Author's note: I would like to acknowledge my extreme debt to Angela Miller, Professor of Art History at Washington University, conversations with whom were crucial in my formative thinking about this project and who generously offered me a number of the references cited below.

1. All references to The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade are taken from a facsimile of the first edition (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968)Google Scholar. Reference to “Yellow Jack” should speak for itself. Calvin Edson was the thin man associated with P. T. Barnum. “Don Saturninus Typhus” will be discussed shortly.

2. In the preceding chapter, Pitch and the P.I.O. man had argued about freedom of the will and whether a “bad” boy may grow up to be a “good” man. Arminian notions of free will had of course come to dominate American Evangelical thought by the 1850s.

3. See Fox, Richard Wrightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983)Google Scholar and Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1978)Google Scholar for important explorations of this problem.

4. The words are those of Reid, Thomas in Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788; rept. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), p. 272.Google Scholar

5. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in The Works of John Locke (London, 1875), vol. 2, p. 3.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 2.

7. Reid, , Essays on the Active Powers, p. 267.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 170.

9. See, e.g., Charvat, William, The Origins of American Critical Thought (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961)Google Scholar; and Meyer, D. H., The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See Davis, Merrell R., “Emerson's ‘Reason’ and the Scottish Philosophers,” New England Quarterly: 17 (1944): 209–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. As Foucault writes, “One speaks upon the basis of the fabric of the world; one speaks about it to infinity, and each of its signs becomes in turn written matter for further discourse; but each of these stages of discourse is addressed to that primal written word whose return it simultaneously promises and postpones.” See The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 41.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 43.

13. Ibid., p. 42.

14. A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 76.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 21.

16. See Allen, Phyllis, “Etiological Theory in America Prior to the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 2 (1947): 489–520CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Rosenberg, Charles E., The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), esp. p. 75Google Scholar. Allen notes that the most common of the prevailing theories for the origin of various diseases “were those based on marsh miasma, atmospheric causes, chemical causes, electricity, predisposing causes in the individual, fomites and animalculae” (p. 492).

17. The New York Mirror, 05 25, 1839Google Scholar. Reprinted in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Oliphant, Mary C. Simms et al. , (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1954), vol. 1, pp. 142–43.Google Scholar

18. Seven Years' Travel in Central America (London, 1859), p. 18.Google Scholar

19. For a full account of the history of the dispute over whether the natural environment of the New World was proof of decadence or promise of superiority over the Old World, which forms the background for Caldwell's remarks, see Gerbi, Antonello, Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Mayle, Jeremy (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

20. “An Oration on the Causes of the Difference, in Point of Frequency and Force, Between two Endemic Diseases of the United States of America, and those of the Countries of Europe…” (Philadelphia, 1802), p. 14.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 15.

22. Ibid., p. 21.

23. Rosenberg, , The Cholera Years, p. 166.Google Scholar

24. See Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), note p. 200.Google Scholar

25. See Rosenberg, , The Cholera Years, pp. 75–76Google Scholar. Rosenberg notes, “The atmospheric theory was too convenient: flexible and amorphous enough to explain the varied phenomenon of the disease, it served also as a weapon against the ‘antisocial’ and ‘antiquated’ doctrine of contagion” (p. 76). In 1823, Peter S. Townsend, M.D., justifying his use of the terms “contagion” and “infection” as more or less synonymous, defined the former as “a specific poison or virus, emitted from the body of a person labouring under the disease” while attributing “infection” to “morbific exhalations derived most usually from organic substances, in a state of decomposition.… By Infected, I mean that condition of the atmosphere where it is charged with the matter of contagion.…” (see “An Account of Yellow Fever, as it Prevailed in the City of New York in the Summer and Autumn of 1822 [New York, 1823], p. ix).Google Scholar

26. Quoted in Erdman, David V., Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New York: Doubleday, 1969), rev. ed., p. 57.Google Scholar

27. Shakespeare, William, Twelfth NightGoogle Scholar, Act 3, Scene 4, Line 135.

28. For a careful account of the development of the notion of sympathy among 18th-Century thinkers, see “The Psyche Reaches Out: Sympathy” in Engell, James, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 11, pp. 143–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Christian Nurture (1888; rpt.: New Haven Yale University Press, 1967), p. 76.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 71.

31. Ibid., p. 82.

32. The problem of sincerity in mid-19th-Century American culture is discussed at length in Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; see also Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

33. See esp. Tatar, Maria M., Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. ch. 2Google Scholar, “Salvation by Electricity: Science, Poetry and ‘Naturphilosophie’”; and Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

34. Etherology and the Phreno-Philosophy of Mesmerism and Magic-Eloquence (Boston and Cambridge, 1850), esp. pp. 28, 74.Google Scholar

35. The Univercoelum, and Spiritual Philosopher (New York, 1848), vols. 1 and 2, p. 297.Google Scholar

36. In Sermons for the New Life (New York, 1859), p. 189.Google Scholar

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38. Ibid., p. 23.

39. Ibid., p. 23.

40. Grimes, , Etherology, p. 81.Google Scholar

41. For this background, see esp. Barton L. St. Armand, “‘Seemingly Intuitive Leaps’: Belief and Unbelief in Eureka,” American Transcendental Quarterly 26 (Spring 1975): 4–15, esp. pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

42. Bell, Michael Davitt, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 93–94Google Scholar. Bell's very suggestive discussion of Poe has strongly influenced my own thinking.

43. Anonymous, The Parents' Great Commission (London, 1851), p. 113.Google Scholar

44. Quoted in Brown, Herbert Ross, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1869 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1940), p. 84.Google Scholar

45. Ormond, or The Secret Witness (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1982), Bicentennial Ed., p. 71.Google Scholar

46. The Marble Faun or the Romance of Monte Beni, in Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), Centenary Ed., p. 326.Google Scholar

47. Daisy Miller, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), vol. 18, p. 85.Google Scholar

48. The Marble Faun, p. 237.Google Scholar

49. “The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture,” in Tales of a Traveller (London: John Murray, 1824), p. 91.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., pp. 92–93.

51. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harrison, James A. (1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), vol. 3, p. 276.Google Scholar

52. The Complete Works, p. 274.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., p. 290.

54. Essays in English and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 60Google Scholar. See also “Milieu and Ambiance,” in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S.F. Vanni, 1968), pp. 179–225Google Scholar. Spitzer believes that “we cannot understand the achievement of Poe unless we place his concept of atmospheric within the framework of ideas concerning milieu and ambiance which were being formulated at the time” (p. 62).

55. Shelley's Mythmaking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 159.Google Scholar

56. In The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Forman, Henry Buxton (London: Reeves & Turner, 1876), vol. 2, pp. 267–80.Google Scholar

57. “The Angelic Imagination,” in Essays of Four Decades (New York: William Morrow, 1968), p. 401.Google Scholar

58. The Complete Works, vol. 6, p. 142.Google Scholar

59. Similarly, as Henry Sussman points out in discussing The Confidence-Man, “the debunkers who arise to battle the operators' claims turn out to be fellow operators, just as the most duplicitous discoursers profess the most extreme sort of prudery” (see “The Deconstructor as Politician: Melville's Confidence-Man,” [Glyph 4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 39]).Google Scholar

60. Ironically, the tradition of ut pictura poesis, the notion that literature and art should be seen as analogies of each other as conceived within the empiricist tradition, was the very support for the idea that the visual was somehow “natural” while words were conventional-thus giving credence to the notion of difference between text and picture, which Melville in The Confidence-Man is debunking. W. J. T. Mitchell characterizes the notion of the image held by empiricists from Hobbes to Locke to Hume as “an automatic, necessary, and transparently accurate transcription of reality that forms the basis of ideas and, in turn, the basis of words.” Mitchell goes on to note that “The pictorialist aesthetic of European neoclassicism, the claim that a poem is a ‘speaking picture’ in a rather strong and literal sense, is grounded in the notion of the mind as a storehouse of images and language as a system of retrieving those images. The very possibility of communication is understood as based in the ‘universal language’ that underlies the local and limited languages of human speech” (see Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], p. 121Google Scholar). Melville, through Pitch, appears to be suggesting that images, like language, are conventional, not natural.

61. Once again, I must express my indebtedness to Bell, Michael's The Development of American RomanceGoogle Scholar in making this formulation.