Bodies of Reform

The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

James B. Salazar

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814741320
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity.

Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

1

Philanthropic Taste

Race and Character in Herman Melville’s
The Confidence-Man

All the nice and subtle questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.

—David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature¹

To interpret someone’s character (handwriting) is to interpret his character (physiognomy) is to interpret his character (personality) is to interpret his character (some characteristic text he has written), in a perpetual round of figure for figure. To read character is to read character is to read character is to read character.

—J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread²

My study begins with Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a text that seems to announce—and perhaps to mourn—the closing of the era of character. Set on the riverboat Fidèle as it travels up the Mississippi River one April Fool’s Day, The Confidence-Man portrays a series of swindles perpetrated by one singular, and quite “original,” confidence man. The confidence man—in Melville’s text but also as a well-known social type—is named for his signature method of assuming an identity and then garnering the confidence of strangers in order to extract money from them—in The Confidence-Man in the form of donations to bogus charities, purchases of counterfeit stock or worthless patent medicine, investments in pyramid schemes, or a simple loan from one trusting, even if newfound, friend to another. The emergence of the confidence man in literature, popular periodicals, and advice manuals of the 1850s has been seen as marking a breakdown of character as a regulatory principle within the social and economic exchanges and far-flung market culture in America’s expanding empire of the mid-nineteenth century.³ Melville’s portrait of the facility and ease with which the confidence man is able to pass off his counterfeit character has thus been seen as a particularly sustained diagnosis of not only a new and troublingly deceptive social type but a more troubling crisis of confidence in the concept of character itself.

Generations of critics have sought to understand the original character of the confidence man himself, therefore, by analyzing how that character is made possible by the uniquely American civic space figured by the Mississippi riverboat Fidèle, on which the peculiar events of this April Fool’s Day take place. Ships have, for Melville, always borne more than their manifests declare, and the “faithful” Fidèle is no exception: it is burdened with no less a task than representing the diverse characters and attenuated exchanges of America’s expanding empire. And what most defines this civic space, Melville insists in the opening pages of the text, is the dizzying “strangeness” of its social and economic exchanges. What most defines this “ship of fools” is that it is, at bottom, a ship that, “though always full of strangers, … continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange.”⁴ The “strangeness” of the Fidèle has thus been understood as describing a broader crisis of character, as the familiar, stratified relations of republican society were being transformed by the new attenuations and mediations of improved long-distance transportation and communication, the representations of a rapidly growing journalistic media, and the social dislocations of urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration.⁵ As strangers increasingly interacting across regional, cultural, and racial divides, individuals could no longer make recourse to the sedimented reputation of familiar members of a local community and thus grew increasingly reliant on the ability to read at a glance the character of strangers. The “strangeness” of late antebellum society thus made confidence between strangers an increasingly necessary, yet precarious, condition of economic and social exchange.

The Confidence-Man thus charts the promise and peril of this reliance on the legibility of character at a time when the terms of that legibility were themselves increasingly unreliable. Rather than simply portraying the social implications of this crisis of character, however, Melville interrogates the cultural work performed by the rhetoric of character, this chapter argues, by restaging its formal logic in the textual and interpretive dynamics produced by the novel itself. Melville’s broader fascination with the concept of character is evident in many of his literary works, from the identity-altering tattoos of Typee to the physiognomic taxonomies of Moby-Dick to the phrenological fascinations of Billy Budd. But in The Confidence-Man, Melville explores the cultural work performed by the rhetoric of character by aligning that work with the operations of literary characterization itself. This is most apparent in the novel’s three metafictional chapters (14, 33, 44), in which the narrator, in unexpected and seemingly candid asides to the reader, explicitly defends what seem to be improbable moments in the text by reflecting on the improbabilities, inconsistencies, and impenetrabilities common both to the act of literary characterization and to the social constitution of character. More significantly, Melville draws on the conventions of literary representation to foreground and to examine critically the interpretative conditions necessary for character’s appearance as a social object. Melville does this by predicating the coherency of his narrative on the presumption that there is a single, masterful character behind the many disguises and “characters” of the confidence man, while also studiously failing to confirm such an assumption. In aligning the manipulative intentions of the confidence man with the depth of literary character to which Melville continually points but never reveals, The Confidence-Man thus raises, I argue, the question of character’s fictional construction, a construction as important to the novel form as to the liberal agency such a form was imagined to inspire.⁶

The confidence man’s unmatched ability to capitalize on any situation and turn it to his profit has led many critics to describe him not as a national “threat” but as an extreme, even parodic, embodiment of the self-interest and enterprising pluck that were being identified with the “American character” as the individualistic ideals of liberalism were eclipsing the earlier republican ethos of civic virtue. Or as one critic of The Confidence-Man has more flatly declared, “Americans have always been, in one sense or another, confidence men.”⁷ The seemingly infinite malleability of the confidence man’s character similarly evokes, as a form of self-negation, the universal perspective and formal equality that define the character of the modern citizen. But what is most striking about The Confidence-Man is that it also figures the confidence man’s strategic agency in terms of an ability to read other characters within the novel, characters who are much more cursorily sketched. By organizing each of the chapters of the first half around the contrast between the impenetrability—and superior strategic agency—of the confidence man, and the all-too-transparent character of his many victims, Melville frames the novel around a contrast between two distinct genres of literary characterization: the character sketch and the romance novel.⁸ We thus perceive the transparency of the various characters sketched in the early chapters, while also seeing such a transparency appropriated by a confidence man whose inner motives and intentions must be assumed by the reader yet can never ultimately be confirmed or revealed. Rather than integrating these two generic forms into the conventional narrative form of the modern novel, however, Melville separates and juxtaposes them in order to foreground the dynamic that drives the broader rhetoric of character itself. Melville emphasizes, in other words, the dependency of the liberal agency figured by the confidence man—his capacities for character reading and the universality embodied in his ever-changing character—on the production and consumption of a stream of completely legible character types.

In delineating the literary dynamics of Melville’s novel, this chapter ultimately aims to make visible the racializing effects of the confidence man’s spectacular self-constitution as both a social agent and a literary character. In the opening pages of the novel, Melville portrays the Fidèle and the many characters it conveys as representative of the demographic diversity of the Jacksonian era:

[On it] there was not lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure.… Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets … Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists … grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. (9)

The opening description of the Fidèle establishes it as a public space defined by its ethnic and racial diversity, a place where “there was no lack of variety, … a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man” (10). What such a framing suggests is that the agency of the impenetrably deep and supremely self-interested confidence man finds its expression among and in contrast to individuals defined by the particularities of race and ethnicity. We might thus read The Confidence-Man as an allegorization of the relationship of the liberal agency of the confidence man to the particularities of race and ethnicity that exclude individuals from the privileges of that agency; we might read it, in other words, as an allegorization of the “distinctly modern, epistemological interdependence of universalism and particularism” through which, as David Kazanjian and others have argued, the privileges of citizenship are distributed in the United States.⁹

But what is most conspicuous about this insistence on the diversity of the riverboat Fidèle is that none of the novel’s characters end up representing that diversity. What is most conspicuous about Melville’s invocation of the category of race is that it presumes to mark everything on board that “ship of fools” and yet fails to be the distinguishing mark of its particular passengers. “Black Guinea” of course walks its diegetic decks, but he only serves to foreground the unreliability of racial marking altogether. His minstrel performances are suspected to be those of a “white masquerading as a black” (31). What has often been viewed as one of Melville’s most satirically cutting works of social critique, in other words, seems at first glance less an interrogation of Jacksonian pluralism than a kind of self-enclosed game in which white men genially conspire to out-charm one another.¹⁰

Such a refusal to make racial difference the distinguishing feature of what Melville otherwise insists is a “piebald parliament” of diverse character types might announce a repudiation of the concept of race and its visual economies of social classification. It might, if such a refusal did not belie the persistent reliance on the figure of race in the central dilemmas of the novel. In a novel perhaps most famous for its indecipherability, questions of race and ethnicity emerge most conspicuously at moments of possible thematic and formal resolution. Racial attitudes not only define the two central figures of the novel (the Indian-hating “misanthrope” and the “philanthropic” “taster of races”), but nested stories of racial encounter are often positioned as temptingly rare allegorical explanations of characters or clarifications of narrative or philosophical ambiguities.¹¹ Of those interpolated tales, the story of the Indian-hater, Colonel John Moredock, has provoked perhaps the greatest critical debate. At least since Elizabeth Foster’s landmark reading of the novel, the task of exegetically disentangling the “inverted allegory” of the Indian-hater has been a key critical strategy of making sense of Melville’s conceptual and literary sleights of hand or, conversely, of proving the insistent irresolvability of the novel.¹²

The story of the Indian-hater is reported by a “stranger” (later identified as Charlie Noble) to the self-described “philanthropist” and cosmopolitan “taster of races,” Frank Goodman, who dominates the second half of the novel as the final and culminating apotheosis of the confidence man. After overhearing a discussion between Goodman and his misanthropic counterpart, Pitch, the eavesdropping Charlie approaches the philanthropist to warn him of the dubious character of this “Missouri bachelor.” His warning takes shape as the story told to him by his father’s friend, the Judge James Hall (which he recalls “almost word for word”) of Colonel Moredock in particular and the “metaphysics” of Indian-hating in general. The story wraps up the episodic structure of the first half and inaugurates the new representational games of the second with its own tempting but questionable offer—an offer to puncture analogically the dissimulative surface of narration with an “explanatory” fable. The fable is most immediately offered as an explanation of the misanthropic character of Pitch, an explanation that also allegorically aligns the confidence man with the duplicity of the “Indian race.” This duplicity of character is what the misanthrope is said to “hate,” and the story has long been read simply as an allegory of the misanthropic critique of the confidence man’s duplicity, the racial dimensions often factored out as “mere” allegorical bearer.¹³

The story of the Indian-hater thus seems to confirm the conventional narrative of character’s historical decline by contrasting the performative mastery of social conventions that define the confidence man’s charismatic “personality” with the skeptical social misanthropy of the self-reliant “character.” While such a misanthropic character promises to defend against and even “exterminate” the corrupting influence of the confidence man, it is one that ultimately fades away and yields to the cultural dominance of the confidence man. And yet, the Indian-hater story troubles this historical narrative as much as it seems to affirm it. For although the confidence man emerges at the end of the novel the unvanquished master of circumstance, the story of the Indian-hater documents this ascendancy of the confidence man in much more ambivalent terms.

First, the misanthropic Indian-hater seeks to wipe out duplicity in and as the figure of the “Indian.” But the “authenticity” and sincerity that he offers in exchange are ultimately revealed as an avowed kind of genocidal sincerity. The nostalgic call for a return to the individualistic ideals of the self-reliant character that it might be said to make is thus shown to be one with spectacularly catastrophic and genocidal consequences. The story leaves us with the dilemma of having to choose, in other words, between the genocidal sincerity of the misanthrope and the “philanthropic” exploitations of the confidence man. Furthermore, the story offers a highly problematic figure to represent the ascendance of the philanthropic character. While the Indian-hater is represented as a historically antiquated and disappearing figure in the story, the “Indian character” of the confidence man seems equally endangered as an enduring cultural icon and more importantly as a historical reality given the Native American’s violent removal from, or containment on, the nation’s frontiers. What then are we to make of the seemingly empty gesture here of explanation, an explanation that only installs the dilemma of having to choose between a genocidal but “reliable” character and a “philanthropic” yet relentlessly exploitative one? More importantly, if the pivotal story of the Indian-hater is not itself the story of the confidence man’s ascendance, then how does the dilemma it produces provide the means for the ascendance of the philanthropic character? If we accept that the novel thematizes the dilemma of having to rely on a social assessment of character that can nonetheless never be secured, then what are we to make of such a conspicuous use of race to resolve this representational dilemma? How is race figured here as a consequence of the simultaneously literary and social problems of representation posed by the rhetoric of character itself? Why does the novel offer a story of racialization to resolve the problems of reliable character, and what might it mean if this apparent resolution turns out itself to be a kind of confidence game?

My aim, in pointing to the dilemma posed by the “explanation” of the Indian-hater story, is not to contest the pivotal significance that the Indian-hater story has in the thematic and formal texture of Melville’s novel or the allegorical force of its proffered resolution. Indeed, I argue that the story of the Indian-hater does resolve the central dialectical relation of the novel, the relation between the philanthropic character of the confidence man and the character of his one abiding foil, the misanthrope. But it does so only in order to show the costs of such a resolution. The failure of the explanation to explain is not simply another example of the text’s tautological web of self-canceling “moot points,” as William Ramsey carefully argues, but rather is a failure that shifts attention to the racializing consequences of such a drive to interpret the inscrutable text of character itself.¹⁴ The interpretive inference that a racially unmarked, uniquely self-reliant and consolidated agent lies behind the polymorphous masks of the confidence man, like the unmasking of the misanthrope’s self-reliant character, this chapter demonstrates, requires the endorsement of an imperial allegory of racial difference and the interpretive consolidation of racialized characters. The Confidence-Man thus models in the revelations and occlusions of its literary form the cultural work performed by the rhetoric of character itself.

Philanthropy’s Gift: A Federal Taste for Race

The opening chapter of The Confidence-Man, “A Mute Goes Aboard a Boat on the Mississippi,” introduces us to the textual nature and characteristic posture of the book’s title character, even if we are unsure whether we are meeting that character himself. The scene opens as “a man in cream-colours” who “was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger” (3) steps on board the riverboat Fidèle. What is less clear, h...