itself. This becomes an even more complex undertaking when the category under discussion is that of fake disability.
Helen Trimpi, for instance, offers a compelling interpretation of both “crippled” Black Guinea and the “man with the wooden leg” as figures for political campaigners. She cites the 1860 cartoon reproduced in Figure 2.1 to demonstrate that “it is fairly common in political cartoons of this period to represent a candidate for office as crippled in one or both legs—i.e., having to ‘stump it’” (Trimpi 51, plate 24).
Yet a closer examination of the cartoon shows that the figure apparently using a wooden leg (Stephen Douglas) has two intact legs of his own and is merely kneeling upon the wooden leg. Similarly his opponent Breckenridge (though depicted leaning upon a cane, with a bandaged foot) also has intact legs, even as he is handed a wooden leg and told that “as Dug has taken the stump you must stump it too.” Thus these figures are not actually figures of disability, but of the disability con, meaning that the symbolic meaning they convey is twofold: the surface suggestion of “crippledom” carries associations of weakness, dependency, and victimhood, while the underlying message of “conning” voters implies deceit, fraud, and cunning. The conflation of these two symbolic meanings, which is evident in both the original cartoon and Trimpi’s interpretation, demonstrates the potency and persistence of the cultural confusion between “real” and “fake” disabilities. At no point in Trimpi’s otherwise excellent analysis does she mention the fact that no one in the cartoon is actually missing a leg. Nor does she distinguish in her analysis of the novel’s characters between Black Guinea’s apparently fake stumps and the man with the wooden leg’s apparently real one.
Figure 2.1. “‘Taking the Stump’ or Stephen in Search of His Mother.” Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Apparently is a key term here, of course. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down any reality in Melville’s novel: “Interpretation is a labyrinthine entanglement that yields no firm or definite result” (Bellis 166). Yet if we continue to keep the word “real” in quotation marks, we may attempt to distinguish between various layers of reality within the novel’s complex and shifting narrative. For example, it seems extremely likely that Black Guinea is an avatar of the confidence man; therefore neither his disability nor his blackness are “real.” Similarly it appears very likely that the soldier of fortune’s disability is “real,” due both to the appearance of his “interwoven paralyzed legs, stiff as icicles,” and to his narrative presentation, which lacks the irony accompanying descriptions of such characters as Black Guinea and the mute (The Confidence Man 79).
The mute, who appears in the opening sentence of the novel, remains a somewhat more ambiguous figure than either Black Guinea or the soldier of fortune. While a majority of critics consider the mute to be the first avatar of the confidence man, there is certainly no consensus. The significance of the mute remains a subject of speculation and disagreement among Melville critics today, much as it is to the “miscellaneous company” in the novel who gather around his sleeping figure in chapter 2; however, all agree that the mute “means something” (The Confidence Man 4).8 I would like to suggest that the mute functions as a portent of the novel’s ongoing concern with issues of physical ability and bodily integrity—a concern that, intertwined with racial, gendered, and economic factors, was at the core of the national struggle to define an American self in Melville’s time.
Although the title of the opening chapter, “A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi,” prepares the reader to immediately encounter a character who cannot speak, the mute’s muteness goes unsignified until he produces his slate in the fifth paragraph. In contrast, the mute is at once marked racially as white by the insistent repetition of light colors: he wears “cream-colors,” his cheek is “fair,” his hair “flaxen,” and his hat is made of “white” fur (The Confidence Man 1). In addition, the mute is marked as a vagrant, that is, one who lacks the elements of ownership and independence that define the American bourgeois citizen and who is therefore set apart from society: “He had neither trunk, valise, carpet bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. . . . It was plain that he was, in the extremist sense of the word, a stranger” (1). Thus by the time the mute encounters the placard offering a reward for the apprehension of the confidence man in the third paragraph, he has already been marked as both an economic outsider and a racial insider—a crucial combination that, I would argue, defines the ideal recipient of charity emerging from nineteenth-century American ambivalence over the proper liberal response to the disabled.9 Yet at the time of the novel’s setting, this projected ideal had yet to take root in the cultural consciousness, and the passengers’ responses to the mute, while ranging from relatively benign to openly hostile, never take the form of actual donations. Rather the passengers find him “harmless enough, would he keep to himself, but not wholly unobnoxious as an intruder,” and he is also described as “simple,” “innocent,” “humble,” “gentle,” “lamb-like,” “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
