Masquerades of Impairment: Charity as a Confidence Game

Abstract

Herman Melville's representation of disabled bodies in The Confidence-Man delineates a nineteenth-century economics of anatomy, charity, and social role. Jacksonian America provided an important venue for practices that were founded on empirical observation: craniometry, phrenology, palmistry, psychology, and physiognomy. All these sciences of the surface named external body features as reliable signs by which the identity of a person could be fixed and known. While The Confidence-Man does not make an overt political critique on behalf of disabled people as a marginalized group, it does introduce disability, not only as a narrative device, but also as a disruption of rationales of national personhood and morality. Because disability came to be construed as a tragic embodiment that extracted individuals from productive membership in a capitalist economy, people with physical and cognitive differences found themselves controlled by new terms reflecting the emergent concepts of modern charity inherent in the industrial U.S. In this period, ideas about disabled people changed fairly drastically: their livelihood and integration were no longer perceived as a familial and community issue, and they were to be officially classified by techniques adopted from objectifying taxonomies of the body. Named as members of a deficient population, disabled bodies were to be managed by private organizations as well as state and federal agencies. This historical transition marks a critical moment in American approaches to disability issues and disabled people, and it serves as a context for Melville's portrayal of the detection strategies employed in the oversight of charity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, practices of community support for poverty and the classification of bodily unsuitability for labor gave way to intrusive managerial attitudes toward diverse human physicalities. Whereas the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to approach human differences from the religious standpoint of the "strong" taking care of the "weak," the nineteenth century approached issues of dependency as a disservice to a nation that must invest in its manifest destiny. In this respect, U.S. responses to physical and cognitive impairments shifted from a relatively benign formula, the interdependency of human lives in one's immediate community, to one of moral and community judgment.11 In The Discovery of the Asylum, David Rothman argues that debates about public responsibility for those who were ill or incapacitated during the seventeenth and eighteenth century largely revolved around questions of looking out for one's own members. Disability and poverty did not turn one into a pariah in need of outcasting. Families and communities were expected to provide support for those who could not support themselves. Most poverty discussions developed around the definition of membership in order to release communities from having to support vagrants and paupers who might migrate into the settlement. See David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971); Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Those classified as economically dependent — because they could not participate in rigid social roles without significant revision to modes of work, habitat, and socialization rituals — became pariahs. Families were held culpable for the unpreparedness of their members for vigorous national participation. Furthermore, charity discourses of this period often held out faulty lifestyles as the source of impairments, therefore finding both families and individuals culpable for bodily and cognitive attributes considered deviant. Melville's entrance into this debate in The Confidence-Man hinges on four distinct critiques relevant to the cultural production of disabled bodies: 1) by conflating charity and confidence exchanges as economic activities with moral repercussions; 2) as a critique of charity systems that excluded recipients from participating as national citizens; 3) as an exposé of capitalist altruism that markets products and services through opportune references to the alleviation of human suffering; and 4) as a narrative device that can unmoor fixed patterns of belief and roles. As the overarching theory that connects these critiques, our analysis uses Michel Serres's theory of parasitic economies as an exposé of inequitable power relations at work in nineteenth century U.S. capitalism. Serres's inversion of the host/guest relationship provides a context for comprehending Melville's own tactical inversions of giver and receiver, con game and gift, donor and recipient. The Confidence-Man wages warfare on physiognomy for presuming, on behalf of scientific and national knowledge, the reliability of bodily appearances as a means to evaluate persons. In doing so, Melville's narrative returns to a critique of the cultural practices that Ishmael had dismissed in Moby-Dick as "semi-sciences" and "passing fables"22 In "'Too Much of a Cripple,'" David Mitchell argues that Ishmael aborted efforts to apply the sciences of physiognomy and phrenology to the interpretation of the whale. After demonstrating that these sciences of the visible have nothing to contribute to the understanding of the whale, Ishmael brushes them off as "semi-sciences" (Moby-Dick 345) that "like every other human science is but a passing fable" (347). Melville's return to these subjects in The Confidence-Man helps to demonstrate the influence such practices continued to have on nineteenth century interpretive methods. Because disabled people were viewed as possessing bodily and cognitive deviances that expressed the corruption of their souls, they were particularly at risk for dehumanizing treatment produced by the analysis of appearances. See David Mitchell, "Too Much of a Cripple: Ahab, Dire Bodies, and the Language of Prosthesis in Moby-Dick,"Leviathan 1.1 (1999): 5-22. in order to interrogate the use of assessments of physicality in making moral appraisals and economic decisions. Melville takes up these critiques of visual assessment in order to foreground the deceptions of bodies, and in order to evaluate capitalist charity exchanges that not only reimburse, but also produce socially inequitable bodies. As a result, The Confidence-Man interrogates the effort to make disability a sign of human depravity. It does so by depicting non-eligible body anatomies as the impetus for a conspicuous "charity"—one that does not undo, but sustains, the self-interested goals of capital exchange. In this case, audiences pay for their status by donating to the most severely performed disability. Such a practice exemplifies what historian Paul Longmore (1997) defines as conspicuous contribution: a cultural ritual where the "economically able" garishly donate in public venues to help disabled people and bolster their own celebrity. Within these economic rituals, "disability" itself becomes a matter of performed severity making disability a spectacle of competing body deficiencies. In order to capture the array of interrelated beliefs that disability spawns, Melville begins with a rarity in narrative literature: an array of disabled characters occupying a shared social (and narrative) space. The unusual nature of such a public gathering causes the man in the ruby-colored velvet vest to exclaim, "You – pish! Why will the captain suffer these begging fellows on board?" (NN CM 28). An assemblage of multiply disabled bodies provides the opportunity to represent disability in a less allegorical manner than a reader finds with characters such as the prostheticized Ahab or the stammering Billy Budd. The staging of such a multiplicity also provides an unprecedented moment where marked and disqualifying human features demand attention in the narrative in a way that makes disability integral to social interpretation. Usually, as we show in Narrative Prosthesis, the story of disability occurs with respect to a single character identified by physical or cognitive differences that mark him/her as an object in need of narrative attention—a kind of discursive rehabilitation. Disability is consistently explored as a story of rare exception. By approaching disability as a formula—one exceptional character at a time—literature reinforces our sense of disability as an isolated bodily deficiency or personal misfortune. The result of cordoning off disability undermines the social urgency of inclusion and social justice with respect to disabled people as a group. Still, modern plot formulas have readers steadily imbibe disability stories one character at a time. Disability often serves merely as a device of characterization, with physical and cognitive idiosyncrasy allowing a character to stand out against an otherwise anonymous backdrop of homogeneous, non-disabled bodies. This representational tradition of disability militates against the idea that physical and cognitive differences persist in human communities and across social periods. Without access to representations of bodies as variable and vulnerable, disability representation obscures the necessary demand that communities can and do accommodate multiplicity in the body politic. Disability can become fixed to a single narrative function–that of the avenger, or the flip-side of the pathetic and deserving recipient of charity. Narrative disabilities, with the death or cure of the literary "patient," allow audiences to participate in the illusion of social acceptance without contemplating the material and social dynamics by which some have been made to occupy bodies marked as excessive–bodies recognized as more suitable for fiction than social policy. In staging a convention of cripples aboard the Fidèle, The Confidence-Man not only diverges from the traditional portrayal of disability singularity but also exposes the dependency of the nation on those defined as biologically inferior. Disabled people represent prototypical non-producers in exchange economies because the terms of their social participation often exceed a system's willingness to accommodate them. Disabled people are parasitical, or so runs the narrative of Capitalism, and their efforts at subsistence within an exchange-based system at least offers those recognized as productive participants (the benefactor class) leverage in the social performance of beneficence. The Confidence-Man unveils disability's centrality to achieving this goal by examining the degree to which bodies marked as deviant provide an opportunity to solidify other social actors' beliefs in their own moral goodness and proximity to normative ideals. In other words, the benefactor (productive) classes rely on those defined as "non-productive" to secure their own social value. Through this inversion of social reliances, Melville's tract situates the confidence game as that which unveils dependency as a reversible game. To demonstrate dependency as a fluctuating social investment, two discourses compete for attention in The Confidence-Man: charity and confidence. The opening chapter situates both terms within literal proximity to anticipate the narrative's argument about their intertwined history. As the passengers gather into various cliques on deck, a "Deaf-Mute in cream-colors" holds up a chalkboard confidently proclaiming charity as a universal good. At the same time a barber opens shop by posting a shingle that declares "No Trust" (the flip side of confidence) to discourage potential clients seeking a haircut on credit. Both signs square off as competing appeals to the moral and economic instincts of the passengers aboard the Fidèle. Yet, while the staging of these two discourses seems antithetical — the former appeals to a biblical good while the latter refuses all faith in the guarantee of future payment — both signs espouse an absolutist principle for their respective audiences. According to the Deaf-Mute's sign, Charity is always a positive virtue while the barber's capitalist instincts refuse trust in every case. An either/or interpretive system is inaugurated and the story sets out to test both principles as an experiment in the validity of American faith in absolutes. To draw the terms of charity and confidence into a shared lineage with one another, the third-person narrator points out that the assembled crowd receives each claim in markedly distinct ways. While the Deaf-Mute is jostled and ignored by those passing him and his multiple disabilities heighten the perception of his "singularity, if not lunacy" (NN CM 5), the barber's equally "mute" posting elicits no such suspicion. In fact, as the narrator explains, the barber's "illuminated pasteboard sign" (an intimation of Ahab's reference to the artificiality of pasteboard masks) provokes no "corresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and still less, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of being a simpleton" (NN CM 5). By virtue of this contrast, Melville places the reader between incommensurable universes where parallel acts fail to elicit equivalent responses. The Deaf-Mute's body, not his references to charity, distance him from the mainstream because disability marks one as excessively deviant. The passengers aboard the Fidèle note both signs and determine that one is unwelcome while sloughing off the other as routine. The Deaf-Mute's incursion provokes alarm and an open effort to disdain his textual declarations on behalf of charity, while the barber's act is received as participating in the normal course of economic affairs. Each message could be dismissed as "self interested": the Capitalist in the guise of the barber provides a desirable service for his own economic remuneration, while the Deaf-Mute may be making claims on behalf of charity to redress his personal destitution (although this motive is never literally solidified in the opening chapters). Yet only the Deaf-Mute's message is greeted with suspicion. The horror of the revelation that the "man in cream-colours" is "not only dumb but also deaf" transforms him into an object to be shunned. His appearance overrides the content of his message as the crowd realizes that he is an object of charity and not just an espouser of its virtues: "Meanwhile, he with the slate continued moving slowly up and down, not without causing some stares to change into jeers, and some jeers into pushes, and some pushes into punches" (NN CM 6). Regardless of the content—one could easily become suspicious of a sign such as "No Trust" as product of commercial distrust in a capitalist system—the disabled body plays a key role in the reception of the message, and thus, the prime value of charity is excluded while the prohibition on credit makes no impact upon topside economic relations. Despite their antithetical receptions both declarations appeal to modes of faith. Neither can secure empirical evidence of their intrinsic value: a divine deity can be proven to exist no more than capital can assert its basis in anything other than symbolic value. This play of surfaces — Charity chalkboard and "No Trust" sign — establishes a key conflict that continues for the remainder of Melville's story. The two messages represent a squaring off of religious and economic systems. Yet, both charity and credit depend upon a future tense of reimbursement for one's effort — in relation to charity the bestower will be rewarded in the afterlife while credit (or trust) will be paid back at a later date for a service delivered in the present. These parallels establish credit and charity as related forces within a market economy, and connect the two terms within a shared cultural genealogy. Their interchange marks the point at which moral and economic systems converge and bolster each other. Not only does the disabled body draw out suspicions about calls to charity, it also spawns social speculation as to the meanings ascribed to bodily differences. Once the Deaf-Mute has retired on a vacant ladder to take a nap, the crowd above him begins to speculate on the meaning of his identity. From innocence to monstrosity each passenger takes his/her turn at imposing a definition on the Deaf-Mute as a figure of difference. The responses run the full circuit of cultural possibilities for interpreting the disabled body: "ODD FISH!""Who can he be?""Uncommon countenance.""Green prophet from Utah.""Humbug!""Singular innocence.""Means something.""Spirit-rapper.""Moon-calf.""Piteous" (NN CM 7). What bolsters each contention is a belief that deafness and muteness "means something." The figure's differences — although largely invisible in a physical sense — prompt efforts to interpret a metaphysical principle informing disabled identity. Like the later stories of racial difference involving the Native American termagant Goneril and John Mooredock's disquisitions on Indian-hating, disability signals something amiss in the universe, and the on-lookers instinctively set about the process of getting-to-the-bottom of the mystery. The "mystery" of disability is never just a question of how divergent bodies come to be; there is always an implication of the entire community in the attribution of difference (Stiker 40), as if a deviance in the accepted order of things implies that society must master difference in order to defuse some harbinger of things to come. Efforts to define the meaning of the Deaf-Mute's body While participate in the game of making his differences in a no is the in an multiplicity of and the effort to difference is The the opportunity to their By approaching disability as a cultural effort to a of into an we The overarching as the confidence game can be from multiple social and meanings also Efforts to an between physical and Melville's work within the context of nineteenth-century physiognomy has a social it came to be as an empirical science in the eighteenth century the of efforts to into reliable physical features as of and thus, the external body could be into a means of the otherwise of an moral As a of interpretation developed to the of that to into the body as the and physiognomy the body as a reliable textual system to be by and and a body — one that the social of disability — a of human on the interpretation of physical and differences. The Deaf-Mute may be or a but all to his Once identified as the Deaf-Mute's figure is into a within their difference to the and sense of in their own well As the passengers exchange their of man in they also solidify their membership in the of the The Deaf-Mute's the proximity to bodily questions of social while Melville the as being a an of all of the (NN CM disability a degree of difference that be this the point is not which meaning be ascribed to the appearance of a disabled body, but that the of disability provokes an interpretive social into The disabled characters are the of on the as the narrator explains, is a not often from so an as (NN CM The appearance of disability social relations that might otherwise as and as in the and body Ahab's prostheticized body into its The Confidence-Man also holds out disability as an exceptional difference. Yet, Ahab is to a as a disabled the latter work an of the that disability to a Capitalist The for this in the representation of disability may be for in a of but have upon the that Melville between the of Moby-Dick and The His back and he a of in his and he for a significant period as a It during this time that Melville's also to about his Yet, while have to the of The Confidence-Man to these bodily we that Melville's of his body him to interrogate his own ideas of The change that marks the time between and disability as a social identity on a with in the and the story became a for this new relationship in the way that racial relations be in the passengers the man in to the of a deviant or t

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.