Literary critics have consistently attempted to account for the strangeness of Isabel's language by placing Herman Melville's Pierre in the context of “the thrillers of the times” and even more particularly “Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth's prolific domestic novels.” However, despite their impulse to pair Pierre with Southworth's fiction, scholars have not assessed the precise nature of the similarity between the two writers' projects and the possible cultural significance of their unlikely union. The above quotations provide a starting point for such an analysis by revealing that both writers are fascinated with the female voice and more specifically with the unprecedented power that listeners attribute to it because of its indeterminate position outside or beyond the body of the woman speaker. In this chapter I focus on the opportunities that this physically displaced or “disembodied” female voice creates for Southworth and Melville to formulate, within the domestic fiction that depends upon and perpetuates middle-class ideology, a radical critique of some of its major premises.