Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade: Keys to its Theme of Multiple Personality: Nineteenth Century Culture and Chapters 20 & 2

The nineteenth century had new literary metaphors for multiple personality: doppelgängers (1) and doubles (2, 3). It had a new neuropsychological perspective according to which a person could have dual personality, double consciousness, or a second self, based on having virtually two brains, the two cerebral hemispheres (4, 5). What prompted these new metaphors and theories? Among other things, Mary Reynolds, a famous American case of multiple personality, in 1811 (6, pp. 128-129; 7, pp. 77-78). 

Melville got the basic plot idea for this 1857 novel from the real life cases of a New York City swindler known as the Confidence Man (1849) and a notorious trickster, The Cosmopolitan (1845), which gave him the title of the novel and the name of one of his character’s identities.

Melville’s novel could hardly be more obviously about multiple personality. After all, it is about a man whose life is a “masquerade” and who switches from one identity to another. Yet literary critics have tended to interpret the confidence man as the Shapeshifting Devil, in spite of the fact that he never bargains for anyone’s soul.

Moreover, as the reader eventually realizes, the confidence man’s primary motivation is not criminal, but emotional. He sincerely yearns for people to trust him.

Why does he have that emotional need to a greater degree than the average person? Perhaps, as we saw with Isabel Allende (see past post), he was considered a liar as a child, a child in whose truthfulness his own mother could never have confidence. For it is known that some people with multiple personality have a history of being considered a liar when they were children, because one personality would deny responsibility for what another personality had said or done.

Chapter 20

The confidence man, now in his alternate identity known as the herb-doctor, encounters an old man who has a very bad cough. The old man is actually looking for the herb-doctor, who was recommended to him to cure his cough by a man who had sold him (bogus) securities in Chapter 15; the securities salesman being another of the confidence man’s identities.

Why doesn’t the text say that the herb-doctor immediately recognizes the old man as one of his previous swindling victims? Once the old man tells him about the securities salesman, the herb-doctor knows whom he is talking about. But, to repeat, why doesn’t the herb-doctor immediately recognize the old man as his past victim (from when he had been using his securities-salesman identity)?

If he were a shapeshifting devil—or anyone with a single personality and consciousness—he would have remembered. But if the herb-doctor and the securities-salesman are two separate personalities of a person with multiple personality, then one personality might very well have amnesia for the other personality’s victim. Having a memory gap or amnesia for what a person would ordinarily be expected to remember, is one of the cardinal clues to, and signs of, multiple personality.

“Chapter 2: Showing that many men have many minds” (8).

Following the above chapter title, the chapter immediately quotes nineteen people, who each gives a distinctly different opinion about the same topic. Thus the chapter’s content prejudices the reader’s interpretation of the chapter’s title to think it means that different people have diverse opinions.

However, if you stop to consider the chapter title in and of itself, you see that it could just as easily be read as meaning: Many men have multiple personality (many minds).

Since the content of Chapter 2 seems gratuitous, and really doesn’t enrich or advance the story, I don’t think that this alternate meaning of the title was inadvertent or accidental. Melville was subtly communicating one of his novel’s major themes: multiple personality.

Multiple Personality in Last Novels

This is the fourth time that this blog has found multiple personality in a last, or even posthumous, novel. The other three were Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Perhaps these novelists felt that multiple personality was a sensitive issue.

1. E. T. A. Hoffmann. The Devil’s Elixirs [1816]. Translated by Ronald Taylor. Oneworld Classics, 2008.

2. Edgar Allan Poe. “William Wilson” [1839], in The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Stephen Peithman. New York, Avenel Books, 1981.

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double [1846]. Translated by Evelyn Harden. New York, Ardis, 1985

4. A. L. Wigan, M.D. The Duality of the Mind, Proved by the Structure, Functions, and Diseases of the Brain, and by the Phenomena of Mental Derangement, and Shown to be Essential to Moral Responsibility [1844]. Foreword by Joseph Bogen, M.D., F.A.C.S. Joseph Simon publisher, 1985.

5. Anne Harrington. Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Thought. Princeton University Press, 1987.

6. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970.

7. Eugene Taylor (Editor). William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.

8. Herman Melville. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Edited by Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.