Native America in The Confidence-Man: Quite an Original Satire and Scene

Native America in The Confidence-Man: Quite an Original Satire and Scene YUKIKO OSHIMA Fukuoka University T he protagonist in The Confidence-Man symbolically enacts a Native American desire for victory over whites. Fragmentary Amerindian references in the novel are well-known, among them the celebrated “Indian-hating” section, the reference to Manco Capac, the asylum for the Seminole, the Goneril episode, and the herb-doctor. But, in fact, the entire work is imbued with an Amerindian dimension, both thematically and structurally . Although pinning down Melville’s confidence man (especially in the person of the cosmopolitan) is risky business, I argue that when seen in Native American guise, this multifaceted figure assumes yet greater originality, indeed justifying the description “QUITE AN ORIGINAL.” Furthermore, I also suggest that the creation of such a protagonist may have stemmed from Melville’s experience in the South Pacific. Manco Capac, as mentioned in the first sentence of the novel, subtly sets the tone: “At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.”1 Manco Capac, the first Incan emperor to unite various tribes and considered a demigod, was placed by his father, the Sun god, in Lake Titicaca and then traveled northwards as an ambassador of “true” civilization. Such a mythological figure and journey fit the novel in which the protagonist probes the meaning of true civilization in the multiracial United States. As a deity, Manco Capac parallels the novel’s smooth-tongued operator who is likened to Christ in the third paragraph with the word “advent” (NN CM 3), and in the last paragraph of the chapter, with “lamb-like figure” (6). Melville’s “The River” (apparently a deleted passage from the novel and existing only in manuscript) offers a connecting Amerindian-related thematic framework for the novel.2 It opens: C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1984), 3; hereafter cited as NN CM. 2 The significance of this discarded fragment has rightly been noted. The editors of NN The Confidence-Man, for instance, argue that Melville intended “The River” “as a final draft” (492). L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 51 Y U K I K O O S H I M A As the word Abraham means the father of a great multitude of men so the word Missippii means the father of a great multitude of waters. His tribes stream in from east & west, exceeding fruitful the lands they enrich. In this granary of a continent this basin of the Missippii must not the nations be greatly multiplied & blest? (NN CM 497) Abraham symbolizes here the ideal nationhood in which various “tribes” or “nations” are mixed. The peace of the Upper River is broken in the Lower River, because “like a Pawnee from ambush foams the yellow-[painted?] Missouri.” The passage continues: The Missouri seems rather a hostile element than a filial flood. Longer, stronger than the father of waters like Jupiter he dethrones his sire & reigns in his stead. Under the benign name Mississippi it is in [truth?] the Missouri that now rolls to the Gulf . . . the Missouri that not a tributary but an [invader] enters the sea, long disdaining to yeild his white wave to the blue. (499) The repeated use of “the Missouri” (four times in total) underscores the dethronement of the Mississippi (the United States) by the Missouri. The historical Pawnee had been forced to evacuate to Nebraska when the whites settled on their ancestral land after the Louisiana Purchase. Later, when attacked by the Sioux, the Pawnee, who had never fought with whites, were not protected, despite what their treaty with the whites had promised. The tribe was placed on reservations in 1857, the year of the publication of The...