The Piazza
Details
"The Piazza" is Herman Melville's introductory story to The Piazza Tales, published in 1856. Like "The Old Manse" from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, it provides a poetical description of the author's actual residence, and serves as a framing device for the whole collection.
The story tells of a man who retreats to a secluded farm house. The property offers him a view of the surrounding mountains, but no piazza on which to sit and contemplate it. He has one built, and from his new vantage he notices a sparkle in the distance. Presuming it to be a cottage in some kind of "fairy land," he embarks on a journey to his hoped-for Shangri-la.
The story has been interpreted to be about thwarted dreams and the failure of reality to live up to the ideals of imagination. From this perspective, "The Piazza" is an inquiry into what happens when our stories – the naive products of our optimistic imaginations – run aground on the shoals of reality.
The Piazza Tales are summarized this way: "Sometimes Melville gives you trick endings.... But more often, he gives you trick realities. The world looks one way, and then he moves you about, and it looks different, though nothing has really changed."
The Piazza: ~13pp
This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.