Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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“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.
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