Melville's The Confidence-Man: A “Poisonous” Reading

“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all,” wrote Melville to Hawthorne while laboring on Moby Dick. “From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now,” he went on, “that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”16a This passage is suggestive in several respects. First, Melville dates the beginning of his successive unfolding to the year during which he wrote Typee. Perhaps, then, there is a connection between the act of fiction-writing and his progress toward the bulb's “inmost leaf.” Each of his novels would in this case represent some further progress toward this goal; Omoo, Mardi, and the rest would each be a further unpeeling of the layers, each going deeper than the one before, until finally that which is hidden beneath the “inmost leaf” is revealed.

Given the trajectory of this progression, The Confidence-Man holds a very special place among Melville's novels. Written in 1856, eleven years and eight novels after Typee, it abruptly and effectively ends Melville's career as a novelist. Perhaps The Confidence-Man peels back that final leaf, for, as Melville himself so tragically predicted, after this his novelistic bloom did indeed wither. The vision of The Confidence-Man, therefore, deserves special attention because it represents what its author himself saw as the ultimate flowering of his vision. Moreover, as Melville's bulb metaphor suggests, this final vision must be present, if overlaid to various degrees, within all the previous novels. I would like to delineate here the contours of The Confidence-Man's imaginative universe, suggesting along the way