From Melville to Eddie Murphy: The Disability Con in American Literature and Film

Abstract

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has been closely examined with regard to nineteenth-century American politics, changing class structures, and the emergence of the "con man" as a contemporary trickster figure. 1 However, little or nothing has been said with regard to the role of disability in the novel, despite the proliferation of disabled characters in it.Yet at the time of the novel's composition, United States and European cultures were involved in a fundamental transformation of perceptions and attitudes toward disability that eventually produced our modern systems of rehabilitation and social entitlements.2 The historical convergence of this transformation with the emergence of the confidence man as a cultural figure is not coincidental either, for, as Deborah Stone notes, the emergence of "disability" as a coherent social category was integrally tied to notions of deception (23).

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