Indian-Hater, Wild Man: Melville's Confidence-Man

STEPHEN MATTERSON IndiarvHater, Wild Man: Melville's Confidence-Man The last ? ??e L Herman Melville published in his lifetime has been considered his most problematic. The Confidence-Man (1857) is especially difficult because four chapters, 25-28, are concerned with Indian-hating, and offer a profile of the legendary (and possibly fictional ) "diluted" Indian-hater Colonel John Moredock ofIllinois. These chapters have generated a substantial body of criticism, and almost everyone who has written on The Confidence-Man has addressed them. One assumption made about the chapters is that they provide a center to an otherwise fragmented novel, a work which one of the standard reference works for American literature persists in calling "unfinished" (Hart 158) and which F. O. Matthiessen called "a distended fragment" (412). The chapters have also attracted attention because, like his use of Henry Trumbull's Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter for his own Israel Potter (1855), they exemplify Melville's reworking of an identified source. Melville took the description ofMoredock from chapter six of the second volume of James Hall's 1835 SL·tches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West, though he considerably alters his short source, as he had altered the source in the making of Israel Potter.1 In The Con/idence-?a? Melville emphasizes that the story is someone else's and obliquely acknowledges his debt to Hall by impersonating him in the character ofCharlie Noble, the teller ofMoredock's story. One striking feature ofmuch of the criticism devoted to the Indianhating chapters is a kind ofcollusion with Melville's own supposed aesArizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 22Stephen Matterson theticization of Indian-hating. Included in the title of chapter twentysix is the phrase "The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating," and the philosophical term has provided a handy means of both dehistoricizing Melville and ignoring or minimizing the political dimensions of the novel. During the 1950s, and for some time after, Melville scholars who addressed the book seldom questioned their assumption that the author complied with a conventional allegory in which the American Indian is a devil. In fact, this supposed use ofallegory formed the basis for other arguments about the chapters and their place in the novel. In the first critical edition of The Confidence-Man, published in 1954, Elizabeth S. Foster paid special attention to the Indian-hating chapters, asserting that "in the large framework of the novel, the tale of the Indian-hater stands as the rooftree" (xci). Foster's scholarship on the history of the Indian-hater is exemplary and still provides a starting point for anyone interested in the issue (see 333-41). She also recognized that Melville's treatment of Indians outside ofthe novel was complex. But even though she had at her disposal a wealth ofinformation, she too accepted Melville's use ofthe Indian as a symbol of evil: "something not so much sub-human as extra-human" (lxvii). Her own argument that the Indian-hating chapters posit a world totally without charity depends upon this association; in effect, she colludes with what she recognized as Melville's use ofthe American Indian as a symbol of evil. This led her to conclude with what seemed a reasonable explanation of how the chapters fitted into a novel seemingly preoccupied with metaphysical concerns such as the presence of evil and the possibilities of charity and salvation. Similarly, one of the most important and influential of all Melville critics and scholars, Hershel Parker, took for granted the supposed allegorical nature ofthe chapters when he wrote that they were "obviously, a satiric allegory in which the Indians are Devils and the Indian-haters are dedicated Christians" (166). It is important, however, to explore how far Melville is very self-consciously utilizing an established set ofconventions regarding the Indianhater , and what effects he achieves through this and through his related use of the myth of the Wild Man. In short, we are faced with the obligation and the opportunity to avoid collusion by seeing the relation between the metaphysics and the politics of Indian-hating. Indian-Hater, Wild Man23 I. INDIAN-HATER The chapters...