Nineteenth-Century Representations of Native Americans | Stephen Matterson (essay date 1996)
Stephen Matterson (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: “Indian-Hater, Wild Man: Melville's Confidence-Man,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 21-35.
[In the following essay, Matterson discusses Melville's use of the Indian Hater character, claiming that Melville considered him a central figure in American attitudes toward Native Americans and implicated the government, the judicial system, and organized religion as participants in these attitudes.]
The last novel 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 of Illinois. These chapters have generated a substantial body of criticism, and almost everyone who has written on The Confidence-Man has...
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