Like many artists, Melville felt constrained to choose between art and money. The turning point of his career came in 1851. With the publication of Moby-Dick, he grew disenchanted with his attempt to please the general reader. Instead, he cultivated a more spiritual language to express the darker, enigmatic side of the soul. Like his letters, Melville's literary style became torturous and demanding; his themes questioned the nature of good and evil and what he perceived as upheaval in universal order. Pierre, his first published work after Moby-Dick, with its emphasis on incest and moral corruption, exemplifies his decision to change direction. His readers, accustomed to the satisfying rough and tumble of his sea yarns, were unable to make the leap from straightforward adventure tale to probing fiction. The gems hidden among lengthy, digressive passages required more concentrated effort than readers were capable of or willing to put forth.
Under the tutelage of Hawthorne, Melville developed the metaphysical elements of his work, often to the detriment of clarity of diction and flow of language. For example:
On the starboard side of the Bellipotent's upper gun deck, behold Billy Budd under sentry lying prone in irons in one of the bays formed by the regular spacing of the guns comprising the batteries on either side. All these pieces were of the heavier caliber of that period. Mounted on lumbering wooden carriages they were hampered with cumbersome harness of breeching and strong side-tackles for running them out. Guns and carriages, together with the long rammers and shorter lintstocks lodged in loops overhead — all these, as customary, were painted black; and the heavy hempen breechings tarred to the same tint, wore the like livery of the undertakers. In contrast with the funereal hue of these surroundings, the prone sailor's exterior apparel, white jumper and white duck trousers, each more or less soiled, dimly glimmered in the obscure light of the bay like a patch of discolored snow in early April lingering at some upland cave's black mouth. In effect he is already in his shroud, or the garments that shall serve him in lieu of one.
