The House, the Pyramid and the Labyrinth. Spatial Archetypes and Domestic Visions in Melville’s I and My Chimney

This article first frames Hermann Melville’s I and My Chimney short story in the context of his literary production and the political and social transformations that affected New England in the mid-19th-century. It analyzes the way it resembles the dynamics that favored the typological evolution of the rural residence, here represented by the wife of the narrator and her architect, and evolved the relationship between interior and exterior, domestic space and territory, individual and society. Then the article measures the grade of alteration Melville applied to his own house, Arrowhead at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to transform it into a fictive and symbolic place for his plot, highlights the effects of a compulsive referring technique to give the story a universal value and focuses on the role of architectural archetypes in representing human condition and perception of reality. In particular, it conjectures on the figure of the Pyramid, embodied by the famous brick chimney, and the Labyrinth, evoked through the use of architectural, linguistic and iconographic devices as well their mutual relationship to mise-en-scène a sort of praise of opacity and imagination as keys to knowledge, finally shaping the prophetic role Melville had elected for himself as a writer.