Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
voyage that I did not believe she could live to see Liverpool. However,” he adds, “after laying up at Liverpool very ill over two or three weeks, [she] gradually recovered” (Craft and Craft 66). Sterling again amplifies this account with imagery of motion and confinement: “Ellen spent the crossing in a dark, crowded cabin in the hold of the ship, seasick and feverish, while William paced the deck, wondering if she would survive” (37). Like the character of Jim trapped in the coffin in Child’s play, Ellen becomes narratively consigned to immobility and darkness, despite having just pulled off one of the lengthiest and most daring escapes in fugitive slave history. And, as in Child’s play, this symbolic confinement resonates with the struggle to reconcile race as free signifier with race as bodily fact, and disability emerges as the product and anchor of that struggle.
There appears to be no question that Ellen experienced bouts of physical illness during her life after slavery. However, the ways she is described not only in her narrative but by biographers and abolitionists seem significant beyond their basis in her physical experience. For example, “in letters to a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Mary Estlin . . . said of Ellen ‘I think Ellen’s health has never sufficiently recovered the shock of their cruel persecution in Boston to make her equal to all the tossing about she has since had to encounter and I’m never so happy as when she is under our immediate protection’” (Sterling 41). An abolitionist wrote of the attempt to kidnap William and Ellen under the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston in 1850, “Somebody took care of Ellen Craft. William less needed help; he armed himself with pistols . . . and walked in the streets in the face of the sun” (qtd. in Craft and Craft 100). Ellen needs “protection”; she needs to be taken “care” of. Certainly these descriptions are inflected by gender and race, by assumptions about frail females and dependent slaves. But those inflections intersect with statements about Ellen’s health to portray her in reality as the invalid we previously knew as a fraudulent construction.28 Thus at the very moment of the successful manipulation of fantasies of identification to achieve freedom, those fantasies emerge ironically with the apparent power to redefine the resistant subject into her immobilized double.
The centrality of the disability con to Ellen Craft’s masquerade demonstrates how disability, race, and gender became mutually entangled in the production of both crises of identification and their fantastic solutions. Before turning to other examples of that entanglement in parts II and III, however, extended discussion of the disability con is warranted. Such discussion is crucial for two reasons: first, as indicated in this chapter, analyses of race and gender in American culture have rarely integrated disability as an equally constructed and significant social category, and thus focused attention to disability is needed to set the stage for discussions of how these identities combine into modern fantasies of identification. Second, as in the preceding discussion of Ellen Craft’s disguise, I will continue to highlight the supplementary dynamic in which disability is not merely another factor entwined with race and gender but often functions in a supplementary role to anchor physical difference. Thus I argue that racial and gendered difference is repeatedly found to be identifiable only through and against the disabled body, and further consideration of the complex constitution of that body is a vital first step.
2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century
From the entanglements and potent implications of Ellen Craft’s masquerade, we now move to consideration of the disability con writ large, in its peculiarly prominent cultural emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just four years after the Crafts’ escape, on July 8, 1849, an article appeared in the New York Herald describing the crimes of one William Thompson, better known as the “Confidence Man.”1 While Thompson himself quickly faded from historical record, the moniker of confidence (or con) man persists to this day, describing a type of wily swindler whose success derives from his manipulation of others’ perceptions. Yet the central significance of disability in portrayals of the con man has rarely been noted or integrated into the many cogent analyses of how this figure emerged in the mid-nineteenth-century United States as a symbol of growing social anxieties driven by rapid changes in personal and geographic mobility, urbanization, and the breakdown of class- and appearance-based systems of knowledge.2 These intersecting anxieties, which I have described as the crisis of identification, included deep fears about the deceptive potentials of disabled bodies, and thus cultural portrayals of con men have included the disability con as a central and recurring element.3 By examining one key literary portrayal of the disability con man, in Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, this chapter introduces some of the key tensions integral to fantasies of identification: tensions between body and text, truth and appearance, science and social relationships.
The Confidence Man is notable for a proliferation of characters with real and assumed physical disabilities, which has only recently garnered critical attention.4 Attention to the disability con in the novel thus is an ideal window into the relationship of disability to the social crisis of mobility and belief that produced the figure of the con man.5 Melville’s manipulation of disability in his novel points to the inherence of bodily identity in the growing problem of how to manage social relations between individuals no longer clearly regulated into economic and physical spheres, and thus no longer easily identifiable. Like Samuel Otter, I read Melville’s novel “as a revealing structure that shows how nineteenth-century Americans articulated their world” (Melville’s Anatomies 3); however, I argue that the disabled body is as crucial to such analysis as the raced and classed body, and that in fact these bodily formations are intimately and inseparably enmeshed. As Lennard J. Davis observes, “disability, as we know the concept, is really a socially driven relation to the body that became relatively organized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Enforcing Normalcy 3). Published in 1857, The Confidence Man testifies to a country and culture not only verging on massive racial and economic disruption but also navigating a fundamental transformation of perceptions and attitudes toward disability that eventually produced our modern systems of rehabilitation and social entitlements.6 This transformation, predicated on the fantasy of easily identifiable and governable disabled bodies, notably coincided with the emergence of the confidence man as an influential cultural figure.
As Deborah Stone notes, the codification of “disability” as a coherent social category was integrally tied to notions of deception (23). Stone observes that the need to regulate both disability and vagrancy—two historically entwined concepts—emerged during the transition to modern capitalism as a response to greater social and physical mobility. She makes this point particularly with regard to begging: “Given its connection to deception, at least in the common understanding, the phenomenon of begging must have been a threat to the social order in another very profound way. It challenged people’s confidence that they could know the truth” (33, my emphasis). Stone’s conclusions indicate the importance of disability for understanding the confidence man as a figure for cultural anxieties over issues of identity, truth, and community (Halttunen 1–7; Lenz 22; Lindberg 5).
The remarkable correspondence between the history of disability and that of the confidence man suggests that the presence of characters with disabilities in Melville’s novel is crucial to his exploration of “American social activity [as] a confidence game” (Lindberg 45). In fact I argue that the trope of disability functions centrally in Melville’s exploration of the real and the fake, body and text, truth and language. By portraying his characters’ physical disabilities as uncertain, contested, and linguistically constructed, he interpellates the reader into a system of confidence in which identity and truth are integrally linked to bodily form. And by connecting those figures to the central character of the confidence man, a wily and articulate antihero, Melville both enacts and undermines the historical linkage between disability and victimhood, embodied in the figure of the pathetic disabled beggar.
Thus the novel not only portrays the new American figure of the con man but provides a new version of a historically persistent character: the fake-disabled swindler. As Stone’s observations suggest, this character has been most persistently associated with begging. We can read the long European history of the fake-disabled beggar in The Prince and the Pauper’s sixteenth-century characters, “the Bat and Dick Dot-and-go-One,” and find evidence of these figures’ nineteenth-century import