himself quickly faded from historical record, the moniker of confidence (or con) man persists to this day, describing a type of wily swindler whose success derives from his manipulation of others’ perceptions. Yet the central significance of disability in portrayals of the con man has rarely been noted or integrated into the many cogent analyses of how this figure emerged in the mid-nineteenth-century United States as a symbol of growing social anxieties driven by rapid changes in personal and geographic mobility, urbanization, and the breakdown of class- and appearance-based systems of knowledge.2 These intersecting anxieties, which I have described as the crisis of identification, included deep fears about the deceptive potentials of disabled bodies, and thus cultural portrayals of con men have included the disability con as a central and recurring element.3 By examining one key literary portrayal of the disability con man, in Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, this chapter introduces some of the key tensions integral to fantasies of identification: tensions between body and text, truth and appearance, science and social relationships.
The Confidence Man is notable for a proliferation of characters with real and assumed physical disabilities, which has only recently garnered critical attention.4 Attention to the disability con in the novel thus is an ideal window into the relationship of disability to the social crisis of mobility and belief that produced the figure of the con man.5 Melville’s manipulation of disability in his novel points to the inherence of bodily identity in the growing problem of how to manage social relations between individuals no longer clearly regulated into economic and physical spheres, and thus no longer easily identifiable. Like Samuel Otter, I read Melville’s novel “as a revealing structure that shows how nineteenth-century Americans articulated their world” (Melville’s Anatomies 3); however, I argue that the disabled body is as crucial to such analysis as the raced and classed body, and that in fact these bodily formations are intimately and inseparably enmeshed. As Lennard J. Davis observes, “disability, as we know the concept, is really a socially driven relation to the body that became relatively organized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Enforcing Normalcy 3). Published in 1857, The Confidence Man testifies to a country and culture not only verging on massive racial and economic disruption but also navigating a fundamental transformation of perceptions and attitudes toward disability that eventually produced our modern systems of rehabilitation and social entitlements.6 This transformation, predicated on the fantasy of easily identifiable and governable disabled bodies, notably coincided with the emergence of the confidence man as an influential cultural figure.
As Deborah Stone notes, the codification of “disability” as a coherent social category was integrally tied to notions of deception (23). Stone observes that the need to regulate both disability and vagrancy—two historically entwined concepts—emerged during the transition to modern capitalism as a response to greater social and physical mobility. She makes this point particularly with regard to begging: “Given its connection to deception, at least in the common understanding, the phenomenon of begging must have been a threat to the social order in another very profound way. It challenged people’s confidence that they could know the truth” (33, my emphasis). Stone’s conclusions indicate the importance of disability for understanding the confidence man as a figure for cultural anxieties over issues of identity, truth, and community (Halttunen 1–7; Lenz 22; Lindberg 5).
The remarkable correspondence between the history of disability and that of the confidence man suggests that the presence of characters with disabilities in Melville’s novel is crucial to his exploration of “American social activity [as] a confidence game” (Lindberg 45). In fact I argue that the trope of disability functions centrally in Melville’s exploration of the real and the fake, body and text, truth and language. By portraying his characters’ physical disabilities as uncertain, contested, and linguistically constructed, he interpellates the reader into a system of confidence in which identity and truth are integrally linked to bodily form. And by connecting those figures to the central character of the confidence man, a wily and articulate antihero, Melville both enacts and undermines the historical linkage between disability and victimhood, embodied in the figure of the pathetic disabled beggar.
Thus the novel not only portrays the new American figure of the con man but provides a new version of a historically persistent character: the fake-disabled swindler. As Stone’s observations suggest, this character has been most persistently associated with begging. We can read the long European history of the fake-disabled beggar in The Prince and the Pauper’s sixteenth-century characters, “the Bat and Dick Dot-and-go-One,” and find evidence of these figures’ nineteenth-century import by their appearance in Twain’s 1881 novel. And in the world of The Confidence Man we can see considerable social tension around the issue of fraudulent 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
