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2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century

From the entanglements and potent implications of Ellen Craft’s masquerade, we now move to consideration of the disability con writ large, in its peculiarly prominent cultural emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just four years after the Crafts’ escape, on July 8, 1849, an article appeared in the New York Herald describing the crimes of one William Thompson, better known as the “Confidence Man.”¹ While Thompson himself quickly faded from historical record, the moniker of confidence (or con) man persists to this day, describing a type of wily swindler whose success derives from his manipulation of others’ perceptions. Yet the central significance of disability in portrayals of the con man has rarely been noted or integrated into the many cogent analyses of how this figure emerged in the mid-nineteenth-century United States as a symbol of growing social anxieties driven by rapid changes in personal and geographic mobility, urbanization, and the breakdown of class- and appearance-based systems of knowledge.² These intersecting anxieties, which I have described as the crisis of identification, included deep fears about the deceptive potentials of disabled bodies, and thus cultural portrayals of con men have included the disability con as a central and recurring element.³ By examining one key literary portrayal of the disability con man, in Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, this chapter introduces some of the key tensions integral to fantasies of identification: tensions between body and text, truth and appearance, science and social relationships.

The Confidence Man is notable for a proliferation of characters with real and assumed physical disabilities, which has only recently garnered critical attention.⁴ Attention to the disability con in the novel thus is an ideal window into the relationship of disability to the social crisis of mobility and belief that produced the figure of the con man.⁵ Melville’s manipulation of disability in his novel points to the inherence of bodily identity in the growing problem of how to manage social relations between individuals no longer clearly regulated into economic and physical spheres, and thus no longer easily identifiable. Like Samuel Otter, I read Melville’s novel “as a revealing structure that shows how nineteenth-century Americans articulated their world” (Melville’s Anatomies 3); however, I argue that the disabled body is as crucial to such analysis as the raced and classed body, and that in fact these bodily formations are intimately and inseparably enmeshed. As Lennard J. Davis observes, “disability, as we know the concept, is really a socially driven relation to the body that became relatively organized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Enforcing Normalcy 3). Published in 1857, The Confidence Man testifies to a country and culture not only verging on massive racial and economic disruption but also navigating a fundamental transformation of perceptions and attitudes toward disability that eventually produced our modern systems of rehabilitation and social entitlements.⁶ This transformation, predicated on the fantasy of easily identifiable and governable disabled bodies, notably coincided with the emergence of the confidence man as an influential cultural figure.

As Deborah Stone notes, the codification of “disability” as a coherent social category was integrally tied to notions of deception (23). Stone observes that the need to regulate both disability and vagrancy—two historically entwined concepts—emerged during the transition to modern capitalism as a response to greater social and physical mobility. She makes this point particularly with regard to begging: “Given its connection to deception, at least in the common understanding, the phenomenon of begging must have been a threat to the social order in another very profound way. It challenged people’s confidence that they could know the truth” (33, my emphasis). Stone’s conclusions indicate the importance of disability for understanding the confidence man as a figure for cultural anxieties over issues of identity, truth, and community (Halttunen 1–7; Lenz 22; Lindberg 5).

The remarkable correspondence between the history of disability and that of the confidence man suggests that the presence of characters with disabilities in Melville’s novel is crucial to his exploration of “American social activity [as] a confidence game” (Lindberg 45). In fact I argue that the trope of disability functions centrally in Melville’s exploration of the real and the fake, body and text, truth and language. By portraying his characters’ physical disabilities as uncertain, contested, and linguistically constructed, he interpellates the reader into a system of confidence in which identity and truth are integrally linked to bodily form. And by connecting those figures to the central character of the confidence man, a wily and articulate antihero, Melville both enacts and undermines the historical linkage between disability and victimhood, embodied in the figure of the pathetic disabled beggar.

Thus the novel not only portrays the new American figure of the con man but provides a new version of a historically persistent character: the fake-disabled swindler. As Stone’s observations suggest, this character has been most persistently associated with begging. We can read the long European history of the fake-disabled beggar in The Prince and the Pauper’s sixteenth-century characters, “the Bat and Dick Dot-and-go-One,” and find evidence of these figures’ nineteenth-century import by their appearance in Twain’s 1881 novel. And in the world of The Confidence Man we can see considerable social tension around the issue of fraudulent beggars, such as the character Mark Winsome’s response to a Poe-like beggar, whom he calls “a cunning vagabond, who picks up a vagabond living by adroitly playing the madman” (168).

Yet the version of the fake-disabled swindler that emerges through the figure of the con man is significantly different from the previous stereotype of the fake-disabled beggar. In both Stone’s historical survey and Twain’s fictional presentation, the fake-disabled beggar appears as a shifty vagrant who, having already occupied or been consigned to the social role of beggar, then seeks to increase his or her profits by playing on public sympathy for the disabled. The disability con man, by contrast, refuses to occupy any stable social role: he plays on social categories of identity through manipulation and masquerade, thus destabilizing fixed notions of ability/disability, rich/poor, and hero/villain. He refuses the victimhood traditionally associated with beggars and instead positions himself as mocking social critic.

I am speaking here primarily of the disability con man as he appears in American literature and culture, as a symbolic actor and literary convention that has both reflected and shaped our social conceptions in the past two centuries. Yet we can see the intersection of this shadowy cultural figure with the material, everyday world, from Hollywood films to television news exposés to Social Security benefits hearings. The distinction I have suggested between the age-old figure of the beggar and the relatively new figure of the disability con man is mirrored in contemporary law enforcement, as in the title of a 1993 article from Police Chief magazine, “The Street Beggar: Victim or Con Artist?” (Luckenbach 126).

As I discuss in chapter 3, the power of this new figure is such that, by the late twentieth century, the disability con man had become so ubiquitous (and popular) a figure in contemporary film and television that one can hardly find a visual narrative about the confidence game that does not incorporate some element of the disability con. It seems that one trope simply cannot appear without the other, so entwined have they become in our cultural imagination. Furthermore this entwinement implies the reversal of its terms: if con men almost always pretend to be disabled, maybe disabled people are especially prone to con games. Such representational logic both reflects and shores up the “guilty until proven innocent” attitude that frames much modern discourse about physical ability: one is often assumed to be faking a disability unless and until it has been proved by either medical certification or obvious physical signs. Both means of proof are manipulated and challenged in The Confidence Man, and this novel offers a rich ground for an exploration of the origins and symbolic frameworks of the disability con.

Seeing the Disability Con

A number of disabled or fake-disabled figures appear in The Confidence Man, several of whom are generally interpreted as various guises or avatars of the confidence man himself. I will focus primarily on three characters, the mute, Black Guinea, and Thomas Fry (the “soldier of fortune”), introducing other characters as they relate to or illuminate these central figures. By analyzing these characters in the framework of cultural attitudes toward disability, I am departing from the general practice of Melville critics (and most literary critics to date) of treating disabilities as metaphors for other aspects of character—such as race, class, or political affiliation—rather than as being about disability itself.⁷ In doing so, I am not denying the force of such metaphors or Melville’s undeniable use of them; rather I am suggesting that such analyses are necessarily incomplete without a consideration of why and how various disabilities have come to signify certain symbolic properties—a consideration that necessitates analysis of the creation and mediation of the category of disability itself. This becomes an even more complex undertaking when the category under discussion is that of fake disability.

Helen Trimpi, for instance, offers a compelling interpretation of both “crippled” Black Guinea and the “man with the wooden leg” as figures for political campaigners. She cites the 1860 cartoon reproduced in Figure 2.1 to demonstrate that “it is fairly common in political cartoons of this period to represent a candidate for office as crippled in one or both legs—i.e., having to ‘stump it’” (Trimpi 51, plate 24).

Yet a closer examination of the cartoon shows that the figure apparently using a wooden leg (Stephen Douglas) has two intact legs of his own and is merely kneeling upon the wooden leg. Similarly his opponent Breckenridge (though depicted leaning upon a cane, with a bandaged foot) also has intact legs, even as he is handed a wooden leg and told that “as Dug has taken the stump you must stump it too.” Thus these figures are not actually figures of disability, but of the disability con, meaning that the symbolic meaning they convey is twofold: the surface suggestion of “crippledom” carries associations of weakness, dependency, and victimhood, while the underlying message of “conning” voters implies deceit, fraud, and cunning. The conflation of these two symbolic meanings, which is evident in both the original cartoon and Trimpi’s interpretation, demonstrates the potency and persistence of the cultural confusion between “real” and “fake” disabilities. At no point in Trimpi’s otherwise excellent analysis does she mention the fact that no one in the cartoon is actually missing a leg. Nor does she distinguish in her analysis of the novel’s characters between Black Guinea’s apparently fake stumps and the man with the wooden leg’s apparently real one.

Figure 2.1. “‘Taking the Stump’ or Stephen in Search of His Mother.” Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Apparently is a key term here, of course. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down any reality in Melville’s novel: “Interpretation is a labyrinthine entanglement that yields no firm or definite result” (Bellis 166). Yet if we continue to keep the word “real” in quotation marks, we may attempt to distinguish between various layers of reality within the novel’s complex and shifting narrative. For example, it seems extremely likely that Black Guinea is an avatar of the confidence man; therefore neither his disability nor his blackness are “real.” Similarly it appears very likely that the soldier of fortune’s disability is “real,” due both to the appearance of his “interwoven paralyzed legs, stiff as icicles,” and to his narrative presentation, which lacks the irony accompanying descriptions of such characters as Black Guinea and the mute (The Confidence Man 79).

The mute, who appears in the opening sentence of the novel, remains a somewhat more ambiguous figure than either Black Guinea or the soldier of fortune. While a majority of critics consider the mute to be the first avatar of the confidence man, there is certainly no consensus. The significance of the mute remains a subject of speculation and disagreement among Melville critics today, much as it is to the “miscellaneous company” in the novel who gather around his sleeping figure in chapter 2; however, all agree that the mute “means something” (The Confidence Man 4).⁸ I would like to suggest that the mute functions as a portent of the novel’s ongoing concern with issues of physical ability and bodily integrity—a concern that, intertwined with racial, gendered, and economic factors, was at the core of the national struggle to define an American self in Melville’s time.

Although the title of the opening chapter, “A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi,” prepares the reader to immediately encounter a character who cannot speak, the mute’s muteness goes unsignified until he produces his slate in the fifth paragraph. In contrast, the mute is at once marked racially as white by the insistent repetition of light colors: he wears “cream-colors,” his cheek is “fair,” his hair “flaxen,” and his hat is made of “white” fur (The Confidence Man 1). In addition, the mute is marked as a vagrant, that is, one who lacks the elements of ownership and independence that define the American bourgeois citizen and who is therefore set apart from society: “He had neither trunk, valise, carpet bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. . . . It was plain that he was, in the extremist sense of the word, a stranger” (1). Thus by the time the mute encounters the placard offering a reward for the apprehension of the confidence man in the third paragraph, he has already been marked as both an economic outsider and a racial insider—a crucial combination that, I would argue, defines the ideal recipient of charity emerging from nineteenth-century American ambivalence over the proper liberal response to the disabled.⁹ Yet at the time of the novel’s setting, this projected ideal had yet to take root in the cultural consciousness, and the passengers’ responses to the mute, while ranging from relatively benign to openly hostile, never take the form of actual donations. Rather the passengers find him “harmless enough, would he keep to himself, but not wholly unobnoxious as an intruder,” and he is also described as “simple,” “innocent,” “humble,” “gentle,” “lamb-like,” “inarticulate,” and “pathetic” (2-4). Thus Melville portrays the mute in terms that correspond to the stereotype of the pathetic disabled beggar.¹⁰

In the passengers’ comments on the mute while he is asleep, however, we see a tripartite mixture of responses, ranging from the sympathetic (“Poor fellow,” “Singular innocence,” “Piteous”) to the suspicious (“Humbug,” “Trying to enlist interest,” “Beware of him,” “Escaped convict, worn out with dodging”) and the mythic, natural, and supernatural (“Casper Hauser,” “Green prophet from Utah,” “Spirit-rapper,” “Kind of daylight Endymion,” “Jacob dreaming at Luz”) (The Confidence Man 4). These “epitaphic comments” illustrate the historical circumstances described by Rosemarie Garland Thomson:

Secular thinking and a more accurate scientific understanding of physiology and disease prevented nineteenth-century Americans from interpreting disability as the divine punishment it had been labeled in earlier epochs. . . . The social category “disabled” is a grudging admission of human vulnerability in a world no longer seen as divinely determined, a world where self-government and individual progress purportedly prevail. Such a classification elicits much ambivalence from a national consciousness committed to equating virtue with independent industry. (Extraordinary Bodies 47–48)

Thus the three categories of the passengers’ comments—sympathetic, suspicious, and mythic—correspond to the three primary social responses to disability at that time. Most scholars agree that the mythic or divine interpretation of the disabled figure was on the decline by the 1850s, eventually to be replaced by the uneasy alliance of sympathy (compassion, charity) and suspicion (resentment, stigma).¹¹ In order to reconcile these contradictory responses, nineteenth-century social structures began to employ “rigorous, sometimes exclusionary supervision of people obliged to join the ranks of the ‘disabled’ . . . in an effort to distinguish between genuine ‘cripples’ and malingerers” (48–49). By the turn of the century these categories will have become highly regularized to clearly distinguish the “real” disabled, for whom one must show charity, from the “fake” disabled, against whom one can freely vent all one’s resentment for their nonproductivity, compounded by righteous anger over their deception.

Yet at the time of Melville’s writing these distinctions were not yet clear. Nor was the mute’s aspect of the correct type to elicit contributions from his audience. (Disabled veterans were the most likely to inspire generosity, as shown later in the story of the soldier of fortune.) The mute is notably noninteractive with the other passengers (in contrast with Black Guinea’s begging displays and impassioned speeches of self-defense), but when he does attempt communication, he is greeted with “stares and jeers” (The Confidence Man 3). Furthermore the mute uses his slate to produce only snippets of charitable cliché: “Charity thinketh no evil,” and so on (2-3). Thus, in marked contrast to the confidence man’s other personae, the mute never becomes a speaking subject but is instead a mouthpiece of cant, a figure of pure textuality. The mute thus becomes a key figure for understanding the use of language by Melville’s disabled and fake-disabled characters, to whom we will return in more detail later.

The next figure of the disability con, Black Guinea, is much more successful at eliciting alms from the steamboat passengers. The flip side of this success, however, is that suspicions arise about the “realness” of Black Guinea’s disability—a point that never arose with regard to the mute since he does not seem to profit from his disability. The passengers’ suspicions of Black Guinea appear to arise quite abruptly, following an extended period of interaction during which they accept his role as a dehumanized object of charity. (He is described most often as a dog but also as a steer, a sheep, and an elephant; The Confidence Man 7-9) Once another character, the man with the wooden leg, makes his accusation, however, the passengers quickly begin to suspect that Guinea may be a “white operator, betwisted and painted up,” for the words of accusation serve to release the passengers’ latent anxiety regarding both racial and bodily masquerade (10).

In this context, the fear that the extension of social support to those with disabilities would encourage fraud was amplified by many centuries of symbolic association of physical disabilities with evil portent, moral failing, and sexual transgression.¹² While it may seem illogical that the association of “real” disability with evil would lead to a suspicion that certain disabled persons were faking their conditions, this metaphorical tangle has emerged necessarily from the strenuous efforts to define the boundaries between real and fake disabilities. The extremely contingent nature of disability itself means that any such boundaries are hopelessly fluid, allowing symbolic and actual meanings to bleed freely across them—a process that continues to this day.¹³ In addition, and through a further tortured logic, the symbolic association of disability with immorality, dishonesty, and laziness is reflected and produced by racist ideologies that associate these characteristics with nonwhite peoples, ideologies voiced in Melville’s novel through such characters as the Indian-hater: “Indian lying, Indian theft, Indian double dealing, Indian fraud and perfidy” (The Confidence Man 126) and descriptions of the evil Goneril, who is repeatedly compared to an “Indian” or “squaw” (50-53). Thus, just as the very fact of Guinea’s disability symbolically suggests he is faking it, so paradoxically the fact of his blackness may symbolically suggest that he must be faking that as well.

In all these cases the tension produced is between inner and outer states of being, a tension that pervades the novel and surfaces in many instances, such as the Philosophical Intelligence Officer’s analogical defense of boys, in which he proceeds “by analogy from the physical to the moral” (The Confidence Man 104), Mark Winsome’s metaphor of the snake’s rattle as a warning “label” (163), and the barber’s disquisition on the false nature of man as seen through the use of wigs, fake mustaches, and hair dyes (199). Mitchell and Snyder thus read Melville’s novel as a critique of the “sciences of the surface,” which dominated both medical and social understandings of the relationship between bodily surfaces and inner essences during the nineteenth century (Cultural Locations 37–39).¹⁴ Phrenology, physiognomy, craniometry, and palmistry all claimed to give essential information about a person’s moral character and abilities by examining external features such as head shape and hand contours. Indeed much of The Confidence Man lends itself to such a critique; yet the fact that Mitchell and Snyder do not distinguish between real and fake disabilities in their analysis means that its full implications are not yet realized. This becomes an even more urgent issue when we consider how race and disability function in mutually constitutive ways to further undercut the assumptions of surface identifications, not only within the novel but in contemporary critics’ interpretations of its meanings.