-5
Not seldom Pierre's social placidity was ruffled by polite entreaties from the young ladies that he would be pleased to grace their Albums with some nice little song. We say that here his social placidity was ruffled; for the true charm of agreeable parlor society is, that there you lose your own sharp individuality and become delightfully merged in that soft social Pantheism, as it were, that rosy melting of all into one, ever prevailing in those drawing-rooms, which pacifically and deliciously belie their own name; inasmuch as there no one draws the sword of his own individuality, but all such ugly weapons are left—as of old—with your hat and cane in the hall. --Melville's Pierre, p341
"And with his unruffleable hilariousness, Millthorpe quitted the room."As a matter of vocabulary the theme of staying unruffled is clearly, for Melville, a preoccupation of 1851-2 when he was writing Pierre. After Pierre Melville was done with ruffles in his prose writings, except with reference to fabric or bodies of water. Two instances occur in Typee, none in Omoo, one instance in Mardi, none in Redburn, none in White-Jacket, one in Moby-Dick, and then none that I can find in Israel Potter; The Piazza Tales; The Confidence-Man; and Billy Budd.
--Melville's Pierre, p435
Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852:
F. "Bah! your modern geognosy is a humbug! or, too deep at least, for a wandering dragoon. Now, would you go about determining the age of the formation from your knowledge of the shell? or give it physiological gradation from your profound knowledge of superposition of strata?"
C. "The former, if I only knew it. You will allow me at least, on your own recommendation to note the fact in my journal?"
F. "Of course; but with becoming modesty. It is enough to ruffle one, to have such a long word thrust at him, of a pleasant summer evening, and a thousand miles from a library."
C. "But, good heavens! do not condemn a word for its length. Paleontology is an almost poetical triumph, which throws an attractive grace over the sterility of geognostic investigations and symbols on the human tombs, which throw beams of startling light over the obscurity of fabulous antiquity,—so when we discover the traces or remains of existing, or the extinct life of the old world, their natural tombs—the fossil rocks—are monuments on which Time thus records their relative ages. It is a beautiful chronometry of the earth's surface!"
--Reprinted with significant revisions in Scenes and Adventures in the Army, page 360Related Dragooned posts:
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