"Melville's "Story of China Aster

HE NEGLECT American readers have shown toward Mellville's last long novel, The Confidence-Man (I857), may be measured by the fact that only last year did it receive second printing in its author's country.' Thanks to the recent efforts of Richard Chase, The Confidence-Man at last beginning to gain recognition as Melville's second-best book, as a supreme achievement.2 Chase has shown that its central character portmanteau figure whos,e traits are derived from several mythical heroes: the Prometheus, Orpheus, and Christ of the Western tradition, and the Yankee Peddler, Brother Jonathan, and Uncle Sam of the native lore. Taken together, they embody the virtues which would ensure the success of the American venture.... this Melville implies by attributing to the confidence man the opposite characteristics of these figures.3 When the book seen in these terms, it not enough to say, as Sedgwick does, that its moral is that goodness, kindliness, trust, serve for nothing but springes to catch woodcocks. They are the moral vacuum which human nature abhors, and will not suffer to exist.4 And Lewis Mumford's earlier reading-that the book could scarcely be anything but Melville's own heavily laden soul, all its characters and incidents being part of that long soliloquy in which Melville struggled with cantankerous mood that threatened to remove, not merely the clothes, but the epidermis, no, the very bowels of his fellow creatures5-limits the objectivity of its satire and the force of its dramatic achievement. The Confidence-Man reveals the bases and baseness of human

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• Personal Narrative, Melville's "The Confidence-Man", and the Problem of Deception

  Kenneth D Pimple•Western Folklore•1992

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