Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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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